RRI Futures: learning from a diversity of voices and visions

ABSTRACT

In this Special Issue, authors take stock of the shortcomings and accomplishments of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) by delving into past RRI policies and processes, and by probing possible and desirable RRI futures. Authors weave together old and new approaches, such as social innovation, ecological economics, (techno)feminism, care ethics, postcolonialism, indigenous knowledge systems, and slow science with the aim of reconstituting RRI anew in a global context. The Special Issue extends an invitation to JRI audiences to reflect with authors critically on what has been learned and to imagine new practices and frameworks for the responsible governance of science and innovation alongside other anticipatory, integrative, and participatory frameworks.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity
• futures
• responsibility
• visions

What can be learned from roughly a decade of interest in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)? How should such learning inform policy, scholarly, and practitioner agendas and imaginations for the next ten years? These questions come at a critical time. Over the past years, we have witnessed a rich and diverse offering of RRI activities and experiments in various geographical locations (Doezma et al. 2019) and technology domains (Stahl & Coeckelbergh 2016; Shelley-Egan et al. 2017), R&I ecosystems (Gurzawska et al. 2017; Egeland et al. 2019) and research policy programmes (Ahrweiler et al. 2019; Pansera et al. 2021). A variety of stakeholders have been engaged and mobilised in co-producing ethical and societally desirable futures alongside researchers and innovators (van de Poel et al. 2020; Marschalek et al. 2017; Reyes-Galindo et al. 2019). The assessment of RRI has gained pace, evident in the development of methods and tools with which to measure, evaluate and monitor RRI performance (Groves 2017; Yaghmaei & van de Poel 2021), which are increasingly seen as central to forging a new social contract between society and technoscience (Flink & Kaldewey 2018). Based upon what can be learned from these recent experiences with RRI, what have we achieved as scholars, practitioners, and policymakers? What is our legacy and impact? What have we learned about RRI in its varieties as both process and outcome? What are the future directions or prospects? Is RRI ‘fit for purpose’ in this complex, globalised world?

This reflexive questioning has become ever more urgent in the context of the COVID pandemic, with vast amounts of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus (Bruynseels, 2020; Silva et al., 2020), accompanied by a massive wave of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the emergence of ‘post-truth’ politics and the contested place of scientific expertise in society (Long & Blok, 2017; Fisher, 2017). In parallel, the world is experiencing the effects of climate change writ large, highlighting not only environmental effects but also increasing social vulnerability. Over a year and a half of working from home has accelerated digitalisation trends already underway, while forcing employees and organisations to wrestle with the effects of a new way of working (cf. Braun et al. 2020).

These developments urge us to take stock of the shortcomings and accomplishments of RRI and to anticipate feasible and preferred RRI futures at a time when scholarly, practitioner, and policy communities are rethinking what counts as RRI, while policy shifts are taking place (Fisher 2020). For instance, the EC’s science policy discourse is shifting towards terms such as ‘open innovation,’ raising questions and uncertainties about how to conceptualise, implement, and evaluate responsibility in science, technology, and innovation (e.g. Gerber et al. 2020).

This special issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation draws together research inquiries (empirical, conceptual, normative) that take these questions, shifts, and implications to heart. It delves into past and present RRI activities and probes possible futures of RRI to shed light on possible, desirable, or plausible RRI pathways for science and society. The articles it contains illustrate the wide variety of RRI themes and topics that have emerged since 2010, when policy institutions, funding bodies, research councils, scientific organisations, civil society groups, industry players and others began mobilising the RRI concept with the explicit aim of aligning technological innovation and societal needs in increasingly complex innovation systems (de Saille 2015). They add a mixture of new voices and insights to the discussion, even though the special issue contributors represent just a portion of the RRI community, including a combination of old and new voices; junior and senior scholars; scholars and practitioners; and contributors from geographically diverse sites and from different disciplinary perspectives. The contributing authors variously view Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as a policy approach, and Responsible Innovation (RI) as a broader intellectual and scholarly set of visions and practices. Authors scrutinise formal accounts of responsibility, research, and innovation by offering contending interpretations of these terms, and by engaging with R(R)I failures, limitations, and inherent tensions. In this way, the special issue illuminates how research agendas, innovation, and responsibility align or misalign, and how R(R)I may take different forms considering the increasing complexity of innovation processes and emerging ethical, cultural, political, and regulatory implications.

