Regional Governance of Responsible Research and Innovation in Norway

To make the results and outcomes from research, development and innovation (RDI) activities conducted in the Norwegian regions compliant with the society's values, public's interests and ethical norms, a proactive governance of those RDI activities is needed. Such a governance approach needs to ensure that RDI activities are transparent to the public, include the public in order to be more reflexive and anticipatory about the ethical aspects, and hence, responsive to the society at large. The project 'Regional Governance of Responsible Research and Innovation in Norway' aims to help four regions in Norway (Troms, Finnmark, Nordland, Trøndelag) towards achieving higher level of responsible research and innovation activities through benefiting from the results gained from the European Commission-funded project RRI2Scale, and transferring the project's results to the above-mentioned four Norwegian regions. For this purpose, the case study conducted within the project exploits the learnings from the RRI2Scale project and provides recommendations for addressing the regional dilemma around the governance of reindeer herding and renewable energy development in the above-mentioned regions.

Within the European context, Norway is widely known as a country in which further development of wind energy powerplants has slowed down significantly over the past few years mainly due to the social resistance from various groups of citizens. Among these, the dilemma around the interests of reindeer herding communities and wind energy companies had been a continuously debated case. The case study conducted within this project builds on the learnings from the European Commission-funded project RRI2Scale (2020-2022), which had 'governance of responsible research and innovation (RRI) at regional scale' at its core, and explores new regional governance approaches to address the mentioned regional dilemma through participatory governance. Besides elaborating on the methodological achievements of the RRI2Scale project (regarding participatory governance) which can eventually be implemented by the concerned regional authorities, the case study provides five distinct recommendations for addressing issues pertaining to different dimensions of regional governance in order to strengthen the RRI approach-driven features of the regional governance in the concerned regions. This is aimed to smoothen the process of implementation of innovative and sustainable (understood in comprehensive terms to include cultural sustainability) energy resources in the country without compromising the rights and interests of local communities.

As a H2020 project, RRI2Scale project mentions facilitating the widespread adoption of its results as the strategic target of its dissemination and exploitation activities. This makes the ambitions of the project perfectly in line with the purposes of the current "NFR Forsterkningsmidler" call. RRI2Scale project considers the following project-related information for dissemination to the project’s target groups: i) vision (objectives, strategic relevance) and key facts; ii) stakeholder engagement ctivities such as regional workshops and co-creation of regional agendas; iii) achievements and recommendations of the project; iv) events to disseminate the results; and v) the key project assets (such as its toolkit, online platform, and Regional Innovation Agendas). The ativities envisaged for the proposed project aim at undertaking the above-mentioned dissemination activities in four other Norwegian Counties (Oslo, Viken, Rogaland, and Trøndelag) in order to explicitly highlight and integrate the principles of RRI in the governance of research, technology development, and innovation activities related to the domains of energy, transport and intelligent city at those Counties. The involvement of the Vestland County Council as a partner in the RRI2Scale project will give the proposed project partners an opportunity to use the experiences from Vestland as a pilot stage for the implementation of the proposed project. In line with the call’s intended areas of support, the proposed reinforcement project plans to disseminate the results from RRI2Scale project in Norway through presenting the results of a case study on responsible governance of reindeer herding in Norway which has been subject of controversy in view of wind energy development in the country.