Absent, yet present? Moving with ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ in radiation protection research

ABSTRACT

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) remains an essentially contested concept, yet potentially facilitates the development of a substantial network comprising actors with a variety of roles, expectations, and stakes, including researchers across technical and social sciences and humanities. Although the notion of RRI is absent in research programs for nuclear research and development (R&D), it is nonetheless recognized by various stakeholders in nuclear fields. In this commentary, we draw on our experiences as embedded science and technology studies (STS) scholars in the burgeoning nuclear subfield of radiation protection, singling out instances where RRI is discussed among R&D managers, scientists and technologists, and social science and humanities (SSH) researchers. Our exploration highlights recurring challenges and opportunities in introducing RRI into the radiation protection research space which pertain to: the strong evaluative connotation of RRI and its top-down character; the lack of industry involvement in RRI processes; and the hybridization of SSH through inter- and transdisciplinary research. Our analysis urges us to consider how RRI facilitates STS movement in the nuclear arena through the formation of relationships with radiation protection stakeholders and with SSH colleagues, and through the transferal of methods, concepts, and practices across research domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• hybridization
• nuclear science and technology
• radiation protection
• social sciences and humanities

Radiation protection (RP) is a subfield in nuclear science and technology where various scientific disciplines (e.g. radiobiology, epidemiology, dosimetry, radioecology) converge to enhance research for ‘[t]he protection of people from harmful effects of exposure to ionizing radiation and the means for achieving this’ (IAEA 2016). Significant milestones in its development include the establishment of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) in 1928 and international legislation for the protection of workers (ILO 1960). Research in RP is burgeoning due, for example, to changing understandings of the health effects of low radiation doses; increasing use of ionizing radiation in medical applications; growing attention to decommissioning and environmental remediation projects; and ongoing issues related to nuclear accidents. European RP research is currently structured around five research ‘platforms’, under an overarching joint programme called CONCERT.¹ These coordinated initiatives seek to address technical and societal challenges related to RP in an integrated manner.

In recent years, the social sciences and humanities (SSH) have made their way into RP research, notably in the area of nuclear emergency response and recovery. Moreover, RP actors (technical researchers, science policy makers, oversight bodies) summon SSH researchers to help them identify and manage ‘the needs in radiation protection for the public.’² SSH involvement was given a strong impetus after the 2011 Fukushima accident, with various policy and regulatory bodies stressing the importance of stakeholder involvement and ‘ongoing dialogue’ between scientific experts, civil society organizations, and publics in the face of nuclear risk governance challenges (NAIIC 2012; BSS 2013; FBPC 2016; Perko et al. 2016).

In this commentary, we explore how RP research is shaped through this ‘opening up’ towards society, and through SSH involvement. We start from what an EU policy spokesperson described to us as ‘a paradoxical situation’: although research programs like CONCERT explicitly call for societal deliberation on science and technology, and although they technically fall under the EU’s Horizon 2020 framework, the notion of responsible research and innovation (RRI) is manifestly absent in nuclear research and training.³ In other words, RRI is not consolidated into an official policy strategy, as is the case in the area of new and emerging technologies (e.g. bio and nano) (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013). Nonetheless, various RP actors recognize the concept, acknowledging and questioning its significance for science and innovation policy and for research and development (R&D). RRI is thus both a nonparticipant and participant in the development of a sizeable RP network comprising actors with a variety of roles, expectations, and stakes. In what follows we point to enactments of RRI in three interrelated groups of RP actors: R&D managers, scientists and technologists, and SSH researchers. Overall, our observations are drawn from a year of fieldwork, comprising documentary analysis, interviews and participant observation at conferences and workshops. As RRI involves SSH researchers in various ways, we reflexively consider how RRI facilitates our ventures as science and technology studies (STS) researchers into the field.

Opening up and articulating RRI

Responses to RRI in the RP field are reflective, layered, critical, and supportive. Informants with long experience of RP and related policy, stress that RRI is not a new idea, as responsibility is firmly rooted in RP research. As one nuclear R&D manager contends, the notion of protection assumes ‘a shared social obligation and concern,’ orienting technology development towards safeguarding people and their environment, now or in the future, from the hazardous effects of ionizing radiation. Another manager exclaims during a 2015 science policy workshop with dismay, ‘But we are responsible,’ thereafter adding that responsible conduct could be more fully incentivized by embedding RRI in existing nuclear R&D processes and policies. From the perspective of researchers and practitioners, the idea of responsibility is very much a taken-for-granted value that underpins RP.

