Message from Academy Chair
Professor Charlotte Macdonald shares her foreword as Chair of the Academy Executive Committee.
How might we reimagine our research, science and innovation sector for the 2020s and 2030s?
As many of you will already be aware, this is the question posed in the Green Paper, Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways, released by MBIE on 28 October and open for consultation until 2 March 2022.
Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways sets out a number of questions across six broad areas. I would like to take this opportunity to invite all members of the Academy to look at the discussion document, to consider and discuss its possibilities over the summer and to contribute to the sector’s future with a submission.
Two themes that stand out strongly in Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways are connectivity and research priorities.
Connectivity is stressed as something we might do more of, and that we can benefit from. In a small and highly inter-linked society such as Aotearoa New Zealand (where it is often said there are only one or two rather than the usual six degrees of separation between any two people) it might seem surprising to note that we suffer from a ‘connection’ deficit. Yet we know that within our subject areas, our professional associations and informal networks, our everyday working patterns, and our funding channels, we can become limited by staying within familiar habits and grooves.
When do we have reason to reach across the corridor, the campus, from laboratory to policy group, from fieldwork to business? And what is it that prompts that reach to people, places and what we don’t know? Where else might we look for fruitful partnership and collaboration?
Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways proposes the development of ‘a single set of system level priorities’ for the research system. It notes a current weakness for the sector and for government as its key funder, in a ‘cluttered and fragmented’ research landscape.
In proposing a set of overarching Research Priorities: Ngā Whakaarotau Rangahau, the paper asks specific questions about the design of such priorities, decisions about what and who would determine such priorities, and how such priorities would be operationalised and implemented.
While we can readily identity a set of national research priorities in 2021 – Covid and decarbonisation amongst them – how many of us would have identified these three years ago? How certain can we be in predicting our future through predetermined priorities? Clearly, there is a balance to be struck between shaping a future we want and can see as central to the work of our research, science and innovation sector, and protecting ourselves in a future which contains large measures of uncertainty.
The Research Priorities: Ngā Whakaarotau Rangahau is but one part of the Green Paper but it is one that we, as members of the Academy, could contribute to very directly and productively as research specialists.
I would invite you all to take time to consider the futures set out in Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways, and to imagine the best possible sector Aotearoa New Zealand might foster.
As you do so, I also want to wish you season’s and summer greetings at the turn of another year that has brought us more of the unexpected.
Charlotte Macdonald FRSNZ
Professor of History