notes/docs/lectures/ethics/09_responsible_research.md

Responsible Research and Innovation

RRI - Responsible Research and Innovation

What is RRI

An 80 billion euro programme to tackle:

• Health, demographic change and the well-being of citizens
• Food security and sustainable agriculture
• Sustainable and efficient energy
• Smart, green transport
• Climate action, resource efficiency and raw materials
• Inclusive and innovative society
• Secure society protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens

What RRI seeks to achieve with respect to these grand challenges is situate science and technology development in its social context. Fundamentally, RRI aims to drive high quality innovations in science and technology that are in the public interest and create a society in which research and innovation practices work towards ethically acceptable, socially desirable and sustainable outcomes.

Responsible Innovation

Now Stilgoe et al. posit 4 ‘dimensions’ or aspects of responsible innovation that together provide a heuristic framework supporting ethical governance of research and innovation. These include anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness.

Anticipation

Thinking through potential social risks of future visions of technology

Anticipation recognises that the detrimental effects of new technologies are often unforeseen – take, for example, the range of social harms we considered in lecture 1 – and that existing approaches to R&I have commonly failed to provide early warnings of future effects.

Anticipation seeks to remedy this situation by encouraging organisations and individuals involved in research and innovation to ask “what if” questions about their work and in doing so to consider what is known, what is possible, what is likely, what is plausible, and what contingencies might well impact their visions of science and technology.

Anticipating and mitigating risk is also a key plank of the proposed EU regulation of AI, which means that anticipation is not a conceptual abstraction but something that many of you will be legally required to actively engage in and document in your professional work.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity requires that researchers and innovators hold a mirror up to themselves and their activities, including the assumptions that underpin our work. It requires that we develop awareness of the limits of our knowledge, and are mindful that the ways in which we think about and frame problems and challenges may not be universally held.

Reflexivity is particularly important at an institutional or organisational level to ensure that the value systems, theories and practices that shape research and innovation and its governance are subject to scrutiny.

This is called “second-order reflexivity” and contrasts with “first-order reflexivity”, where individuals reflect on and scrutinise themselves privately. Second-order reflexivity seeks to make reflexivity a public matter and leads to kinds of consideration of ethical governance proposed by Alan Winfield and Marina Jirotka we discussed in lecture 7.

Reflexivity is key to the development of ethically acceptable and socially desirable innovations. It requires researchers and innovators see beyond organisational boundaries and responsibilities and consider their wider, moral responsibilities.

Inclusion

Inclusion recognises the need to open up anticipatory visions of future social worlds to public dialogue in ways that critically interrogate the social, political and ethical viewpoints implicated in technology development.

Inclusion requires that we are sensitive to

• a) the ‘intensity’ of public engagement – i.e., how early members of the public and other stakeholders are consulted in the innovation process
• b) ‘openness’ – i.e., how diverse the sample is and who is represented
• c) the ‘quality of engagement’, including the gravity or seriousness of public and stakeholder involvement and the continuity of engagement and discussion throughout the research and innovation process.

Responsiveness

Responsiveness recognises that responsible innovation must be able to change shape or direction in response to public and stakeholder viewpoints and values, and to changing circumstances. Responsiveness involves building new knowledge into the research and innovation process as it emerges.

Stilgoe et al. also place emphasis on the role of governance approaches in R&I, including research funding, intellectual property regimes and technological standards, which may act to close down responsiveness, along with other norms and expectations that reinforce particular dependencies and lock-ins. In short, if RRI is to be effective we also need to be attentive to the environment which enables R&I and the structures that organise it, in order to counter the “logic of unresponsiveness” that underpins findings like Birhane’s.

AREA Framework

https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/research/framework

The framework is called AREA and reflects the 4 dimensions of Stilgoe et als responsible innovation framework, reframed as Anticipate, Engage, Reflect and Act.

Anticipate asks researchers to describe and analyse any economic, social and / or environmental impacts, intended or otherwise, that might arise from the proposed research. The aim is not to predict the actual impact of the proposed research, but to explore potential impacts and implications of the research that may otherwise remain ignored during the research the process.

Reflect asks researchers to reflect on the purposes, motivations, and potential implications of their research, and the associated uncertainties, areas of ignorance, assumptions, framings, questions, dilemmas and social transformations these may occasion.

Engage asks researchers to open up their research visions and their potential impacts to broader deliberation, dialogue, engagement and debate with stakeholders and the public in an inclusive way.

