Towards a Practice of Reflexivity
Lisa Verwoerd
The complex and intractable character of today’s environmental and sustainability issues present unprecedented challenges to science and policy alike. In response, there is called for more reflexive modes of knowledge production. With such modes, academic and non-academic actors collaborate in processes of knowledge co-production geared towards societal transformation and sustainable development. Despite knowledge co-production’s increasing popularity, it has been argued that, in practice, it appears to deviate little from conventional technocratic ideas on the interactions between science and policy. Policy researchers in the Global North who aspire knowledge co-production are shown to run into societal, political, cultural and institutional barriers as the respective science-policy systems appear to privilege more classical modes of knowledge production. Consequently, co-production’s transformative power often falls short of its potential to contribute to sustainability. Addressing these barriers, scholars have called for the institutionalisation of reflexive research. Yet, the process by which institutionalisation might be achieved and what its outcomes might look like so far have received relatively little empirical and theoretical attention. This thesis aims to make up for this, and does so by exploring the process by which knowledge co-production in policy evaluation – as an enactment of reflexive research – becomes normalised at a Dutch knowledge institute positioned at the intersection of science and policy, viz. the PBL Netherlands Environmental Policy Assessment Agency. The main research question addressed in this thesis is as follows: How does the process of normalisation of knowledge co-production in policy evaluation at the PBL Netherlands Environmental Policy Assessment Agency take shape?
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Global Health security, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and pathogen sharing: Building a New Microbial Commons
Carolina dos Santos Ribeiro
In the first quarter of the 21th century, epidemics and pandemics of emerging infectious diseases are more present and concerning than ever. Due to the globalized and zoonotic nature of such outbreak events, collaboration and sharing across disciplines, sectors, domains, organizations and countries are essential. For collaboration and sharing to have the most significant impact on the ability of the Global Health community to manage infectious diseases, it needs to be open and timely. Nevertheless, there are stakeholder concerns and countervailing mechanisms for such open and timely sharing guided by data protection and appropriation, as well as the establishment of reciprocity and the fair sharing of benefits; which are threatening efficient and collaborative Global Health action. This chapter sets the scene for this thesis by stating the current importance of infectious diseases, the mechanisms in place to fight them, and why collaboration and sharing are unprecedented when fighting these threats. This research is contextualized to the Global Health security environment, depicting the multitude of stakeholders involved and introducing the difficulties they encounter when collaborating and sharing resources to contribute to infectious diseases management. Ultimately, the aim of this thesis is to contribute to Global Health security by providing insights on how to foster multi-stakeholder collaboration and enhance the sharing of pathogen resources. These insights are produced through the investigation of how collaboration and sharing take place in this context, the existing barriers as well as proposed solutions to address such barriers.
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Wading through the Mud: Reflections on Shaping RRI in Practice
Jantien Schuijer
Over the past ten years, the framework of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has gained traction in Europe. It captures the ambition to make research and innovation processes more inclusive of societal perspectives, attentive to social, ethical and ecological impacts, and flexible in adjusting courses of action when needed. Although broadly discussed in theory, many questions still exist about RRI’s translation into the “muddy” context of real world settings. This book aims to shed light on the shaping of RRI in practice. It reflexively studies action-oriented work that was conducted within a European RRI project on public engagement and nanotechnologies. The analyses provide lessons that are particularly valuable in relation to the shaping of public engagement processes, multi-actor sense-making of RRI, and the adoption of new roles by actors working at the science-society interface.
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