Review of RRI tools project, http://www.rri-tools.eu

ABSTRACT

The RRI Tools project, funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (2007–2013), is an important attempt to translate key guiding principles of responsible research and innovation (RRI) into a compendium of best practices to assist researchers and practitioners. It has set up a valuable database of practical and other reference resources, instigated an EU-wide community of practice, and begun rolling out training in RRI. By placing engagement at the heart of the RRI endeavour, it raises again important questions relating to how engagement is done and how it relates to the broader processes and institutional contexts in which innovation happens.

KEYWORDS:

• RRI tools
• engagement
• participation
• reflexivity

The transition from discussions of the principles and goals of responsible research and innovation (RRI) to exploring how they might be realised in practice has made significant strides since the publication of the first major collection of academic and policy perspectives on this subject in 2013 (Beasant, Heintz, and Owen 2013). The background principles of RRI defined in various ways by different authors share certain aspects, which are linked via the need to leverage a plurality of perspectives, expert and lay, in reflecting on, assessing and transforming the often unacknowledged priorities that underlie technoscientific innovation. If technoscientific societies are experimental ones, then RRI debates circle around the need to gain more democratic influence over the means of production and of collective experimentation. In trying to articulate what such an expansion of democratic influence might mean, a variety of commentators have focused on the need to place the ethical and political significance of an inherently uncertain future at the heart of RRI. Academics, research funding bodies and policy actors have taken up this challenge, writing of the centrality to RRI of concepts like anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013), or the imperative to anticipate, reflect, engage and act (the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council).

Through such concepts, an idea of responsibility emerges that is not limited to traditional legalistic concepts. Instead, it orients itself towards the future, reflecting ethical perspectives on care (Grinbaum and Groves 2013). With technoscientific experimentation evoking open futures, and critiques of technoscience emphasising uncertainty about promised futures, the debate about responsibility turns on what virtues and values are desirable in the face of ongoing uncertainty, not on attempts to predict often inherently unpredictable outcomes. Engaging citizens beyond the gates of academia and industry is seen as central to forging a new social contract between society and technoscience, no longer simply seen as a source of useful tools, but now as (pace Shelley) an ‘unacknowledged legislator’ over social life and thus a political actor. RRI is seen as the guarantor of the legitimacy of this new contract, which is to be founded upon the creation of a new culture within the institutions of technoscience and of innovation governance.

This trajectory of development for RRI is well represented in the work of the RRI Tools project. Funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (2007–2013) to develop a set of digital resources to advance RRI throughout the EU under Horizon 2020 and coordinated by ‘la Caixa’ Banking Foundation in Spain, the project divided this programme of work into three tasks, integrated within the overall aim of beginning to build a new culture of responsible innovation. As an integrative endeavour, a major part of this effort has been to draw together and assemble behind one online portal a host of educational resources designed to enable users to develop new ways of working that reflect the central goals of RRI. These resources have themselves been user-generated, working with the network of RRI Hubs the project has linked with across the EU to form connections with researchers and practitioners.

In building this network, the project consortium conducted during the first year of work a review of perspectives on RRI across Europe, concluding that a major obstacle to further advancement was a lack of resources covering training and education across all aspects of RRI, from principles to practices to evaluation. In addition, there was a widespread sense of the vagueness of RRI, scepticism about its value, and widespread unfamiliarity with its goals beyond wider public engagement. In dialogue with the views of stakeholders surveyed during this phase of the project, the consortium developed an interpretation of what might be called an ethos (way of being) of RRI. This is in line with the aforementioned developing view that a new culture characterised by particular individual, collective and/or institutional virtues must be created to establish the new aforementioned social contract. In the terms developed by the RRI Tools project, this means being diverse and inclusive, open and transparent, anticipative and reflective, responsive and adaptive.

This consultative phase led directly on to the gathering and collating of the aforementioned online resources, hosted on an easily searchable compendium of practices, tools, resources and other elements which could be taken to exemplify RRI ‘on the ground’, allowing further reflection by interested stakeholders not only on what they themselves could do to align their activities more with RRI agendas, but also on how concrete efforts to establish RRI practices shed light on the viability and meaning of guiding principles. Putting together such a compendium would also serve the purpose of identifying gaps in practices, enabling a mapping of future research needs.

