RRI futures: ends and beginnings

‘RRI is dead. Long live RRI!’¹ With this intentionally provocative phrase, initial ideas began to circulate for what was to become this long-awaited special issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation.

Beginning in late 2017, one began hearing whispers that the European Commission, whose 2014-2020 R&D funding program – building on policy developments on both sides of the Atlantic (Fisher 2019) and on the excitement and energy of an international scientific and intellectual movement (Brundage and Guston 2019) – had christened a new theme known as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), was nearing a major inflection point. While accounts of the actual relationship between RRI as a funding program (Rip 2016) and more theoretically based approaches to Responsible Innovation (Owen and Pansera 2019) vary, one thing is certain: the European RRI endeavor stands as a landmark among ‘policy for science’ and ‘ethics policy’ programs, alongside venerable and internationally adopted approaches of Technology Assessment (TA) and Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications/Aspects (ELSI/ELSA). Thanks to the initial vision that propelled RRI forward (Von Schomberg 2011) and to subsequent strategic decisions, solicitations, and investments, numerous (Novitzky et al. 2020) ambitious and aspirational projects and programs were launched during the ensuing years that saw RRI rise in significance and visibility throughout manifold intellectual, organizational, and institutional contexts around the globe.

RRI projects, policies, programs and their extensive array of outcomes stand as a testament to the vision and energy of a vibrant community of scholars, practitioners, activists, policy entrepreneurs, and their networks and organizations, many of whom sought to reimagine and reconstruct the governance, assessment, and practice of research and innovation in society. RRI outcomes represent an impressive wealth of findings and capacities whose enduring value will no doubt inform both formal and informal attempts to understand and improve the role of science and technology in society, into the future. This special issue – meticulously curated through the vision and efforts of its two guest editors (Van Oudheusden and Shelley-Egan 2021) – presents some of the crucial lessons learned from the RRI experiment to help various participating stakeholders and communities understand and orient themselves to new spaces, ongoing challenges, and emerging opportunities.

Crucially, the golden age of RRI also helped foster a cadre of sophisticated junior scholars whose insights, experiments, and emerging leadership herald promising discoveries and directions. Indeed, junior scholars have from the beginning and continue to play a significant role in the development of RI, RRI, and JRI (e.g. Nelson, Selin, and Scott 2021; Shanley 2021; Smolka 2019). Any accounting of RRI must also acknowledge the influential efforts of national research councils and funding agencies that took the lead in articulating more local visions of integrative, inclusive, and anticipatory research policies, often by evolving new or repurposing existing programmatic mechanisms (e.g., Owen 2014; Egeland, Forsberg, and Maximova-Mentzoni 2019; Van der Molen et al. 2019). All the while, watchful RRI participant-observers have critiqued and challenged myriad discourses, frameworks, and efforts otherwise aimed at enrichening and engaging research and innovation in a host of local and global settings (e.g. Blok and Lemmens 2015; Valkenburg et al. 2010; Wong 2016).

The legacies and enduring value of RRI – as well as spaces for its continuance and renewal – are thus evident in a multiplicity of people, places, politics, and practical processes of research and innovation throughout the industrialized world. As the guest editorial outlines in greater depth, this special collection offers a sustained meditation on the RRI experiment in the form of a wide range of voices, findings, reflections, and provocations from a decidedly diverse set of research and innovation practical perspectives, normative concerns, and theoretical outlooks. Each contribution in its own way extrapolates from research findings and experiences to explore novel, overlooked, underdeveloped, or contested aspects of RRI and its possible futures.

Contributing authors develop their prospective assessments from the basis of multiple RRI contexts, settings, and sites of implementation – including large interdisciplinary projects (Stahl et al. 2021), higher education institutions (Ryan et al. 2021), private sector perspectives (Steen 2021), research funding organizations (Smith et al. 2021), indigenous-led innovation (Macdonald et al. 2021), policy accomplishments (Owen et al. 2020) and opportunities (Robinson et al. 2020), global North-South comparative national settings (Wakunuma et al. 2021), adjacent scholarly fields (Szymanski et al. 2021), neglected and alternative histories (Shanley 2021), and future politically and ideologically-charged scenarios (Daimer et al. 2021). Offering their outlooks from these varied and multiple vantage points, each rooted in its own set of RRI phenomena and pressing questions, special issue authors offer hopeful lessons, spirited defenses, carefully derived distinctions, and sober prognostications.

