'Opening up' science policy? Engaging with RRI in Brazil

• In Event: Global Perspectives on Responsible Innovation: Widening the Gaze I

Abstract

This paper presents initial results from the Brazilian team in the Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice (RRI-P) collaboration, concurrently running in 22 countries. The project invites reflection from institutional actors through a variety of exercises that focus on RRI's potential for 'opening up' and impacting on national science and innovation policy. The first such exercise is an early-stage national workshop that is the object of this article. We describe how RRI was viewed by the participants in the Brazilian workshop, yielding an initial approximation on how RRI is likely to be perceived by actors involved in science, technology and policy in the wider national context. We subsequently reflect on the workshop itself as an engagement exercise and discuss its potential to open up policy dynamics in Brazil. Largely unknown in the Brazilian context, RRI-led engagement exercises were embraced by workshop participants as a means to exert a positive influence in opening up science policy discussions, by creating bridges between RRI research and policy actions; as an enabler of dialogue on issues not usually addressed in existing policy debates; and as a source for new framings for existing, stalemated problems. Despite its potential for opening up policy, we also discuss how RRI nevertheless faces the inherent hurdle of surpassing longstanding Brazilian traditions of hierarchical governance and linear models of innovation, both pervasive in the country's political institutions.

Authors

• Marko Monteiro, State University of Campinas

• Luis Ignacio Reyes-Galindo, State University of Campinas - UNICAMP

• Phillip Macnaghten, Wageningen University