Implementing Responsible Research and Innovation: From New Public Management to New Public Governance

The European Commission’s pursuit of “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) and its implementation in the European Research Area serve to investigate how ambitious policy goals can be conveyed into action. Challenging about implementing policy is the need to foster coherence in the interpretation of policy goals while coordinating their elaboration in practice. This chapter identifies the European Commission’s approach to implementing RRI as a case of New Public Management, and contrasts this with efforts at ‘bottom-up’ RRI implementation. Experiments with involving researchers and other stakeholders in designing and executing concrete RRI actions that fit their professional setting are understood as manifestations of a New Public Governance approach to implementing RRI policy. It is found that such deliberation of policy concepts and goals, and their concretization in a context-specific learning-by-doing approach practically enables the uptake of normative policy ambitions in networks of interdependent, non-hierarchically related actors across diverse substantive and administrative contexts.