These considerations evoke additional questions and concerns among informants, particularly as to the role of powerful economic players, such as industry, in innovation processes. This view is reflected in the following utterance from an ethicist who studies the history of nuclear energy.

I don’t see the point of shifting responsibility to the labs because innovation cycles are largely determined by industry incentives, despite possible ethical reservations.

Alongside this concern about industry noninvolvement, several informants voice anxiety that RRI is a ‘top-down’ policy, which provides insufficient consideration for how the RP field is being opened to public involvement. This sentiment is strongly reflected in the following statement from a research platform chair.

As if nothing has been done up to this point. I agree for improvement but it would be worth to acknowledge the current results.

It is directed at SSH researchers, who in 2015 took the initiative to draft an ‘Appeal to implement Responsible Research and Innovation in Euratom nuclear research, development and activities.’⁴ This declaration emerged after the Ricomet conference on Risk Perception, Communication and Ethics of Exposures to Ionising Radiation, eliciting mixed responses among SSH researchers. One STS researcher questioned the choice of words in the declaration and the motivations sustaining it, as follows.

I’m not sure ‘implementing’ RRI is a good way to put it. It sounds so … instrumental.

These responses unfold alongside concerns about how to initiate inter- and transdisciplinary research and whom to involve in RP R&D, and about the meaning of RRI. At the 2016 Ricomet conference, a radiation biologist acknowledges the importance of public deliberation and ‘exchange of knowledge,’ but also questions the desirability of involving civil society organizations in R&D.

Should we involve civil society organizations in R&D? I think that is an activist agenda.

Following through on this exchange, a medical radiation scientist asks SSH researchers in the room to define RRI.

The problem may be that you [SSH researchers] are not one field. You are all kinds of disciplines, tools, and things. How do you people define RRI?

These examples serve as illustrations of how RRI is (re)articulated among nuclear R&D managers, scientists and technologists, and SSH colleagues. Although far from exhaustive, they point at recurrent challenges in embedding RRI in RP research, which resonate with sentiments about RRI expressed elsewhere (Van Oudheusden 2014; de Saille and Medvecky 2016; Groves 2017). As they directly concern SSH, they invite us to reflectively probe our engagements as STS researchers in the field.

Moving in and with RRI

As STS researchers we continually move ‘in’ and ‘out’ of RP research projects, platforms, and programs, engaging in multiple research assignments along the way (Robinson 2010, 150). Our activities are diffused, fragmented, and fleeting, urging us to ‘hang on,’ as much as we ‘add on.’ This precariousness is heightened by our position in the hierarchy of participating disciplines (often on the last rung of the ladder), by power asymmetries and dependencies. It is made present when we are asked to motivate how our research is relevant for RP and society, or when we are asked if sociology is a science.

These questions make us feel ‘out of sync’ yet, like many others, we continue to engage in forms of inter- and transdisciplinary research collaboration. These collaborations are counterproductive when they feed sterile expectations that lock SSH researchers into stereotypical roles (e.g. ‘participation experts’), which they cannot play (Balmer et al. 2016). This may explain why some SSH colleagues are reluctant to engage with RP research at all, arguing that when SSH risk instrumentalization, SSH researchers would better not ‘get on board.’⁵ However, collaboration is productive when it renders us aware of our own ignorance and biases, urging us to work with others to create epistemological value for research and moral and social value (Farías, Müller, and Passoth 2017; Nielsen and Sørenson 2017).

Seen this way, moving about opens opportunities for learning and for meaningful transformation: we are now in a position to exchange knowledge and transfer expertise from one context to another. As one example, the first author oversees a series of lab engagement studies in radioecology, with the aim of broadening the types of considerations (technical, social, ethical) that steer R&D. These studies draw on work by Fisher (2007), whose sociotechnical integration approach has been applied in new and emerging technologies (e.g. nanotechnology, microbial engineering) but has not been transposed to nuclear science and technology. We think this transferring of methods, concepts, and practices should be the primary challenge for SSH researchers rather than limiting themselves to assumed or expected roles (e.g. organizing stakeholder panels).

