ABSTRACT

To stimulate the science and innovation system to work towards societally beneficial, ethically acceptable and environmentally sustainable outcomes, in recent years the governance framework of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has been developed. Built on older scholarly traditions, both conceptual and practical work has been done under this umbrella term, which has the merit of bringing together valuable conceptual and methodological resources previously dispersed across various communities. A risk with the ensuing complexity of RRI, however, is that it becomes difficult to monitor or assess how RRI impacts on researchers, innovators, institutions, companies, fields or even the research and innovation system as a whole. In this paper, we present reflexive monitoring in action (RMA) as a methodology for monitoring and assessing RRI that simultaneously facilitates enacting it. RMA is an interactive methodology for monitoring transitions in the context of knowledge-intensive ‘wicked problems’ developed in the field of sustainable system innovation. To make our case, we build on our experiences with formulating and using criteria for assessing RRI gained in the RRI Tools project, funded by the European Commission (EC), and on our experiences with practising RMA in the context of the Dutch nature policy programme Natuurpact.