1 Introduction

Well-defined policy objectives are insufficient to guarantee successful policy implementation (Lipsky 1980; cp. Pültzl and Treib 2007: 93). Implementation of policy ambitions remains a tenacious puzzle, in no small part owing to the increasing complexity of a differentiated and decentered polity (Bevir and Rhodes 2008; Bevir 2020). Implementation challenges include ensuring sufficient coherence in the interpretation of policy goals, and coordinating the elaboration of goals into concrete policy action among a wide variety of actors. Exacerbating the challenge, policy implementation is highly contingent on the substantive focus of the policy issue in question (Ripley and Franklin 1976) and on the political and administrative systems in which implementation efforts occur (Imperial 2021). The European Union (EU) presents a setting in which policy implementation is notoriously challenging (Bauer 2006; Challies et al. 2017). In part, difficulties with European policy implementation stem from the fact that policy execution takes place among a heterogeneous network of interdependent actors without a formal hierarchical relationship to implementing bodies in Member States. Policy implementation challenges in Europe are further complicated by the proclamation of ambitions in law but with little additional elaboration or guidance in practice.

An example of ambitious policy goals in legal text with limited practical guidance is found in the European pursuit of “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) as a process for “better aligning research and innovation with the values, needs and expectations of society” (EC 2016: 6). The RRI concept was included as a cross-cutting issue in the law establishing the European Commission (EC)‘s 8th framework program for funding research and innovation, Horizon 2020 (H2020) (EC 2013). The concept was further elaborated in the 2014 ‘Rome declaration on RRI’ with the intent to stimulate responsibility for better aligning research and innovation with societal values and needs in the European Research Area (ERA). Despite these policy goals, research into the operationalization of RRI across H2020 programming has revealed limited success in policy implementation (Novitzky et al. 2020; cp. Forsberg et al. 2018).

The recently completed NewHoRRIzon project was funded by the EC to review progress towards, and aid the implementation of the RRI policy goal. In our experience, the EC effort to mainstream responsible research and innovation in the ERA presents a prime example of policy implementation challenges in practice. In this chapter, we reflect on NewHoRRIzon results and experiences, asking: How was RRI put into practice in the ERA and what lessons can be drawn about policy implementation in such complex governance settings? Our goal is to contribute to under-developed scholarly research on policy implementation in view of complexity (cp. Howlett 2019; Baldwin et al. 2019).

After a brief presentation of the empirical basis for our reflection, we tour the policy implementation literature on two public management reforms, New Public Management and New Public Governance, to provide conceptual background. Next, we situate within this policy implementation context our efforts with RRI as studied and supported by the NewHoRRIzon project. In the project, participants were invited to deliberate RRI policy goals and to design and execute concrete activities (dubbed “pilot actions”) to implement RRI in their context and related research (or research funding) practices. In the final section, we discuss our experiences with implementing RRI among diverse groups of ERA stakeholders. We will consider how the policy goal of RRI, and its attendant normative orientation, exists in tension with the substantive focus (science governance) and administrative setting (the science funding system) of EC Research & Innovation (R&I). We close by touching on how future research and innovation policy seeking alternative normative orientations, like RRI, might be realized through decentralized efforts among diverse policy targets in diverse implementation settings.

2 Methods

Our explorations and reflections on RRI policy implementation draw upon our empirical experiences within the NewHoRRIzon project. The objectives of the project were to, first, assess levels of RRI integration across all lines of H2020 funding (a total of 19 sub-sections of the program were analyzed, see Novitzky et al. 2020). Building upon this analysis, the second objective was to establish H2020 sub-section-specific communities of stakeholders, gathered in so-called “Social Labs”, to advance adoption of RRI in practice. Timmermans et al. (2020) elaborated the methodological adaptation of Social Labs to RRI policy; see Tabarés et al. (2022) for project-wide empirical results.