RRI lessons, legacies and prospects

The first five contributions to the special issue consider RRI as a discourse and policy approach, analysing and reflecting on its uptake within concrete contexts and experiments, and anticipating its prospective role in responsible futures of research, innovation, and society. Daimer et al. (2021) seek to understand the future potential of the RRI concept with respect to the role of societal engagement in various futures of research, innovation and society, with a timeframe until 2038 that allows them to analyse both incremental and transformative change. The authors develop four different ideal type Weberian scenarios with which to understand how societal aspects are considered in research, technological development, and innovation activities, emphasising the broader ideological and political conditions in which lay people and professional actors interact. The scenarios set out four radically different types of political system, including participatory, libertarian, authoritarian and technocratic. The emphasis on ideological positions and political practices and related different possible futures allows various actors within the Research and Innovation (R&I) system to proactively anticipate potential trends and to implement different future trajectories where feasible and desirable.

Stahl et al. (2021) reflect on lessons learned from their involvement as RRI team members in the Human Brain Project (HBP), a prestigious ten-year European flagship scientific research project situated at the nexus of neuroscience, medicine and information and communication technology. Building on insights acquired over the project’s lifespan, the authors point to recurring challenges in realising RRI within HBP, such as the (in)visibility of public engagement in relation to decision making, the predominant focus on compliance issues (e.g. relatively well-defined legal problems), and the difficulties of interdisciplinary collaboration. Some scientists, for instance, continue to perceive time spent on social and ethical issues as a distraction from real scientific work. For them and many others, RRI is limited because it is imposed from the outside and comes ‘too late,’ typically after big decisions (e.g. the creation of a new research infrastructure) have already been made. To address such shortcomings, the authors propose the notion of Responsibility by Design (RbD). RbD strategies seek to shape the development and agendas of future research infrastructures in a responsible manner, not simply by endorsing RRI principles, but by actively mobilising and sustaining an RRI community around shared matters of concern relative to digital neuroscience, brain medicine, and brain-inspired technology.

In their perspective article about taking knowledge production seriously in RRI, Smith et al. (2021) mobilise their experience of developing an RRI framework in the ERA Cofund on Biotechnology project to analyse the attempts of scientific administrators and policy makers to articulate what RRI means for them. The authors observe different ways in which RRI is enacted as a form of knowledge production, pointing out limits of the project-driven approach endorsed by the European Commission. They encourage experimentation with the project form and moving beyond it to open new RRI pathways for researchers, administrators, and scholars.

Robinson et al. (2020) engage with research policy at the level of the European Commission’s Horizon Europe framework programme in their perceptive piece on co-creating RRI legacies in Horizon Europe. The authors suggest that the new policy experiments of Missions and Open Innovation 2.0 offer an opportunity to leverage the RRI insights gained over the last decade. They underline the ‘power of co-creation’ in functioning as a ‘linking-pin’ between the open science focus of H2020 and the open innovation emphasis of Horizon Europe, calling for new impact assessment approaches and a more defined role for citizen participation in innovation processes.

Finally, as scholars who have been engaged with the RRI discourse since its early days, Owen et al. (2021) reflect on developments and achievements within the past decade and look forward to the prospects for RRI. The authors chart the shift from RRI as a transformative vision for reconfiguring science, innovation and society to one underpinned by the pragmatic and actionable RRI keys. Notwithstanding their description of the resulting dilution of a ‘more ambitious vision for RRI,’ the authors contend that subsequent experiments allowed for the flourishing of a community that would not have existed had RRI not existed itself. They also note that, while there have been increasing examples of meaningful experimentation with RRI, in particular in the EU’s Science with and for Society (SwafS) programme, this has not brought about a self-sustaining culture of RRI. Acknowledging profound changes in the world since the emergence of the original vision for RRI in 2011 in Brussels, the authors are nonetheless optimistic that RRI will endure, as a key site for ongoing debate and as a site of praxis for engagement of a diversity of stakeholders with responsibilities to society.

