Overview

There is a strong push to open Research and Innovation (R&I) processes to broader audiences to achieve several aims, including: promoting inclusion; raising the effectiveness, validity and applicability of (scientific) interventions; creating a better and/or wider evidence-base for policy and decision making; and to more closely align R&I processes with societal needs. This should, in turn, enable R&I to better address highly complex, uncertain, and contested societal challenges that depend on collaborations between science, technology, society, and policy. In this context, Research Funding Organizations (RFOs) play a crucial role. Operating at a regional, national, international and global level, they are responsible for setting R&I agendas and framing topics addressed in calls. They also codetermine the scope, content, direction, outputs, and potential impacts of research.

However, engagement of societal groups in the processes of RFOs, and R&I in a broader sense, can be challenging. Questions we must ask when preparing and implementing stakeholder participation include: What kinds of processes should stakeholders be involved in and how? How do we enable and empower participants to make decisions? How do we choose the right participants and the right processes? How can biases be managed and mitigated? How do we need to care for participants during their involvement? How do we ensure the privacy rights of participants? And how can activities be carried out in line with basic principles and values of research ethics and integrity?

PRO-Ethics was a four-year Horizon 2020 project with the objective of creating and testing an ethics framework, guidelines, and best practice examples to help organizations engage stakeholders while respecting principles of fairness, transparency, equality, privacy, and sustainability. PRO-Ethics used an iterative process implementing participatory pilots and learning loops in a consortium of eight RFOs, five technical partners and two international organizations. While PRO-Ethics had a Pan-European outlook, it incorporated and compared local conditions and other specific and cultural characteristics of the partnering RFOs from Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, Spain, and the Brussels Capital Region, which implemented the PRO-Ethics pilots.