Paper long abstract:

A number of new governance frameworks for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) are already in existence, or are being developed and proposed imminently. But, our paper argues, before embarking on the construction of new frameworks there is a need to appreciate, from a historical perspective de-facto governance (Rip 2010) of responsible research and innovation (rri). We argue that the different ways actors already frame ‘responsibility’, and the different normative orientations which sit behind those framings, is non-trivial from the point of view of governance, because different normativities pose correspondingly different governance challenges, which have implications for the design and implementation of governance mechanisms, techniques and instruments. The paper presents 5 ‘grand narratives’ representing the ‘divided worlds’ of responsible research and innovation spanning a wide range of research and innovation settings. It traces each historically, highlighting the implications of each in terms of corresponding governance challenges. The paper posits that historical empirical analysis of this type is helpful to conceptualising responsibility as it poses questions and reflections as to the undergirding conditioning factors that necessarily inform attempts to construct societally acceptable and legitimate over-arching RRI governance framework(s). The paper is complementary to Tanciogne et al (2014, presented at this conference) which addresses the same question through scientometric analysis.

Paper long abstract:

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is still a new conception made compulsory for European Commission funded projects in the Programme Horizon 2020. RRI still remains an addition of heterogeneous elements (a):

1) Engagement and participation of societal actors in research and innovation (public engagement),

2) Science literacy and scientific education (education).

3) Ensuring gender equality in both the process and content (gender),

4) Open Access to scientific knowledge, results and data; (open access);

5) Ethical dimension (ethics and governance).

From a philosophical perspective we will firstly present a critical discussion of this collection of requisites mentioned before. Indeed it is not obvious to establish a logical link with responsibility.

We will then connect RRI with some parts of the philosophical debate around the rich concept of responsibility, starting with the different conceptions of responsibility (b): cause/consequences, accountability, responsiveness, role, authority and competence. We will select and exploit some relevant debates beyond theses interpretations useful for RRI.

Thirdly, we will consider different approaches in the field of responsibility in organizations. We will reduce our scope to responsibility (c) as accountability (collective) and virtue (individual). This step will carry us until the delicate problem of shared responsibility, with three levels: (a) elements of RRI EC definition, (b) conceptions of moral responsibility, (c) collective and individual responsibility.

We will finally see how shared responsibility can be translated in term of governance.

Paper long abstract:

With respect to the increasing role of science and technology to address societal challenges, synthetic biology has been argued to promise as well considerable benefits as challenges. In this respect, assessments are able to moderate processes following particular normative principles, objectives and outcomes - also labelled as responsible research and innovation (RRI). This research aims to understand how responsibilities are framed, defined and allocated within national strategic approaches influencing research and innovation activities in synthetic biology. Focussing on the UK synthetic biology roadmap, we investigate how normative claims have been shaped and legitimised. In this review, we take into account contextual factors and motivations that influenced the initialisation of this roadmap, as well as how potential contestation - both with regard to involved and excluded actors - has been managed. Preliminary results indicate that the UK synthetic biology roadmap assumes a necessity to promote synthetic biology - compared to alternative approaches based on pre-cautionary principles - as a means to combat social and environmental challenges. However, the socio-scientific dimension of synthetic biology - which includes management of uncertainty, investigation of ethical boundaries and legitimisation of societal aspiration setting - seems underrepresented. In addition, instead of stipulating specific conditions and procedures to incorporate responsibility applicable to real-world conditions, the roadmap seems to implicitly transfer the burden of RRI on synthetic biology researchers and potential future producers. Even though the roadmap recognises its limited actor engagement - and therefore affected representability - it remains unclear how appropriate the roadmap's taken approach is in inducing democratic responsibilisation of innovation processes.