The next set of articles attend to RRI as an intellectual and scholarly set of practices. In her research article on the value of history in imagining possible R(R)I futures, Shanley (2021) mobilises ethnographic and archival research to propose an alternative historiography of R(R)I, to advance our understanding and the direction and purpose of R(R)I today. Drawing on scientific/intellectual movement theory as a heuristic with which to think about the long-term effects of R(R)I, she homes in on early iterations of Science and Technology Studies and Technology Assessment as forebears of R(R)I, highlighting ‘potentially “forgotten” or “neglected” histories.’ These historic excursions generate a richer appreciation of how and why R(R)I came to be. They underline the importance of reflection within RRI communities on how to clarify, refine, and reimagine R(R)I futures, as past, present, and future articulations intertwine.

Steen (2021) also addresses considerations of time in his perspective piece on slow innovation. In this case, the author considers reflexivity within the process of doing RI drawing on his vast experience as a senior research scientist at TNO, a Research and Technology Organization in The Netherlands. Steen advocates making time for ‘uneasy questions, vulnerable experiences, awkward moments and uncertainty,’ arguing that if innovation is to contribute positively to our world, it must be slowed down, following the unruly tempos of ecological and social processes.

In their perspective on bringing together multispecies studies and RRI, Szymanski et al. (2021) consider those non-human creatures that are part of research and innovation processes and are currently omitted from RRI frameworks. The authors argue that RRI should ‘be in conversation’ with multispecies studies to bring nuance to discussions about responsibility as an individual versus a collective endeavour. Important conceptual overlaps include care, concern, and relationality in the cultivation of mutually responsive relationships. These topics, which the authors feel are often ignored in mainstream debates about RRI (Ludwig & Macnaghten 2020), can help to facilitate co-responsibility among all actors in innovation, as they underscore how human wellbeing is always about the wellbeing of humans and non-humans together.

In the next set of articles, the authors consider the scope, aims and uptake of RRI in a variety of contexts, from geographical regions to local communities, beyond entrenched concepts of innovation and related metrics, and within research performing and funding organisations. In their article on reconceptualising RRI from a Global South perspective, Wakunuma et al. (2021) call for a more elaborate inclusion of the Global South in the framing and conceptualisation of RRI. The concept of RRI has had a North-centric focus, with little reference to other understandings and conceptualisations of RRI (Fisher 2016; Ludwig and Macnaghten, 2020). Framings have tended to emphasise technology-oriented, scientific-based knowledge systems, while neglecting social-oriented, informal knowledge based systems. Wakunuma et al.’s contribution explores how RRI can be reconceptualised to be more inclusive, setting out a theoretical framework that accounts for trans-regional differences. Concretely, they home in on three national cases – The Netherlands, Malawi and Brazil –to demonstrate capital-oriented and livelihood-oriented RRI perspectives. The authors make the case for a conceptual integration of these two extremes in moving forward with RRI and advancing a more globally inclusive RRI discourse.

Similarly, Macdonald et al. (2021) extend the scope and aims of RI – in this case by creating a space for Indigenous-led innovation grounded in the lived realities, values, and expectations of local communities. The authors explore the responsible use of drone technology to tackle increasingly complex environmental management problems such as weeds and feral animals in northern Australia’s Kakadu National Park, an important biocultural landscape owned by Jawoyn people. Rather than starting from North American and European framings of responsible innovation, they co-develop protocols with communities to guide the use of drones, taking into account concerns around privacy, data ownership, and ethical risks with surveillance, while ensuring Traditional Owner control over when and where this technology is used and how it could best benefit local people. Reflecting commitments to support diversity and inclusion, the article’s authors comprise researchers, community members, environmental stewards, managers, and coordinators. The broad lens through which the authors approach socio-ecological questions provides new, potentially rewarding connections between RI, inclusive co-design, and community-centered governance.

