Search

ABSTRACTThis perspective piece focuses on attempts to reshape research in Aotearoa New Zealand in ways that honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the country's founding treaty between Māori and the Crown. These obligations establish dimensions of responsible research in this context that go beyond European-devised Responsible Innovation (RI) frameworks. We reflect on these requirements and how they are addressed within two public research organisations. Considering growing tensions between attempts to decolonise the Aotearoa science system and systemic challenges to enacting responsible research, we explore initiatives that seek to translate Te Tiriti obligations into research practices. While not articulated as RI, we discuss commonalities between these approaches and tenets of RI. Our reflections highlight the centrality of meaningful partnerships for enabling responsible research and the institutional structures required to support such relationships within Aotearoa. The paper concludes with questions around if, and how, the maturing RI scholarship can support decolonising research practices.

ABSTRACTThis Perspective considers the potential value and limitations of introducing Responsible Innovation approaches from the Global North into Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. We reflect on the relationship of predominantly Western European understandings of responsibility and endogenous ‘Antipodean’ forms of responsibility, including Indigenous relationalities, collective stewardship, and care that extends to more-than-human worlds. Commencing a dialogue between these different modes of responsibility, we outline incommensurabilities, complementarities, and tensions within two core dimensions of Responsible Innovation, namely anticipation and inclusion. To realise benefits from introducing Responsible Innovation and avoid neo-colonial enforcements of adventitious understandings of responsibility, ‘Antipodean’ practitioners need to understand their multidimensional cultural contexts with the aim of collectively reconfiguring responsible practices. Pursuing intercultural dialogue with ‘Antipodean’ modes of responsibility can, in turn, help to responsibly innovate Responsible Innovation outside of the Global North and strengthen the concept’s foundational ethos of collective stewardship by making it more inclusive and multifaceted.

Agricultural digitalization is providing growing amounts of real-time digital data. Biophysical simulation models can help interpret these data. However, these models are subject to complex uncertainties, which has prompted calls for interdisciplinary research to better understand and communicate modelling uncertainties and their impact on decision-making. This article develops two corresponding insights from an interdisciplinary project in a New Zealand agricultural research organization. First, we expand on a recent Royal Society Open Science journal article (van der Bles et al. 2019 Royal Society Open Science 6, 181870 (doi:10.1098/rsos.181870)) and suggest a threefold conceptual framework to describe direct, indirect and contextual uncertainties associated with biophysical models. Second, we reflect on the process of developing this framework to highlight challenges to successful collaboration and the importance of a deeper engagement with interdisciplinarity. This includes resolving often unequal disciplinary standings and the need for early collaborative problem framing. We propose that both insights are complementary and informative to researchers and practitioners in the field of modelling uncertainty as well as to those interested in interdisciplinary environmental research generally. The article concludes by outlining limitations of interdisciplinary research and a shift towards transdisciplinarity that also includes non-scientists. Such a shift is crucial to holistically address uncertainties associated with biophysical modelling and to realize the full potential of agricultural digitalization.