In 2015, when Fapesp (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia de Portugal (FCT) launched a call for research proposals, all records were broken. Despite Fapesp having similar agreements with more than 100 agencies around the world, they had never received so many proposals. Who highlights this episode is Henrique Brito Cruz, former dean of Unicamp, former president and former scientific director of Fapesp, in an interview with the column.
If trade and migratory flows between Brazil and Portugal are often funneled by historical expectations or linguistic contingencies, in the area of education and science, the relationship is stable, sophisticated and modern. But it was not always so.
Until about two decades ago, bilateral scientific cooperation focused on research on history or the common language and was supported by institutions such as the Instituto Camões de Portugal. The extinct Commission for the Commemoration of Portuguese Discoveries, a Portuguese body, also created chairs in Brazilian universities to disseminate Lusophone history and culture. Contemporary research was carried out looking only at the past.
But everything has changed in the last 20 years. The signing of several agreements between Fapesp, FCT, Capes and CNPq, together with a partnership, signed in 2014, which allows Brazilian students to enter Portuguese universities (currently 55) through Enem, turned the game around. Also in this period Portugal created a well-known network of science dissemination centers (Centros Ciência Viva), spread throughout the territory, which was inspired by the Ateliers de Ciência Vivo program in Rio de Janeiro.
What are the results? There have never been so many Brazilian university students (about 19,000) or professors and doctoral students residing in Portugal (about 1,000). But there is one fact that is even more revealing: the volume of annual scientific publications co-authored by Portuguese and Brazilians.
If until the mid-1990s they were counted on the fingers of one hand, in 2021 they surpassed 3,500. Relying on Elsevier’s bibliometric database at the request of the column, Brito Cruz points out that in the period from 2019 to 2021, Portugal was Brazil’s 6th most important partner, behind the USA, UK, Spain, Germany and France.
In the 2018-2021 quadrennium, the main area of co-authorship research was medicine, followed by engineering, and physics/astronomy. Exceptional growth is also observed in environmental sciences (nine times) and social sciences (11 times). In other words, researchers from both countries also began to look to the future.
But there are still challenges, as Manuel Heitor, former Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education of Portugal (2015–2022) points out to the column. The main one is “finite funding from both parties”.
30 years ago Portugal invested 0.6% of GDP and currently disburses 1.6%. In Brazil, this percentage is 1.2%. Both are below the OECD average (2.7%), the group of the world’s largest economies. Recently, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences asked presidential candidates to commit to an investment of 2% of GDP for science in up to four years, an amount never achieved before.
But the future is promising. Manuel Heitor highlights the European Union’s new funds for scientific cooperation with the Global South, which include Latin America and Brazil. The European bloc has 96 billion euros (about R$486.6 billion) until 2027 to finance research and innovation.
A part of these resources should allow the Brazil-Portugal cooperation to take a qualitative leap, ceasing to be focused on the mobility of students and researchers and maturing around greater institutional cooperation, the so-called “collaborative arrangements” between institutions in the two countries. Luso-Brazilian hubs should be born, composed of academic and scientific institutions and tied to the local business, cultural and social fabric.
They will function as magnetic fields where society and social and human scientists will participate in the same value chain. Areas such as public health, sustainability/bioeconomy and blue economy, central themes for the sustainable economic development of both countries, should gain prominence. If previously Portuguese and Brazilian scientists researched common history, today they are part of it.
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