Paper long abstract:

Foresight in the form of priority-setting is used as a governance instrument to steer research and innovation towards societal challenges. The new concept and debate around Responsible Research and Innovation creates a potential new way to understand and analyse such priority-setting exercises. In this article I will examine a Danish priority-setting process (RESEARCH2015). My paper analyses the effects of the priority-setting process on the interaction between stakeholders, ideas, and viewpoints and the potential of foresight exercises to have impacts that go beyond the immediate process. The empirical work includes detailed process documents as well as interviews with experts, facilitators and participants. The study finds that the foresight exercise has succeeded in creating a space for constructive interaction among very different actors discussing societal challenges, but also that not all actors feel included or wish to accept the implicit selection criteria arising during the process. A difference in understanding can be detected between emphasising innovation and specialist expertise as a means for creating competiveness and focusing on the longer term benefits of research for social cohesion. While clear political impact of the process is visible, I argue that this should be seen as much as a successful adaptation of the process to political goals as a political transformation through the lessons of the process. For foresight to contribute effectively to the goals of responsible research and innovation, the implicit exclusion of actors with different ideas of how to set research priorities presents an important challenge to be dealt with.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) aims to advance the technological innovation system as a whole by including and strengthening novel as well as already existing normative and procedural elements. Such an advanced innovation system should be able to deal better with the grand societal challenges of the 21st Century without neglecting possible negative side effects of emerging technologies. In this paper RRI itself is treated as an innovation. Drawing on STS concepts of institutional innovation and recent transition and diffusion of innovations approaches relevant conditions for the success of RRI will be discussed. Taking this perspective, RRI appears as a socially constructed approach eventually aiming at long-term fundamental reform of the dominant innovation regime that is heavily based on economics of techno-scientific promises. However, RRI still is in an early formative stage of development, characterised by conceptual variation, limited actor-networks and a small number of practical experiments. Based on the state-of-the-art of RRI the paper will explore pathways for the further development of this institutional innovation (invention). In particular, we will discuss upcoming challenges and structural requirements for learning and experimentation in the field of Technology Assessment, which is treated as one of the main pillars of RRI.

Paper long abstract:

This paper makes a contribution to academic debates on the governance of responsible research and innovation. The focus of these debates is how to increase the beneficial effects of new technologies whilst reducing the potentially undesirable effects. Attention is mainly directed at the funding and conduct of scientific research. Less attention has been paid to the governance of innovation towards 'responsible' outcomes. The process by which governments attempt to govern innovation - a highly distributed, complex and unpredictable socio-economic activity - has been particularly underexplored. Yet, as representative bodies, regulatory agents and economic actors, government plays a key role in shaping technological innovation.

The aim of this paper is to address this imbalance. It focuses on a process of re-balancing an innovation pathway as a result of intense global contestation around the 'responsibility' of an existing technology, where rapid scaling-up created unintended and undesirable effects, instigating a shift in the direction of the technological innovation system. We use biofuels, particularly corn-based cellulosic ethanol, as our empirical case and select the U.S. Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) as a probe to examine the governance arrangements underpinning this re-direction.

The paper contributes to the debate on the governance of RRI by drawing lessons from the empirical data in two main areas:

- how the 'responsibilisation' debate was re-opened and how contestation was mediated.

- how the broader societal debate was linked to political processes and the re-definition of hard law.

Paper long abstract:

Big data in biomedical research are neither ready-made, nor readily accessible: and are not simply 'big'. The sociotechnical apparatus governing sharing of these data is the neoteric 'data access committee' (DAC). Still emergent, DACs' remit, composition and guidance vary widely in governing access to study data and/or samples. DACs are a central infrastructure in the international data economy, yet little is understood of their practices, networks and configurations. We conducted ethnographic research in one DAC responsible for access to data and samples in four longitudinal cohort studies.

DAC member's used a range of rhetorical strategies to warrant access/non-access to 1) potentially controversial research and to 2) finite resources. Decisions involved negotiating and traversing: multiple relations with funders, research users, study guardians and policy makers; governance oversight and ethical prohibitions; and, technical and administrative structures and strictures. The paper describes these practices, and the epistemic and non-epistemic values and constructs of legitimacy, accountability and responsibility inhering to them.

In this setting responsibility was a contested terrain where hybrid subsidiary/sovereign modes predominated and formal mechanisms of governance largely comprised delegated (albeit perpetually challenged!) authority. Absent human and non-human actors (study participants, 'the public', mass media, the studies, 'the science') remained present in data access decision making, providing a touchstone for communal, social, institutional, as well as personal modes of responsibility. The undoubtedly asymmetric relations of power/responsibility were not simply or uniformly monolithic. In concluding, we offer a conceptualisation of responsible research and innovation which draws on these findings.