Act asks researchers to using the processes of Anticipation, Reflection and Engagement to influence the direction and trajectory of the research and innovation process itself.

So RRI is an important part of the EU and UK research and innovation pipeline and will become much more so now that the UK research councils have been brought together under the umbrella of UK Research and Innovation or UKRI.

How does RRI work?

The focus of RRI is not only on achieving ethically acceptable, socially desirable and sustainable outcomes. It also and fundamentally concerned with how research and innovation is conducted and the parties involved in the process. RRI can thus be broken down into four key elements: policy, stakeholders, outcomes, process.

Policy

The EU sets out six key policies to shape responsible research and innovation processes, which are target at governments, funding agencies and R&I organisations.

1. Robust goverence
   • RRI principles should, as a matter of policy, be embedded in robust governance frameworks. These frameworks should be flexible and adapt to change so as to be capable of responding to the unpredictable nature of research and innovation.
2. Gender equality
   • It is also a matter of policy that research and innovation take the perspectives of both men and women into account to ensure outcomes are relevant to the whole population.
   • Decision-making bodies and R&I organisations should have balanced gender representation and strive to ensure gender equality in research and innovation.
3. Integrity
   • Honesty, accountability, fairness and good stewardship should be core principles of research and innovation and are key to ensuring the integrity of R&I.
4. Public and stakeholder engagment
   • The public and other stakeholders should, as a matter of policy, be engaged in research and innovation processes as early as possible to avoid tokenism, ensure outcomes align with the values, needs and expectations of society and to avert societal backlash
     • as, for example, happened with the attempted introduction of GM crops into the UK
5. Open Access (FAIR)
   • publicly funded research should be open access in order to catalyse broader innovation, encourage collaboration and improve the quality of research
   • Scientific results and data should follow the FAIR principle
     • results and data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable
6. Science and technology education
   • The demand for highly qualified people continues to rise globally and there is also need as a matter of policy for improved science and technology education to build the necessary capacity to enable R&I at scale and to provide citizens with the knowledge they need to engage with research and innovation.

Stakeholders

RRI involves a range of stakeholders, who should in one way or another be involved in permanent and ongoing dialogue with one another. These stakeholders include:

Policymakers, who have the ability to bring stakeholders to the table and foster debate. This not only includes government but funding agencies, the directors R&I organisations and anyone else involved in making decisions that shape research and innovation locally, nationally and internationally.

The research community is obviously a key stakeholder in research and innovation and includes everyone in the research and innovation pipeline from science advocates and communicators, to research managers, researchers, technicians and support staff.

Business and industry, from start ups to SMEs to large corporates and transnational companies, are all key to research and bringing innovations to bear on social life.

The education community, from primary school to university, science centres and museums, and including teachers, students and their families, play a key role in building capacity and promoting public understanding of science and technology.

Civil society organisations, such as trade unions, NGOs and the media, also play important roles in shaping research and innovation.

RRI seeks to involve these stakeholders in shaping ethically acceptable, socially desirable and sustainable outcomes. Indeed, in recognising that research and innovation reaches beyond the lab, RRI seeks to foster shared responsibility for research and innovation and ensure that it that serves the public good.

Process

The emphasis placed on shared responsibility is reflected in the RRI process, which seeks to put the responsible innovation framework into action and is characterised by diversity and inclusion, anticipation and reflection, openness and transparency, and responsiveness and adaptive change.

Diversity and inclusion emphasise that the RRI process should involve a wide range of stakeholders early in research and innovation to produce outcomes that align with the values and expectations of the groups involved in and affected by R&I. Voices across a diversity of communities should be involved from the beginning of R&I through to its commercialisation, as different perspectives and expertise generate higher quality science and ensure all points of view are taken into account.

Anticipation and reflection emphasise that the RRI process should look beyond the immediate impact of research and innovation and reflect on possible unintended consequences that may arise further down the line. Researchers and innovators should explore potential impacts with stakeholders to generate insights that enable the negative consequences to be avoided.

Openness and transparency emphasise that the RRI process should be accountable to stakeholders and requires that they are provided with meaningful information during all stages of the process to empower them, encourage engagement, foster debate, scrutinise research and innovation, and enable them to make informed decisions.

Responsiveness and adaptive change emphasise that the RRI process should take account of societal need and thus respond to the views expressed by the public and other stakeholders. If necessary, the goals of the research or methods should be adapted and changed.