In this chapter we present a reflective conversation between policy implementation theory and our analysis of Social Lab experiences in the NewHoRRIzon project. The product is an example of what Cicmil et al. (2006: 677; cf. Calori 2002) term, “project actuality research”, in which “scholarly theorizing and practitioners’ narratives” are combined (Loeber and Vermeulen 2016). Since we were involved in designing and running the selected Social Labs, but not in designing and carrying forth the activities (pilot actions) undertaken by Social Lab participants, we characterize our role as “engaged researchers” (Levin and Ravn 2007), rather than action-researchers. Given this kind of involvement, we are able to infuse our reflections as insiders with an outsider perspective (Bonner and Tolhurst 2002).

Among the 19 Social Labs organized by NewHoRRIzon to support RRI implementation (one for each of 19 sub-sections of H2020), our reflection draws upon our experiences with the three Social Labs for which we as authors were responsible. The diverse substantive foci and administrative settings of these three labs – two from the “Societal Challenges” Pillar of H2020, on food and security respectively, and one from the “Excellent Science” Pillar, namely the early career researcher mobility and career development, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) – serve as warrant for our choice to put these empirical experiences into conversation with policy implementation theory. As such, these three Labs form the sub-units of analysis in what amounts to an embedded case study (Yin 2003: 42). The three sub-units present “extreme” cases (Flyvbjerg 2011: 307): they convey, in a concentrated form, insights in the range of issues and intricacies that characterized the problematic of RRI implementation. Such an embedded case study approach makes it possible to mitigate potential limitations of case-study methodology. Distinct but contextually connected cases validate and provide a measure of reliability for extending conclusions beyond isolated cases.

In each Social Lab, stakeholders were recruited to three face-to-face workshops (with as much group continuity as possible) to reflect on RRI and to develop and implement interventions (the aforementioned pilot actions) to tackle specific RRI-related challenges. Social Lab managers had the autonomy to adapt individual Social Lab designs to the particular substantive (e.g., food, security, MSCA) and administrative settings of H2020 programming and Lab participants. Social Labs provided an opportunity for rich discussions on the challenges and opportunities of implementing RRI in varying sub-sections of H2020. Labs were designed to be generally, not strictly, representative of each H2020 program line (i.e., not strictly proportional to any indicative measure of a program line, rather simply seeking stakeholder role, geographic, gender, and sector diversity). As such, our experience reflects working with groups of participants relevant to the policy goal of RRI because of their proximity to the subject matter (Fox and Miller 1996), and comprised of a mix of individuals we could practically reach and individuals who ‘opted-in’ to participate in the specific social context created by the NewHoRRIzon project. Given the project’s mission to support bottom-up exploration of, and creative actions to advance RRI through the Labs, however, we see this practical constraint as a strength of the approach.

3 Implementation: An Ever-Transitioning Field of Research and Practice

Policy implementation describes the conversion of policy goals into efficacious action aligned with intentions (O’Toole 2000). Edwards (1980: 1) defines this process as “the stage of policymaking between the establishment of a policy - such as the passage of a legislative act, the issuing of an executive order, the handing down of a judicial decision, or the promulgation of a regulatory rule - and the consequences of the policy for the people whom it affects.” The study of such processes connects to wider research efforts into public management, governance, and “policy execution” (Ansell et al. 2017:468).

Empirical studies of public administration in the 1970s and 80s, among them by Pressman and Wildavsky (1984), showed how implementation itself shapes policy (Majone and Wildavsky 1979: 170). These analyses prompted implementation scholars to take implementers’ ‘bottom-up’ perspectives as the point of departure for subsequent study (e.g. Lipsky 1980), often observing departures from policy designers’ ‘top-down’ views (Pülzl and Treib 2007). Over time, studies seeking to make sense of tensions between policy designers and implementers were replaced by conceptualizations of policy-oriented decision-making power being dispersed in polycentric networks of interdependent (semi-)public and private actors (Ansell and Gash 2007).

Regardless of form, the question is how policy goals and practice interrelate (Laws and Forester 2015). How to support coherence in implementation?. Answers to these “how” questions are consistently shaded by the public policy approach de jour. Notably, the New Public Management approach (NPM) to public administration has enjoyed a bureaucratic tour-de-force over the past forty years (Osborne and McLaughlin 2002; Fredriksson and Pallas 2018; Funck and Karlsson 2018).

