Dutch Research Agenda (NWA)

The Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) is NWO's citizen-driven national research programme, funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and built around government bodies, researchers, civil society organizations, and citizens. It has been active since 2018 and has backed 560 projects around public value and social challenge routes. NWA runs four programme lines: Research along Routes by Consortia, Thematic Programming, Innovation and Networks, and Science Communication and Outreach. The agenda was shaped from roughly 12,000 citizen questions organized into 140 cluster questions and 25 self-organizing research routes, and 2026 calls include Reducing drug harm, NWA Citizen Science 2026, and NWA Resilient Digital Ecosystems. The programme favors broad consortia that can connect a social challenge to a research route and show a credible pathway to public value. Because the work is routed through NWO on behalf of OCW, the most competitive proposals usually start from the agenda's citizen questions and then build a coalition around them with a clear societal payoff.

Each grant below is a distinct funding opportunity with its own eligibility, scope, and deliverables.