A big new brief is out. It examines the historical paradigms that led to the set up of New Zealand's unique research system, and how they suggest opportunities to initiate self-organising transformation.

 

Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways Green Paper seeks a major transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand’s research, science and technology (RS&T) system and places ‘prioritisation’ at the head of its consultation process. Work to date has found that prioritisation is the most challenging topic, yet one that can provide a powerful test of whether proposed changes in all other categories can transform Aotearoa New Zealand’s research system as desired. This work analyses the potential to use more effective prioritisation as a target for transformational and feasible reform by sequentially applying frameworks identified by Meadows and Ostrom, to prioritise interventions in systems and manage common pool resources, respectively. The analysis identifies how to reframe the historic paradigms driving reform to prioritise and maximise the appropriation of well-being benefits of RS&T expenditure within Aotearoa, using an ‘NZ inc’ perspective. The analysis supports reframing and managing the nation’s RS&T institutions, infrastructure and funding as a common resource pool.

Access and contribute to the community we've set up on Zenodo. The DOI repository system allows briefs to be shared, discussed and cited as modular components of submissions.

https://zenodo.org/communities/tearapaerangi

This is a joint effort of Te Pūnaha Matatini and NZAS.

Let's do better than this cartoon. We can choose to understand complexity, and use it to design the future of our research system.