Opening up Responsible Research and Innovation

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is increasingly being implemented by researchers, and in the UK, its use is encouraged by funders such as UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The aim of RRI is to ensure that research and its impacts are opened up to broader deliberation, engagement and debate in an inclusive manner, and to enable the complexities and uncertainties of research to be revealed through involvement with those impacted by the research. Taken at face value, RRI appears to challenge the status quo of decisions around scientific and technological developments being left to those with scientific expertise. However, existing RRI frameworks are anthropocentric, and exclude the more-than-human world (animals, plants, soil, water, land etc.,). To address these issues a project was undertaken which aimed to design, co-produce and provide a conceptual framework for including the more-than-human world within responsible research and innovation. Part of the project included a one-day in-person workshop with diverse knowledge-holders to ensure different knowledges and perspectives were feeding into the project. The focus of this article is not on the workshop itself, but what arose from it. Following the workshop, one of the knowledge-holders produced a written piece about game theory and its potential role in RRI. This written piece is presented here and its importance and relevance to RRI is reflected upon. We explain why this written piece about game theory matters to RRI. We conclude by offering recommendations to researchers. Funding Acknowledgement This work was supported by Advancing Capacity for Climate and Environment Social Science (ACCESS) Flex Fund under Grant 119281R. Thank you to all the knowledge-holders that participated in the one-day in-person workshop. Your insights were invaluable. At Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, we would like to thank Jacob Thomas for the very helpful feedback, and Dr Gareth J Johnson for his support in bringing this article to fruition.