Outcomes

The RRI process is essentially concerned to deliver the right outcomes, where right means that:

1. The process has engaged and empowered stakeholders and the public;
2. The process has produced outcomes that are ethically acceptable, socially desirable and sustainable;
3. Outcomes provide solutions to ‘grand’ societal challenges.

Putting RRI into practice

In order to foster uptake of RRI, the EU funded the RRI Tools project, involving over 25 different institutions across 30 countries. The RRI Toolkit is available online https://rri-tools.eu and is free to access and use. It aims to drive a new culture of research that puts citizens at the centre of innovation.

Abma Tineke and Jacqueline Broerse’s ‘dialogue model’ of participatory research developed in the healthcare sector. The dialogue model has 5 discrete phases, including exploration, consultation, prioritisation, integration, programming and implementation.

Exploration is the first phase of the dialogue model and aims to identify and make contact with the different stakeholder organisations, groups, and individuals that should be involved in the research.

Consultation does at it suggests and engages stakeholders separately in a dialogue about the research to ensure their voices are heard. Tineke and Broerse emphasize the importance of paying attention to diversity (age, gender, ethnicity, etc.) and being sensitive to asymmetries in power in doing this.

• They underscore the need to empower stakeholders who are not used to actively participating in research to enable “more equal interaction with professionals” and that researchers should pay particular attention to the issues that matter to specific stakeholders.
• Consultation also involves determining appropriate methods of conducting research dialogues with stakeholders, e.g., interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, observations, etc.

Prioritisation as the name suggests is about identifying which research themes that emerge from the consultation process should be take priority.

• This often an iterative process involving further consultation with stakeholders to ensure the right themes are being prioritised appropriately.
• Importantly it involves consideration of what can reasonably be expected to be achieved within the lifetime of project, which means that while a theme may have high priority for stakeholders, it may not be technically achievable in the available timeframes, which may lead to it being de-prioritised.
• Prioritisation is a matter of compromise between what stakeholders want and what can be technically delivered.

Integration seeks to combine the prioritised research themes into a coherent research agenda.

• It involves bringing the different stakeholders together to discuss the research agenda and to agree upon outcomes.
• Tineke and Broerse emphasise the need for this dialogue to be fair and for stakeholder groups to be proportionally represented to ensure that no single group dominates agenda setting and that all have an equal say.

The programming phase involves specifying a research plan to enable the research agenda to be implemented.

• It involves setting a programming committee involving stakeholder representatives to ensure the research addresses the concerns of all stakeholders as it proceeds into implementation.

And implementation obviously involves putting the plan into practice.

• This may involve identifying parties to carry out the research plan, or parts of it, but it also requires oversight and again involves stakeholder representatives on management committees or advisory boards to ensure the research stays on track.

Participatory methods in computing

The collective resources approach led to action-based and experience-based design methods that leveraged prototypes as vehicles for participatory research.

Prototyping was established as an alternative approach to requirements specification in the 1970s, replacing a written document subject to the vagaries of interpretation with a functioning version of a computing system.

The problem with prototyping is that it is by its very nature a technical exercise, all too often preoccupied with demonstrating technical features to stakeholders and having them sign-off on them.

The challenge that Cooperative Design set out tackle was how to involve ordinary people – users and other non-technical stakeholders – in the actual development of prototypes.

Prototyping is a common feature of many design models today, from the spiral model to agile. The contribution of Cooperative Design is to use it as a vehicle for put stakeholder viewpoints and experience at the centre of the design process, not technical specifications and feature demonstrations, and it provides us with a tried and tested way of doing participatory research in computing.

RRI self-reflection tool

Perhaps the most useful tool in the RRI Toolkit is the self-reflection tool: https://rri-tools.eu/self-reflection-tool

• It helps you determine whether or not your research is responsible.

The public engagement section asks you 10 questions about stakeholder involvement.

1. How do you involve stakeholders and the public in your work?
2. What channels do you use to enable stakeholder participation in the R&I process?
3. At which stage of the R&I process is it most effective for you to engage stakeholders, and why?
4. What does public engagement in the decision-making process mean in your work or organisation?
5. What dimensions are usually discussed during your engagement activities?
6. How do you tailor R&I processes to include stakeholders with different genders, ethnicities, classes, ages, routines, experience, or levels of power?
7. How do you ensure that stakeholders understand and accept their roles and the objectives of their engagement?
8. What measures would have a direct impact on your multi-stakeholder engagement activities?
9. What effects do your engagement activities have on public participants and on your R&I processes?
10. How do you address critical aspects of public engagement activities?