Paper long abstract:

Universities face a call to make their research more 'responsible' and to contribute to the solution of global challenges. The notion of responsible research and innovation (RRI) has gained particular momentum in Europe by its inclusion as a formal requirement for projects in Horizon 2020. Although universities may show an increasing awareness of their societal responsibilities in their strategic communications, implementation of RRI within the regular organization of universities will not be easy. Studies on the development of inter- and transdisciplinary research indicate the many barriers for transitions in universities, such as existing career patterns, performance evaluations and the disciplinary orientation of scientific journals. This suggests that the governance of RRI requires profound changes in the organization of universities. The aims of this paper are to explore the impact of the implementation of RRI on the organization of European universities and to identify potential barriers for the implementation of RRI as a new mode of working. Following Stilgoe et al. (2013), we define RRI as a combination of anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness. The paper is based on a literature study on the notion of RRI, on previous experiences with RRI and similar activities, and on the (changing) organization of European universities, combined with interviews.

Paper long abstract:

While quantitative performance indicators are widely used by organisations and individuals to assess the "quality" of research and researchers, little is know about their impacts on the epistemic processes of academic knowledge production. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in the life sciences and climate sciences in the Netherlands, Austria and Sweden, we show how researchers think with quantitative performance indicators at almost every step of a research process.

We focus on three key moments in research processes to show how thinking with indicators is becoming a central aspect of research activities themselves: 1. Choosing a research question; 2. Organising research work within a lab/group; 3. Ending a research process. It becomes visible how the worth of research activities becomes increasingly assessed and defined by their potential for translation into quantitative measures of quality. Other criteria of scientific quality, e.g. epistemic originality, long-term scientific progress, and societal relevance and social responsibility become redefined through their relations to quantitative indicators. We understand this trend to be in tension with goals in policy to encourage innovative, societally relevant and responsible research.

Paper long abstract:

Knowing that technologies are inherently value-laden and systemically interwoven with society, the question is how individual engineers can take up the challenge of accepting the responsibility for their work? This paper will argue that engineers have no institutional structure at the level of society that allows them to recognize, reflect upon, and actively integrate the value-laden character of their designs. Instead, engineers have to tap on the different institutional realms of market, science, and state, making their work a 'hybrid' activity combining elements from the different institutional realms. To deal with this institutional hybridity, engineers develop routines and heuristics in their professional network, which do not allow societal values to be expressed in a satisfactory manner. To allow forms of 'active' responsibility, there have to be so-called 'accountability forums' that guide moral reflections of individual actors.

The paper will subsequently look at the methodologies of Value-Sensitive Design and Constructive Technology Assessment and explore whether and how these methodologies allow engineers to integrate societal values into the design technological artifacts and systems. As VSD and CTA are methodologies that look at the process of technological design, whereas the focus of this paper is on the designer, they can only be used indirectly, namely as frameworks which help to identify the contours of a framework for active responsibility of engineers.

Paper long abstract:

Within Australia there are a small, but growing number of doctors offering unproven therapies using the patient's own stem cells for incurable diseases, sports injuries, cosmetic and anti-ageing purposes. Under current Australian regulations, such autologous interventions are viewed as a 'medical procedure' and outside the remit of the Australian regulation body with oversight for the manufacturing and marketing of therapeutic goods - the Therapeutic Goods Administration. The sale of autologous stem cell treatments - often for many thousands of dollars - is viewed by many clinicians and scientists as challenging professional ethical standards due to the experimental nature of such treatments, and they have called for urgent amendments of Australian regulations to restrict such practices. Others believe Australian doctors have a right to provide this treatment, and propose a self-regulation model to provide greater community safeguards. Based upon in-depth interviews with doctors who provide autologous stem cell therapies and other stakeholders in the field, this paper examines the tension over the ethical governance of autologous stem cell therapies and the performative boundary work utilised by doctors in their professional ideologies and practices to create governance within this emerging industry.