Thus, looking back on over eight years of work on a large-scale interdisciplinary research project, Stahl et al. ask ‘how RRI can have long-lasting impact and persist beyond the time horizon of funded projects,’ proposing ‘responsibility by design’ as a concept to aid in ‘embedding RRI in research and innovation in a way that makes it part of the fabric of the resulting outcomes.’ Similarly, based on their experience developing an RRI framework at the research funding organization level, Smith et al. argue that ‘treating RRI as a form of knowledge production’ allowed them to ‘engage with the institutional dimensions of science’ and they recommend this as a promising approach for future R&D program engagement. And analyzing data collected from nearly 200 higher education institutions to understand RRI implementation through the lens of organizational change, Ryan et al. (2021) emphasize how organizational factors such as focus on research, dependence on research sponsorship, and varying demands for legitimacy appear to influence RRI uptake.

Challenging conventional understandings, Shanley takes an atypical historical view to reveal how RRI forerunner ‘technology movements’ whose impacts continue to resonate today tended to be proactive, composed of diverse actors, and entangled in related movements and international networks – all of which suggest that ‘the ways in which our thinking about possible future worlds’ can be ‘restricted or enabled by the ways in which different histories are told.’ Encouraging scholarly boundary crossing, Szymanski et al. observe the lack of interaction between RRI and multispecies studies, looking to a more robustly informed set of scholarly discourses that might ‘expand definitions of stakeholders and responsibilities’ and continue to deepen conceptual themes central to both fields, notably care and relationality.

Inquiring into how RRI can be ‘re-conceptualized to be inclusive of both the Global South and Global North,’ Wakunuma et al. compare differing national approaches to develop ‘a reconfigured, inclusive theoretical framework that accounts for trans-regional differences’ and that demonstrates what they see as a trans-national ‘RRI continuum.’ Noting the lack of attention in RRI to understanding ‘how responsibility in innovation might be negotiated with Indigenous people,’ Macdonald et al. present their findings from a case of indigenous-led innovation to reveal that research and technology can be governed according to ‘principles of Indigenous stewardship’ and that Traditional Owners can help frame and lead such innovation rather than simply adapting to it.

Giving voice to alternative approaches to innovation at the firm and regional policy levels, Steen praises the value of ‘Slow Innovation’ from his practitioner vantage point, offering it in place of ‘innovation driven by industry and commerce’ as well as that driven by ‘the state and control.’ Similarly, in light the economic ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, Albertson et al. employ the concept of ‘well-up’ economics to understand how the ‘relational dimensions of responsible innovation’ may help extend responsibility to the pursuit of science and technology in contexts of slow-growth, no-growth, and a-growth.

In terms of national and regional policy investments, Robinson et al. see an emerging emphasis on innovation policy as an ‘opportunity to leverage the insights gained from the past decade of activities in RRI and to extend and improve, particularly with regards to fair and equitable co-creation activities.’ Meanwhile, noting that fundamental debates about the governance of science and innovation that have animated RRI from the beginning of its rise will continue to occupy policy stakeholders, Owen et al. issue a call to ‘re-energise the challenge to the dominant technology-market dyad’ that has long framed innovation policy, in order that ‘RRI should continue’ to serve as a much-needed site for ongoing debate, praxis, and politics.

With an eye to the uncertainty of impending political developments, Daimer et al. explore four possible divergent future scenarios to investigate ‘how societal aspects are taken into account in research and innovation’ under vastly different governmental regimes; one fundamental interest animates their anticipatory explorations: how to safeguard ‘[m]eaningful interactions between lay people and professional actors’ even in the ‘harshest ideological and political’ conditions.

Notes

1 Thanks to Raffael Himmelsbach for initial discussions.