Albertson et al. (2021) explore the possibilities arising through extending RI beyond technology-driven innovation and the dominant economic growth imperative in which it is enmeshed. The authors remind us that when RRI was first discussed at the European Commission in the early 2010s, considerations such as ‘stewardship of the future’ and ‘commitment to care’ were on offer but were never meaningfully integrated into EC research policies. Drawing on notions such as inclusive growth and responsible stagnation, they argue that RI must promote social inclusion geographically and temporally in order not to compromise the wellbeing of vulnerable stakeholders or future generations. This means innovation needs to be reconsidered along relational terms, including care, stewardship, and social welfare rather than always aligning it to the logic of the market. Adopting an a-growth perspective (which is opposed to unconditional growth, but not to growth per se), the authors offer the concept of ‘well-up’ economics as an alternative innovation metric – one that considers whether innovation is systemically just for all stakeholders, including the most vulnerable.

Underscoring the role organisations can play in driving, or impeding, change, Ryan et al. (2021) in their article on organisational patterns in RRI implementation efforts, explore the connection between organisational characteristics and organisational receptivity towards RRI. Combining insights from multiple large datasets, the authors construct distinct RRI profiles of 188 European higher education institutes, linking these profiles with organisational properties such as organisation size, research orientation, and funding base, among others. Through their analysis, the authors illustrate how RRI research stands to benefit from quantitative explorations of broader patterns of RRI uptake. These analyses provide a more robust platform for targeted, effective policy action, especially when coupled with in-depth, theoretically informed perspectives on the organisational dynamics and logics that also shape RRI’s institutionalisation.

Reinventing responsible innovation

As the contributions to this special issue make clear, there is plenty about R(R)I that remains to be learned, reclaimed, and reinvented: RRI is not only extending into new empirical and theoretical fields but also moving across distinct societies, communities, and cultures; and across local, national and international levels. It is emerging through initiatives emanating at the grassroots and the grasstops. It is exciting to see how junctions form between these different levels and approaches, and how the clash of perspectives creates new opportunities and challenges for innovating responsibly.

It is also exciting to see that ten years after emerging as a contested science policy narrative, authors and practitioners are bringing a historical sensitivity to bear on RRI, highlighting that RRI is now firmly tied into the dominant narratives of economic and technological development. RRI scholars and practitioners must continue to probe these narratives, revealing not only how specific ideas about RRI have gained traction in, and through, science policies, organisational processes, and research practices, but also imagining how RRI could be made more socially relevant, sustainable, and inclusive both in Europe and elsewhere.

Thus, a key question confronting advocates of responsible innovation today is to use insights gained over the last ten years and weave together old and new approaches, such as social innovation, ecological economics, (techno)feminism, care ethics, postcolonialism, slow science, and others with the aim of reconstituting RRI anew – or as policymakers would say, building back better. An analysis of the ‘absences of RRI’ opens up new and intriguing opportunities to engage with, for example, the non-human elements of RRI experiments and with new configurations of notions of care and ‘response-ability’ in relation to the responsible governance of techno-scientific futures.

Each contribution offers insights into how RRI can be reinvented and at least implicitly formulates agendas that will inform future iterations and manifestations of responsible innovation, whether or not explicitly associated with the specific notion of RRI. This special issue extends an invitation to JRI audiences to reflect with authors critically on what has been learned and to imagine new practices, policies, and policy instruments for the responsible governance of science and innovation alongside other anticipatory, integrative, and participatory frameworks.

Acknowledgements

Michiel van Oudheusden’s efforts were supported in part by funding from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 MSCA-IF-2018 research funding scheme (grant number 836989).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michiel van Oudheusden

Michiel Van Oudheusden is an Individual Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he studies and facilitates responsible innovation in environmental sciences and technologies. He is affiliated to KU Leuven and a coordinator of the Belgian Science, Technology and Society network.

Clare Shelley-Egan

Clare Shelley-Egan is a Senior Researcher at the Work Research Institute, Oslo Metropolitan University. Her research interests centre on ethics and governance of new and emerging science and technologies, encompassing Responsible Research and Innovation, Open Science, and public engagement.