Gow and Dufour (2000: 578) define NPM as an expression in vogue since the early 1980s to “[d]escribe a new way to study and manage public sector organizations.” NPM represents an analytic perspective on public policy as well as an approach to arranging its practices. Gow and Dufour’s use of the word ‘new’ is somewhat relative – Hood and Peters (2004) wrote in the early 2000s of NPM as being “middle-aged” – yet the characteristics of NPM still dominate many policy fields. While the precise nature of the NPM has been debated, it is generally understood to include the following implementation-related characteristics (Hood 1991; Osborne and McLaughlin 2002; Fredriksson and Pallas 2018):

  1. 1.

    the delivery of public services is organized in terms of private sector methods, allowing for entrepreneurial management, as opposed to the bureaucratic logic of the public administrator operating in line with given rules and hierarchically organized responsibilities. Policy goals and targets are, preferably, formulated in quantitative terms. Public officials are encouraged to skillfully operate as proactive managers who have discretion in implementing these policy goals (Falconer 1997);

  2. 2.

    the efforts of public managers are controlled by output measures, for which explicit standards are set and translate into performance indicators. The emphasis on performance evaluation enables public sector bodies to be held accountable for their activities (Osborne and Gaebler 1993);

  3. 3.

    the emphasis on output controls (Boyne 1999) tallies with the decentralized organization of the public sector (Pollitt et al. 1998). The disaggregated structure of the public sector sets policy design apart from implementation, generating the critical question of how to align action among public sector bodies essentially encouraged to compete with one another over resources (cf. Milward and Provan 2000: 276–277).

In practice, NPM approaches have denuded public bodies to the benefit of commercial and community organizations, contracted to deliver public services previously (Dickinson 2016). The result is typified by Rhodes (1996) as a form of governance “without government,” leaving public policy design and implementation at the hands of networks of heterogeneous actors. Such arrangements not only result in a decrease of the power and influence of public service professionals (as well as demoralization), but also in a struggle over the intentions of policy action and, often, failures to actually deliver public value (Bozeman 2007).

The proliferation of administrative fragmentation and public value failure permeating public policy in the wake of NPM approaches gave way to a new wave of public sector reform. This has placed greater emphasis on strengthening horizontal ties among key policy actors, including individual professionals and public bodies. Osborne, among the most prominent chroniclers of NPM, coined the movement, “New Public Governance” (NPG) (Osborne 2006). Many have since tried to capture what sets NPG apart from NPM. Various authors identify as NPG’s main characteristics (e.g. Xu et al. 2015):

  1. 1.

    an emphasis on participation and interactions to ensure collaborative governance that cuts across organizational and institutional boundaries (Torfing and Triantafillou 2013);

  2. 2.

    a re-centering of the public good and of the citizen as a central sparring partner in deliberating what this entails (in contrast to the NPM’s tendency to view the citizen as a customer). This is accompanied with an emphasis on social problem solving via voluntary cooperation;

  3. 3.

    the embracing of a new role for government, namely as a coordinator of interactive and participatory efforts and the processes of meaning making in which these result.

Implementation from an NPG perspective amounts to processes of involving a plurality of interdependent public and private actors who have a stake in some shared issue, to jointly explore how to make sense of the issue and produce innovative solutions that lead to desired outcomes.

To which extent can such ideal-typical conceptualizations of policy action be of use in understanding actual policy processes? The historical interplay of policy implementation studies and the wider context of governing makes clear that policy intent, converted into real world action, strongly correlates with the institutional design in which it takes shape (Peters 2014, 2015). To optimize the explanatory potential of policy conceptualizations, it is therefore vital to consider the institutional setting in which an implementation process unfolds, and to include in the analysis of implementation institutional aspects co-shaping actors’ behavior (Baldwin et al. 2019; cp. O’Toole 2000, 2015). In our analysis of RRI implementation we will therefore, following the neo-institutionalist take of Lowndes and Roberts (2013), account for the following aspects influencing actors’ behavior in relation to RRI in the ERA: a) formal and informal rules, standards, and regulations, b) situated practices, and c) narratives, which manifest as “subtle processes of explanation and persuasion transmitted through the spoken word” (Jehling et al. 2019: 111).

4 Implementing RRI in the European Research Area

The European Research Area (ERA) is comprised of a plurality of regulatory nodes, responsible for the distribution of research funding on European and Member State’s national levels, spread across 27 countries. The governance of science is dispersed amongst a network of organizations and intermediary institutions, including standard-setting organizations, self-regulation bodies, regulatory agencies, and ethics boards at national or supranational levels. National funding agencies and universities across scientific fields involved in the ERA, who can be identified as focal actors in RRI implementation, interact with these diverse organisations in the absence of a clear-cut hierarchical structures, making coordination of action and meaning-making a complex affair. While such arrangements are not uncommon in implementation processes of any policy, the case of RRI is made more complex by the progressive – in relation to normal science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993) –agenda it entails.

RRI’s normative aims espouse an open and interactive approach to research and innovation intended to enhance the ability of societal actors and innovators to work towards “the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products” (von Schomberg 2013: 64). Alongside the progressive normativity of the definition is its prescriptiveness, urging research and innovation processes, “to become mutually responsive” (idem) with societal stakeholders. A range of definitions of RRI share in this conjoined prescriptive and normative frame (e.g. Smallman 2018; Gurzawska et al. 2017).

4.1 The EC’s Approach to Implementing RRI

The normative and prescriptive aspects of RRI were carried forward by the EC in the founding regulation of the Horizon 2020 (H2020) funding program, stating as a policy goal to “develop the governance for the advancement of responsible research and innovation by all stakeholders (researchers, public authorities, industry and civil society organizations), which is sensitive to society needs and demands, and promote an ethics framework for research and innovation” (EC 2013, L 347/167). Ultimately, the EC operationalized RRI as an umbrella term combining concerns across six so-called keys, themselves leading concepts in previous research funding program frameworks, in casu, gender equality, public engagement, science education and science literacy, open access and open science, ethics and governance. In order to implement RRI in the ERA, these themes were to be addressed in the research and innovation processes that the EC supported financially. H2020, with a total budget of approximately €80 billion (European Commission 2013), hence was the main locus of RRI implementation.

A first step to RRI implementation was to have the six keys elaborated into performance assessment metrics for evaluating research efforts (notably via the assessment of proposals submitted to acquire H2020 funding). To that end, an expert group was commissioned “to identify and propose indicators and other effective means to monitor and assess the impacts of RRI initiatives and evaluate their performance in relation to general and specific RRI objectives” (Strand et al. 2015: 9). This researcher team developed a set of indicators which it presented together with the advice to, instead, make RRI operational in collaboration with the research groups and institutions who had to work with the indicators, inviting them to elaborate context-specific, jointly deliberated qualitative indicators. The EC largely ignored this advice and continued its efforts to operationalize RRI through a quantitative, indicator-based approach.

Subsequently, a commissioned research project, Monitoring the Evolution and Benefits of Responsible Research and Innovation (MORRI), presented a next attempt at creating a monitoring and evaluation system for RRI. Even though the researchers involved shared reservations with Strand et al. (2015) about the usefulness and applicability of the resulting set of indicators, in subsequent H2020 calls for research proposals, the MORRI indicators were often mentioned with the suggestion to apply these in prospective proposals. The ambition of developing RRI indicators got further elaborated in the form of a five-year research and innovation action (RIA) funded under H2020, dubbed Scientific Understanding and Provision of an Enhanced and Robust Monitoring system for RRI (SUPER MoRRI).

In addition to the efforts at translating RRI into sets of performance indicators, the Unit in H2020 responsible for the Science with and for Society (SwafS) program financially supported some 35 projects on RRI (and the related concept of Open Science). The projects varied in their exact aims yet invariably set out to elaborate or advance questions of what RRI entails, how to make it accessible to researchers, and so on, with the intention of “mainstreaming” RRI in research funded in H2020.