A core concept behind the project is the idea of a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), a diverse and perhaps widely distributed group that, taking part in a shared space of activity, undertakes a process of collective learning. The RRI Tools project realises this by allowing members of the collective created during its first year of work to upload content to its website – examples of best practice, case studies of implementation, items for the library which enable reflection or inform on the different aspects of RRI, and tools or resources for planning and conducting activities. The website also offers a self-reflection tool which guides users in exploring how far their own research or technology development reflects the ethos of RRI. This focuses on six policy agendas: the ethics of research and innovation, gender equality within science and technology, governance of risk, open access to research, public engagement and science education. At the same time, it uses its network of Hubs to offer training in various aspects of RRI. In this way, the project has sought to build the beginnings of a culture in which the reflexive guiding of innovation is no longer a matter solely of external governance, but instead an immanent process of acculturation (Lõsch, Gammel, and Nordmann 2009).

RRI’s major difference from traditional ways of thinking about the contract between innovation and society, such as models of corporate social responsibility (CSR), lies in the role attributed to engagement and the tools employed to carry it out. Whereas traditionally CSR has ascribed a significant role in making business more socially responsive to inward-looking codes of conduct (Soraker and Brey 2014), RRI establishes outward-looking engagement as the central means both of making innovation processes more reflexive and of understanding what it is for innovation to be socially responsive. Furthermore, and as RRI Tools shows in the materials relating to engagement already submitted to its compendium of resources, arguments for RRI have succeeded in making questions of structure, process and innovation politics increasingly central to how engagement is done. At the same time, much as the RRI Tools project marks a real advance in moulding practices that both reflect and cast new light on the meaning of RRI principles, it forces us to ask again questions that have accompanied debates around RRI for the last 10 years.

In particular, the questions of how and when engagement occurs, and moreover – within the more open-ended deliberative contexts which it aims to create – how processes of reflecting on and assessing innovation play out in practice are highly significant. In particular, the ways in which what counts as relevant evidence is selected and who is enabled to speak (and on behalf of which others) are very important. These and other related points have been made by van Oudheusden (2014), who points out that RRI itself involves a defined political stance that those who are called to participate in it may question. Collaboration and cooperation are not necessarily the shared starting assumption of those who become involved in engagement, though they may be an outcome. What is more, the ways in which RRI practices draw on science communication as a way of imagining engagement may have a constraining effect. The capacity of those, such as research scientists, who are often called to participate as experts in engagement activities to actually influence innovation pathways options may very well be highly limited. These observations underline the necessity of not simply fetishizing engagement as a coming together of experts and non-experts, but instead of being aware within the RRI community of practice of the need to reflect on the hows and whys of engaging, and also of being critically aware of where these activities fit within the innovation system, together with what other institutional structures and processes flow around and constrain them and their potential impacts. As others have suggested (Chilvers 2013), reflexivity is not just a principle that RRI has to promote for others, but is one it must itself cleave to. As the RRI Tools project has argued, applying RRI means crafting it for particular contexts, rather than applying it in the way one follows a familiar recipe. But craft skill also means considering on whether the tools one has are really suitable. To quote Gilles Deleuze, approaching knowledge implies a spirit of self-education, ‘the necessary modesty [of] not managing to know what everybody knows’ (Deleuze 1994, 167). The risk of simply sliding into using RRI as a means of meeting pre-defined criteria is high. If the ethos of RRI is anticipative but also reflexive and inclusive, then resisting a sensus communis in which all within the RRI community ‘know’ what it means to do RRI is before it is in fact done is vital. Putting outward-facing engagement at the heart of innovation is important. But considering what may count as effective engagement, and how these effects may be conducted through the institutional contexts in which innovation is done, are no less important.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Christopher Groves is a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University in the UK, with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick, UK. His research focuses on how individuals, groups and institutions make sense of an uncertain future and on the ethics and politics of technology.