Moving about also implies learning from other sociotechnical fields, and from SSH more broadly. STS is not the same as risk communication, which in turn is distinct from political sociology and from history. It is unfortunate that many STS scholars are dismissive of risk analysis, impact assessment, and communication studies while simultaneously calling for an opening up of perspectives. Our experiences suggest that combining quantitative and qualitative social science methods can be particularly productive, both in establishing rapport with non-STS actors and as conduit for partial perspectives on technology development.

As RRI is an inherently integrative endeavor that draws together multiple sciences and humanities, it is a potential resource; a mobilizing concept that allows for the transferal of skills, knowledge, disciplines, and networks. SSH researchers looking to gain entry to disparate sociotechnical fields can draw on it to initiate collaborative processes involving multiple agents and disciplines. However, RRI also hybridizes disciplines into specialized subfields, such as risk communication, technology assessment, and public engagement, bringing SSH together and pulling them apart. When collaborating with engineers, technologists, policy makers, and other SSH researchers, we must diligently and patiently explain that, like biologists or chemists, we have very different conceptions, use different models, and do things differently, and that we would do well to tap into this multiplicity, to explore how it allows for a recombination of different forms of expertise. There is not one way of inserting SSH into RP and there is not one RRI: it is an essentially contested concept, which affords multiple views, rationales, and agendas.

Hanging around on the sidelines

In radiation protection research, RRI is absent, yet present. Following Horst and Michael (2011), it ‘hangs around on the sidelines.’ Its (non)presence is potentially disruptive, perturbing the processes of ordermaking. As involved actors with a growing stake in R&D, we must explore and consider the implications of this absence/presence for RP research and for SSH by asking when, where, and how RRI is inserted into radiological fields. STS researchers can make a contribution here by carefully attending to how RRI is read and rearticulated. This focus on reception and reflexivity aligns with research agendas propagated by other STS scholars that underline the need for studying how, rather than whether, innovation is made responsible (Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016). Ideally, such an agenda would incite more collective experimentation ‘on the ground’ (Groves 2017) that urges all stakeholders to consider the meaning and viability of RRI by being open about their engagements and responsive and adaptive to different ways of developing RRI. For STS researchers, it would imply attentively listening to the voices of RP stakeholders and fellow SSH researchers, taking into account their concerns and the challenges and opportunities they see for RRI now and in the years to come.

Notes on contributors

Michiel Van Oudheusden is an embedded social scientist at the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK•CEN), where he researches safety and security governance and the role of citizen science in nuclear emergencies and post-disaster situations. He is involved in several EU research initiatives on radiation protection and co-coordinates the Belgian Science, Technology and Society network (BSTS).

Catrinel Turcanu holds a PhD in Engineering Sciences and is scientific staff member of the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK•CEN). She is coordinator of and researcher within SCK•CEN’s PISA Programme for the Integration of Social and ethical Aspects into nuclear research, focusing on the governance of radiological risks and the mutual interaction of nuclear technologies and society.

Susan Molyneux-Hodgson holds the Chair of Sociology at the University of Exeter (UK). She has been studying the emerging techno-science of synthetic biology ethnographically, and has collaborated with scientists and engineers on a number of grants to support this work. She is a key advocate of social science and humanities integration in nuclear sciences and technologies, and initiator of the SSH Strategic Research Agenda for radiation protection research.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by the EC CONCERT project, funded through the H2020 Euratom research and training programme 2014–2018 under grant agreement No 662287; and in part by the UK Economic and Social Research Council funded grant ‘Nuclear Futures: a seminar series to re-make sociotechnical research agendas’ 2015–2018 [grant number ES/N009444/1].

Notes

1 CONCERT-European Joint Programme for the Integration of Radiation Protection Research; see: http://www.concert-h2020.eu/en

2 This quote is taken from an internal strategic document, entitled ‘European radiation protection research: Outcome of Euratom integration policy and future perspectives,’ which was circulated among radiation protection platform members in May 2017.

3 See the EU’s Euratom website: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/euratom

4 http://ricomet2015.sckcen.be/~/media/Files/Ricomet2015/RICOMETdeclaration.pdf

5 The notion of boarding is derived from the French word ‘embarquer.’ We draw on it here as it emanated in an animated discussion between the first author and a French social scientist who strongly opposed the idea of involving SSH disciplines in nuclear R&D.