4.2 NewHoRRIzon’s Approach to Implementing RRI

Among the projects funded to elaborate the RRI concept in H2020 was the NewHoRRIzon project, which aimed to “promote the uptake of RRI in H2020 and beyond” (NewHoRRIzon 2016). This aim implied, many of those involved in the project argued, a critical questioning of existing research and innovation routines from the perspective of responsibility; the intent being to provoke reflexivity on research and research funding practice. The project’s objectives in principle allowed for such a reading of its remit, as NewHoRRIzon aimed at “Promoting a clear concept of RRI...” (NewHoRRIzon 2016: 73) while also “… recognizing the need for context specificity, variety, and concreteness.” The project thus emphasized responsiveness in elaborating the meaning of RRI to the actors involved. By not only asking ‘what RRI means?’ but also inquiring how actors make sense of RRI in their professional context (cp. Yanow 1996), the NewHoRRIzon project created settings in which those actors who were directly involved in research and innovation (R&I), and in the funding of R&I, were invited to themselves elaborate the RRI concept.

The settings to do so were created by NewHoRRIzon and dubbed Social Labs. While the label was adopted from Hassan (2014; cp. Timmermans et al. 2020), the Social Labs in NewHoRRIzon did not draw on prescribed formats, but were designed by the researchers involved, who joined forces with professional facilitators. A “Social Lab Manual” drafted by NewHoRRIzon’s project leader and a dedicated two-day workshop gave initial directions to the set-up of Social Labs. As noted, 19 Labs were organized, one for every H2020 sub-section. All Labs consisted of three consecutive workshops spread over a period of two years, and including predominantly virtual interactions in between. Within this shared framework, each Social Lab team organized its own Workshops to suit their program’s specific circumstances. Some 15 to 25 participants per Social Lab, collecting a diverse group of stakeholders involved in a funding scheme, were invited to workshops to reflect on the notion of responsibility and on how that might fit the contexts in which they professionally operated. In doing so, Lab participants were enabled to identify institutional barriers to and facilitators for RRI implementation. Table 11.1, below, summarizes – by way of illustration – the rules, practices, and narratives (cp. Lowndes and Roberts 2013) that were addressed in the Labs that we, as authors, were responsible for managing. The barriers identified were, subsequently, addressed via the pilot actions so as to further RRI implementation.

Table 11.1 Barriers and facilitators for RRI implementation in three sub-sections of the ERA, as generated by Social Labs on societal challenges (food, security) and excellent science (MSCA)
Full size table

Social Lab efforts surfaced the observation that the Commissions’ view on responsibility was narrow and did not fit participants’ institutional contexts, or their associated dominant practices and narratives. The pilots and discussions clearly indicated the need to develop new, localized narratives on RRI and to create new contextualized practices and – where possible – buttress these practices with the formal rules and incentive structures. By targeting such practices through the Social Labs, RRI gained meaning and concrete shape from a bottom-up perspective in a form befitting the fragmented setting of the European Research Area itself.

5 Discussion: RRI as New Public Governance

The observation that the EC’s implementation strategy to reconciling the H2020 program with RRI ambitions proved of limited success (Novitzky et al. 2020) was puzzling to many. Various RRI observers have pondered whether the EC’s choice to make RRI operational in terms of the keys limited the potential scope of the notion, as originally defined and introduced (Von Schomberg 2013). Although for the EC, there was a broader narrative about improving science and society relationships accompanying the keys, the keys nonetheless prevailed as isolated themes. The reduction of the notion’s meaning to the keys-logic implies, Owen and Pansera (2019) argue, an a priori limitation of the imagination required to see RRI develop as a genuinely new discourse, and thus succumb to cooption by ‘business as usual’ policy and practice (2019: 40–41).

This assertion can be put in perspective by bringing policy implementation literature into conversation with these views and our results and experiences as engaged researchers in the NewHoRRIzon project. Based on a comparison with the characteristics as listed in Sect. 11.3, we classify the EC’s approach to RRI policy implementation as a classic case of New Public Management. Notably the emphasis on top-down selected keys and the efforts to have these elaborated in quantitative performance indicators speak of a managerial approach to implementing RRI in the NPM tradition. In addition, the fact that a single H2020 program (‘Science with and for Society’, Swafs) was made responsible for advancing RRI (e.g., in the form of developing RRI-tools), with seemingly little additional support for integrating RRI in peer funding schemes across the disaggregated structure of the ERA, fits an NPM approach. This tallies too with the idea that RRI indicators would incite funding organizations to stimulate researchers and innovators in adopting RRI, and to be accountable for their actions in those terms. Such an approach feeds into and reinforces the market logic embodied in the ERA in which organized competition for scarce resources is used to enroll researchers and innovators and their respective institutes.

The narrow operationalization of “RRI as keys” rendered the policy a seemingly apolitical, administrative endeavor. The approach echoes a trend in public sector financial administration wherein, to overcome the fragmentation of public administration there is a tendency, Pollitt and Bouckaert posited, to fit “all agencies into one set of accounts” (2017: 85) so as to be able to keep track of ‘the bigger picture’ financially. We conclude that, as applied to RRI implementation, tracking and measuring keys without regard for substantive difference or diverse administrative contexts of R&I fields typifies a self-sabotaging approach to aligning R&I policy goals and implementation.

What then to make of the NewHoRRIzon approach to RRI implementation? It remains too early to assess the impact of project’s ‘bottom-up’ approach to “mainstreaming RRI.” The experience does, however, present a robust opportunity to revisit the idea of implementation in science policy. Considering the fragmented institutional context of the ERA, involving a diverse range of countries (27) and scientific programs (19), each with multiple and differentiable substantive sub-domains, an approach to implementing RRI that supports bottom-up interpretations, our findings suggest, might be more promising. In that sense, NewHoRRIzon resembled a ‘New Public Governance’ (NPG) approach to RRI implementation, rendering a process of joint and creative problem solving (Ansell et al. 2017).

One might argue the EC reached a similar conclusion, funding the NewHoRRIzon project and other decentralized implementation efforts through its Science with and for Society (Swafs) program. However, the instantiation of these efforts as projects in-and-of-themselves likely inhibited a more potent NPG approach to RRI. Indeed, the transient nature of such projects excluded recourse to establishing, for example, RRI competence units across program lines with dedicated resources and active coordination from a central hub.’ Yet even within the constraints of a project setting and narrow policy mandate structuring its co-production process, NewHoRRIzon implementation still represents an example of supporting practices and narratives to inform actions to build a culture of RRI in the ERA. It did so by sometimes challenging – and sometimes seeking alliances with H2020 protagonists – to advance RRI in their localized contexts. Implementation for the Social Lab management teams entailed networking to mobilize energy for strengthening practices and narratives conducive to RRI, and challenging those counter to it. We place this implementation under the broad umbrella of NPG. We do so based on reference to the variety of collaborative arrangements allowing for the governance of public issues, emphasizing “inter-organizational relationships, networks, collaborative partnerships, … and other forms of multi-actor relations” advanced by NPG approaches (Sorrentino et al. 2018: 20). Interestingly, Social Labs did not only invite participants to deliberate the RRI notion, but also to actively design and execute concrete actions to help change their own context in line with the policy goal. This action-orientation of the Social Labs resulted in a learning-by-doing approach to elaborating the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of RRI-in-context.

6 Conclusions

NewHoRRIzon’s Social Lab approach built on the project’s analysis of the EC’s lack of success at implementing RRI across H2020, and presented a more agile approach to RRI implementation. This observation enables us to answer our main question in setting forth this comparison between the EC letter and NewHoRRIzon practice of implementing policy. We can now draw several lessons about implementing a normatively and practically challenging concept like RRI in the complex governance setting of the European Research Area (ERA).

A first observation is that the very quest for coherence and centralized coordination may come at the expense of implementation success. The NPM approach to elaborating policy in terms of ‘keys’ made RRI a standardizable, calculable, and measurable intervention and, in principle, narratively coherent. Yet, as the findings from the NewHoRRIzon diagnosis showed, the success of including such efforts in R&I policy were modest at best. As presented, formal implementation of RRI in terms of new rules and standards was often counteracted by standing practices and signature narratives characterizing the lived experience of those active in the ERA and supported by H2020 programs. We found it was often these standing practices and narratives keeping the RRI policy’s ‘target groups’ (the highly varied sets of grantee researchers and innovators, as well as funding officers, National Contact Points (NCPs) etc.) from ‘co-producing’ (Whitaker 1980) the EC’s RRI policy goals in practice.

A second observation concerns the affordances and limitations of letting go of the idea of substantive coherence in implementing policy concepts like RRI. While the EC’s keys structured conversations on RRI, we encouraged Social Lab participants to focus on lived experiences to help make sense of RRI. In practice, this meant enabling reflection on participants’ own tacit knowledge and backgrounds, and tap into each other’s experiences to co-construct what “RRI” meant for and to them. As a consequence, the Social Labs created spaces to explore and leverage instances of what Randles (2017) dubbed de facto RRI, that is, of the empirically diverse answers to the question we raised in the Social Labs: ‘what does responsibility mean to you in the context of your professional practice?’ The choice to adopt such a responsive approach in making sense of RRI may foreclose on straightforward quantitative assessments of the impact of Social Lab participants’ actions in terms of “RRI uptake” (for example, gender ratios across teams). Such measures, of course, help track vital improvements, as visible in progress on gender balance goals dating back to at least the Fifth EC Framework Program (EC 1999). These measures, however, are insufficient to the larger task envisioned by RRI—namely, an embodiment of European values and a precautrionary approach to research and innovation. The NPG approach we documented allows for “a way of embedding deliberation on [aspects of societal concern in research and innovation] within the innovation process” (Macnaghten 2020: 13); a responsiveness which the author identifies as quintessential, together with the dimensions of anticipation, inclusion, and reflexivity, in giving hands and feet to the responsibility theme. For Macnaghten (2020), this holds for innovation but, we argue, this is equally the case for research and innovation policy, that is, all those processes the RRI concept principally addresses.

In conclusion, the Social Lab approach to implementing RRI as executed in the NewHoRRIzon project, offers hallmarks of an NPG approach. Most particularly, Social Labs put researchers and other stakeholders in the ERA center stage in elaborating what RRI policy might mean and how it could be conveyed in real-word settings and actions. The fact that the Social Labs presented a forum for a variety of stakeholders from across research and funding institutions who seldom ran into each other – researchers, funding specialists, NCPs etc. – was extremely helpful. Namely, this cross-pollination allowed for socialization and explication of barriers to effectuating RRI (as well as sharing of what might enable RRI). By cutting across organizational and institutional boundaries, the interlinkages between various aspects of research (and research funding) came to the fore. This exchange formed a starting point for practically enabling the uptake of RRI across diverse substantive and administrative contexts of the H2020 funding program and ERA. The Labs showed that for such actions to be effective, coordination across the actions and various realms of action is also required.

Our NewHoRRIzon experiences, in the light of policy implementation, offer a vital empirical critique of the dichotomy suggested by Owen and Pansera (2019) who separate “RI” as an academic approach to problematizing responsibility in processes of innovation from “RRI” as a policy construct. Such a dichotomy, our NewHoRRIzon experience shows, is not only misconceived, but also potentially at cross-purposes to the larger project of aligning science and society. We suggest that the differences ascribed to the articulations of RI and RRI, rather than being distinct academic and policy constructs, stem from different approaches to R&I governance. As an expression of an NPM approach, the idea (captured by Owen and Pansera under the ‘RRI’ heading) seemingly imposes an ‘alien’ add-on to what researchers’ and other stakeholders consider to be their core business. Such a narrative becomes counterproductive to any ‘mainstreaming’ effort purporting cross-cutting programmatic reflection (e.g., on societal concerns about and in research and innovation). Contrastingly, an NPG approach to implementation (e.g., as ‘RI’) affords decentralized pathways to leverage diverse research cultures and cares across disciplines in service of advancing societally engaged and responsive R&I. For policy makers, remembering this distinction – and the vitality of the NPG alternative – offers a way forward in implementation of RRI policy better tuned to the spirit of the ERA: namely, the project of supporting integration of cultures and values across Europe (Kuhlmann 2001). For academic practitioners, our experiences show the benefits of developing collaborative networks, tailored to field contexts, when seeking to implement ambitions of research and innovation with and for broad-based, lasting societal benefit.