Brazilian RRI Workshop: first impressions
The Brazil team from the RRI Practice Project conducted the Brazilian Workshop in RRI on Feb 16th, at FUNCAMP’s Casa do Professor Visitante. With the title “Brazilian Workshop on Responsible Research and Innovation: How to imagine/implement responsibility in research and innovation?”. The event brought to the workshop representatives from some of Brazil’s major players in science, technology and innovation for an open and productive discussion on RRI. Topics discussed included what that term means in Brazil, the challenges and opportunities there were for implementation in the country and existing initiatives in each institution.
The institutions represented were the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications (MCTIC); CAPES and FAPESP, both major funders of research at the federal and state (São Paulo) level, respectively; Embrapa Informática, a part of Brazil’s Embrapa company that deals with informatics for agriculture, situated in Campinas; ITS Rio, a think tank associated with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, with active research and policy work on data futures and internet governance in Brazil; the major health science and technology center Fiocruz, who sent representatives from Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, both involved in this institution’s data policies; CNPEM, a National Laboratory for Energy and Materials research, home to Brazil’s Sirius, a high performance synchrotron light source; and UNICAMP’s dean of research.
Discussions were lively and institutions seemed very open to the concept of RRI, many of them identifying in their institution’s missions many values related to RRI: serving the community, providing research and development to ensure societal betterment, commitment to open access (and sometimes open science) and willingness to engage with society. Albeit not in the same way as it is thought of or implemented in the EU, we could detect in how institutions talked about their own actions and initiatives many values that are aligned with an overall RRI perspective on science and technology. This does not mean, it must be said, that these institutions would implement RRI or even that their programs help to consolidate RRI values or perspectives (involving ethics, engagement, gender equality, open access and science education). But it means that there is an overall openness to ideas stemming from the RRI framework which, if negotiated in a positive way, could readily engage with Brazilian institutional practice.
Challenges to RRI implementation were also discussed: some of the most visible ones were, as expected, the lack of infrastructure to implement some of the actions needed to make RRI concrete. Engaging with society or making data open many times costs money and requires infrastructure not always present in a system strapped for resources and under constant institutional uncertainty. Another challenge was related to institutional values very dear to Brazilian institutions such as autonomy. This can present challenges to RRI policies depending on how they are designed or framed, if they are to be seen as a limitation of that autonomy. The way science and research is conducted in Brazil, many times through personal connections which enable (or make impossible) specific projects or policies can be thought of as a possible challenge, or a path to possible implementation of anything related to RRI.
As Prof. Phillip Macnaghten put it after the event, there was a sense of optimism, even in the face of Brazil’s challenging political moment and uncertainties related to funding of science and economic growth overall. The sense from the workshop was that there was a genuine desire to construct ties and dialogue around RRI, which could become a way to organize dispersed policies and initiatives in many of these institutions. We hope to foster this dialogue as the RRI Practice project progresses!
