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What is RRI-Practice?
RRI-Practice is a 3-year project under Horizon 2020. Its aim is to understand the barriers and drivers to the successful implementation of RRI both in European and global contexts; to promote reflection on organisational structures and cultures of research conducting and research funding organisations; and to identify and support best practices to facilitate the uptake of RRI in organisations and research programmes. The project will review RRI related work in 22 research conducting and research funding organisations and will develop RRI Outlooks outlining RRI objectives, targets and indicators for each organisation.
RRI-Practice project takes as its starting point that organisational policies on socially responsible research practices cannot be implemented simply in a top down fashion. In order for organisations (universities, research institutes, funding organisations, etc.) to have ownership of any concept of RRI they have to be able to relate it to their own mandates, cultures, worldviews. In this project, we will use dimensions of institutionalist approaches in organisational theory to clarify challenges and conditions for successful RRI work.
Goals and objectives
RRI-Practice will systematically explore the following aspects of RRI:
- Organisations’ own understanding and operationalisation of socially responsible research practices
- 5 European Commission RRI keys: ethics, societal engagement, gender equality, open access/science and science education
- Process dimensions that are often regarded as central to RRI: diversity & inclusiveness, anticipation & reflexivity, openness & transparency, and responsiveness & adaptation.
The RRI-Practice project will contribute to the advancement of the governance framework of RRI in a number of ways:
- RRI-Practice will contribute to the concretisation of the RRI concept by investigating the ways in which both the five RRI policy keys and broader understandings of ‘responsibility’ and RRI are taken up, reconciled to (or not) – and enacted within – current organisational practices and cultures. Comparative analysis of the uptake of practices addressing the 5 EC policy keys, in addition to other understandings of RRI, in specific kinds of organisation will facilitate the scaling up of specific findings to general recommendations for broader implementation. Such knowledge will contribute to the further development and refinement of the concept itself and contribute to strengthening imaginings and practices of RRI ‘on the ground’.
- RRI-Practice will contribute to furthering the implementation of RRI in practice by understanding barriers to and drivers for successful implementation of RRI thorough conceptual and empirical analysis of discourses and initiatives in 22 research conducting and research funding organisations across 12 countries and, on this basis, developing action oriented plans or ‘Outlooks’ for further strengthening of RRI work in these organisations. Indicators for successful implementation of RRI measures will be central in these action plans.
- RRI-Practice will use its European and global reach – as reflected in the composition of the consortium – to mainstream RRI in research and policy by uniting and enlarging the RRI community in the participating organisations and countries and promoting best practices for specific kinds of research organisations in different national contexts. Moreover, the work programme of RRI-Practice will facilitate recommendations for the EC based on the project’s findings regarding barriers to and drivers for the operationalisation and implementation of RRI, which in turn, will contribute to the development of more effective and targeted strategies and options for RRI policies.
Project Partners
For additional information, please visit the website of the project at https://www.rri-practice.eu/.
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