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A Mobilising Concept? Unpacking Academic Representations of Responsible Research and Innovation

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Abstract

This paper makes a plea for more reflexive attempts to develop and anchor the emerging concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI). RRI has recently emerged as a buzzword in science policy, becoming a focus of concerted experimentation in many academic circles. Its performative capacity means that it is able to mobilise resources and spaces despite no common understanding of what it is or should be ‘made of’. In order to support reflection and practice amongst those who are interested in and using the concept, this paper unpacks understandings of RRI across a multi-disciplinary body of peer-reviewed literature. Our analysis focuses on three key dimensions of RRI (motivations, theoretical conceptualisations and translations into practice) that remain particularly opaque. A total of 48 publications were selected through a systematic literature search and their content was qualitatively analysed. Across the literature, RRI is portrayed as a concept that embeds numerous features of existing approaches to govern and assess emerging technologies. Our analysis suggests that its greatest potential may be in its ability to unify and provide political momentum to a wide range of long-articulated ethical and policy issues. At the same time, RRI’s dynamism and resulting complexity may represent its greatest challenge. Further clarification on what RRI has to offer in practice—beyond what has been offered to date—is still needed, as well as more explicit engagement with research and institutional cultures of responsibility. Such work may help to realise the high political expectations that are attached to nascent RRI.

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Notes

  1. The first search was conducted in July 2014 and the analysis was done between the months of August and December 2014. As of today, a considerable number of new contributions have been published given that the concept of RRI has rapidly gained popularity. In November 2015 we have therefore repeated the exact search to make sure that our review took on board the majority of results, only excluding an acceptable number of studies published between August 2014 and November 2015. We would like to inform the reader that we identified 19 valid results in this search, 4 of which were authored by the same authors included in our sample. This left us with 15 references from new authors, which surely will contribute diverse perspectives, but that we do not consider as an outstanding number of publications for the period considered in the database used. We would also like to acknowledge that the search engine scans only journals indexed in the Web of Knowledge. This limits the results of the analysis, excluding recent specialised journals such as the Journal of Responsible Innovation, as a prominent example.

  2. See http://ec.europa.eu/research/swafs/pdf/rome_declaration_RRI_final_21_November.pdf and https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/responsible-research-innovation. Accessed December 23, 2015.

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Acknowledgments

Research reported in this paper was supported by the Integrated EST Framework (EST-Frame) project (http://estframe.net) funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme GA No. 288981 (Millar, Smith and Ribeiro) and through the Leverhulme Trust research programme “Making Science Public” (MSP) (RP2011-SP-013; Millar) and it is aligned with work being carried out within the Nottingham BBSRC/EPSRC funded Synthetic Biology Research Centre (Millar). We would like to thank our colleagues within EST-Frame for engaging in several very helpful discussions regarding TA and RRI, as well as to Carmen McLeod (MSP), Sarah Hartley (MSP), and to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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  1. Centre for Applied Bioethics, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington Campus, Leicestershire, LE12 5RD, UK

    Barbara E. Ribeiro, Robert D. J. Smith & Kate Millar

  2. Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine, King’s College London, London, WC2R 2LS, UK

    Robert D. J. Smith

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  1. Barbara E. Ribeiro
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Ribeiro, B.E., Smith, R.D.J. & Millar, K. A Mobilising Concept? Unpacking Academic Representations of Responsible Research and Innovation. Sci Eng Ethics 23, 81–103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-016-9761-6

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