Bob Edlin: Royal Society paper flaunts the Treaty....

......(in call for more govt funding for science) and bats for mātauranga Māori

Only in the past few decades has the Royal Society of New Zealand included the social sciences as an official class of scientific disciplines.

That shift controversially allowed a slew of professional social science organisations to formally affiliate with the society.

Its broader mandate was officially expanded to explicitly include the social sciences and humanities in 2010 and the expansion was permanently encoded into law through an update to the Royal Society of New Zealand Act in 2012

The society no longer was exclusively focused on physical, technical, and life sciences but became a national academy for research, humanities, and social inquiry.

To what effect?

We get a fair idea from a new paper titled Threats to Research Funding in New Zealand: building a stable, forward-looking framework for capability, productivity, and national resilience

This is a report from a Working Group of Fellows from the Academy of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (its legal name is the Royal Society of New Zealand but in 2007 Maori elders “gifted” it the Māori name Te Apārangi, or – broadly – “group of experts”).

The report sets out the Academy’s analysis of “pressures on the public research system, alongside a forward-looking pathway for restoring scale, stability, and cross-party support over the coming decade”.

That’s encouraging. It implies the authors have eschewed a backward-looking pathway.

Nevertheless, they have attached great significance to a contentious interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, while making the case for more public funding of science and research.

The treaty does not mention science (nor many other things, come to think of it).

Since it was signed, scientific achievements have included the formulation of the theory of evolution, the development of germ theory and antibiotics, Einstein’s theories of relativity, the discovery of the structure of DNA, the Big Bang theory, and the emergence of modern computing and gene-editing technologies.

That science has been built on a solid foundation – the assertion that the physical laws of nature (such as gravity, evolution, or climate mechanics) cannot be changed by a person’s race or political beliefs.

“The Scientific Method” requires research rigour, peer review, and transparency. This is designed to strip away personal or political bias so that conclusions rest on empirical evidence, not ideology.

True, publicly funded education and research calls for governments to decide how to allocate funds, which generates lobbying and politicking.

The authors of the Royal Society paper are addressing this.

They call for a strategic, sustained, multi-year approach that recognises the vital and irreplaceable contribution of R&D investment to the long-term public interest, and they say this would build upon the opportunities created by recent structural changes.

They further say:

• The problem is long-term. New Zealand has underinvested in R&D for generations. The large gap with the OECD average, let alone that of small, advanced economies, has not narrowed for decades. Moreover, on current policy settings, it is unlikely to close substantially over the coming years. Against this, the balance between public and private R&D investment is in the process of significant change.
• Direct government R&D funding has fallen sharply in real terms and as a share of GDP over many years, with further declines projected over the remainder of this decade. Restoring funding levels to previous peaks, let alone achieving more ambitious targets, will be challenging fiscally. It will also take time to rebuild and expand the required research capability. A medium-to-long-term funding strategy is thus essential.
• The system has been buffeted by repeated restructuring and shifting policy priorities. Some recent structural consolidations have merit. But they need funding stability and predictability to be fully effective.
• Cross-party agreement on the centrality of research investment is missing. Without it, no multi-decadal strategy can survive electoral cycles. The way forward must therefore address scale, stability, and cross-party support together. In designing an effective research system, various widely accepted principles should guide policy choices, not least the Principles of Freedoms and Responsibility in Science, as advanced by the International Science Council, and the related provisions in the Education and Training Act 2020.

The paper suggests relevant system design principles should include:

• Recognition that there is considerable merit in a pluralistic funding system with a deliberate mix of funding pools, governance arrangements, criteria, and timeframes serving multiple legitimate purposes.
• Recognition that many kinds of research require dedicated, stable, long-term funding (i.e. over decades), including investment in research infrastructure such as specialised facilities, computing, communications networks, databases, archives, and collections.
• Recognition that research often proceeds under significant uncertainty, that many findings are unexpected or serendipitous, and that the commercial potential of fundamental research often becomes visible only after many years.

And then the Treaty is slipped into considerations.

The paper says there must be recognition that current global and local challenges require multidisciplinary research,

“… and therefore broad funding across all academic disciplines, including HASS [humanities and social sciences] and mātauranga Māori”.

More particularly, the paper says there must be recognition

… that the Crown has obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, including sustained support for mātauranga Māori, Māori-led research, and Māori data sovereignty.

PoO suspects there are more than a few people out there who would challenge that statement and counter no, the Crown does not have those obligations.

The paper’s views are fleshed out in a section headed

Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori research

This says:

New Zealand’s research system operates within a constitutional context shaped by Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The funding choices set out in this report therefore have particular implications for Māori, for mātauranga Māori, and for the partnership obligations that are central to the country’s identity.

Academy of the Royal Society Te Apārangi considers that an explicit Te Tiriti lens belongs at the heart of any forward-looking research funding strategy, both as a matter of principle and capability.

The Main Authors of the paper are identified as:

• Emeritus Professor Jonathan Boston. He is an Emeritus Professor of Public Policy in the School of Government at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. For decades, he has been an influential voice on welfare reform, child poverty, and climate change adaptation.
• Anne French, a poet, editor, and strategy specialist.
• Dr Judi Hewitt, a bio-statistician and soft-sediment benthic ecologist (a scientist who studies living organisms within soft substrates like mud, sand, or silt rather than hard rock).
• Professor Nancy November, a Professor of Musicology in the University of Auckland’s School of Music.
• Professor Joanna Kidman, a Māori sociology academic of Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Raukawa descent.

Four of the five main authors are women, which more than rectifies the historical gender imbalance that has favoured men.

One of them is from the domain of music, completing her MA/PhD at Cornell University in 2003 with a dissertation on the aesthetics and reception of Haydn’s string quartets. She also is an award-winning teacher with a research emphasis on culturally sustaining pedagogy (which focuses on how people learn and the theory of teaching, whereas a curriculum outlines what is taught).

Another of the lead authors is a poet, although in 2002, she switched careers from publishing to research funding and worked for the government’s principal research funding agency, the Foundation for Research, Science, and Technology. She later built up her professional practice in research consulting and research development.

PoO wonders whatever happened to the influence of the physicists who followed in the path of Lord Rutherford and the other scientists whose work once was the firm focus of the Royal Society.

Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE.