Bruce Small

• Doctor of Psychology
• Researcher at Cognosis Social Research

Reports on Aotearoa New Zealand's research, science, and innovation (RSI) system suggest the sector could improve its social responsibility and create more social value. However, researchers and innovators within the sector find this challenging. Through qualitative interviews and a national survey of RSI system participants, this study explores th...

Biosecurity is essential to protect against the negative effects of non-native invasive species. As part of the government’s ‘Biosecurity 2025’ Initiative to enlist all New Zealanders as biosecurity risk managers, Tauranga Moana has been named the ‘biosecurity capital’ of New Zealand. The initiative will involve large-scale citizen science, for rep...

The Primary Innovation programme investigated co-innovation to solve complex agricultural problems in five New Zealand primary sector projects. The projects engaged diverse stakeholders using a collaborative, integrative process to co-define problems, and co-create and implement solutions. Each project included a Reflexive Monitor, who facilitated...

For the past decade, collaboration has been the preferred method of devising land and water policy in Aotearoa New Zealand to achieve agreed outcomes. However, the use of collaboration in policymaking is at a crossroads, as some argue it is unrealistic to expect stakeholders and tangata whenua with competing interests to work in partnership on cont...

Measuring biosecurity perceptions, awareness and behaviour: A New Zealand case study Tauranga Moana has been named the ‘biosecurity capital’ of New Zealand, as part of the government’s ‘Biosecurity 2025’ Initiative to enlist all New Zealanders as biosecurity risk managers. This will involve large-scale citizen science, for reporting, eradication an...

The socio-environmental challenges the world faces are ‘swamps’: situations that are messy, complex, and uncertain. The aim of this paper is to help disciplinary scientists navigate these swamps. To achieve this, the paper evaluates an integrative framework designed for researching complex real-world problems, the Integration and Implementation Sci...

Monday's failure: forgot research's place Tuesday's failure: just wanted a face Wednesday's failure: a product of pressure Thursday's failure: a boundary by Escher Friday's failure: was too loving and giving Saturday's failure: worked too hard for a living And the project conceived on the 7 th day was happy and faultless and without a delay....

Collaborative policy-making has increased in New Zealand, and with it has brought new demands for supporting research. As a tool for reflection of projects where both research and societal outcomes of policy and practice change are pursued and multiple knowledges are recognised, we use the Integration and Implementation Sciences framework. We prese...

Monday’s failure: forgot research’s place Tuesday’s failure: just wanted a face Wednesday’s failure: a product of pressure Thursday’s failure: a boundary by Escher Friday’s failure: was too loving and giving Saturday’s failure: worked too hard for a living And the project conceived on the 7th day was happy and faultless and without a delay. This a...

Innovation platforms (IPs) that support agricultural innovation to enable transition processes towards more sustainable agriculture provide a space where conflicts of interest among actors in the existing agricultural system (the so called incumbent regime) may play out. Sometimes these conflicts over how actors will benefit from an action are not...

Abstract: Ten Australians and one New Zealander provide reflections on the influence of Julie Thompson Klein’s work on and in inter- and trans- disciplinarity. Even taking into account that this article is based on a small number of contributions from only one corner of the world, the reflections demonstrate the influence of a diverse array of Klei...

The world needs to produce more food, more sustainably, on a planet with scarce resources and under changing climate. The advancement of technologies, computing power and analytics offers the possibility that ‘digitalisation of agriculture’ can provide new solutions to these complex challenges. The role of science is to evidence and support the des...

Reflexive monitors (RMs) have been found to be vital to the success of co-innovation projects. While the practices utilized by RMs have been examined in various contexts, we examine the roles they have played in a new cultural context in New Zealand (NZ) and how it has been possible to embed these roles in a diverse range of innovation projects in...

The handbook is not intended to provide a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Instead, throughout the handbook we have provided practical and relevant guidance, shaped by people who have worked as reflexive monitors in the Primary Innovation programme. It is designed to provide a New Zealand centred companion document to the pioneering work of van Mierlo...

The Collaboration Lab research programme is focused on the "Our" part of Our Land and Water National Science Challenge. Adversarial processes have dominated allocation and consent applications, leading to stalemate and inaction (Small et al., 2013). Land and water regulations are based on a linear input of science into policy (OECD, 2009; Weible et...

p>Reflexive monitors (RMs) have been found to be vital to the success of co-innovation projects. While the practices utilized by RMs have been examined in various contexts, we examine the roles they have played in a new cultural context in New Zealand (NZ) and how it has been possible to embed these roles in a diverse range of innovation projects i...

The sustainability and resilience of rural communities in New Zealand in the face of changing circumstances and conditions is gaining increasing media and academic attention with trends towards, and prediction of, rural decline. New and emerging digital technologies are an important driver of global change, offering both opportunities for, and thre...

In New Zealand, local governments are tasked with both sustainably managing natural resources and supporting adoption of practices and technologies for environmental outcomes. Unfortunately, farmers in New Zealand lack trust in advice on environmental performance provided by local governments. Hence, local governments may seek to partner with other...

Reflexive monitors (RMs) are vital to the success of co-innovation approaches in Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) projects. While the practices utilised by RMs have been examined in various contexts, links between their roles and the theoretical frameworks they straddle is limited. This paper will address this gap in terms of explaining the cas...

An Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) approach is currently being used to determine whether the adoption of agricultural innovations in New Zealand can be enhanced. Important elements of the innovation systems approach include the participatory application of a co-innovation process, for example inclusiveness and a focus on transformative change,...

This study provides empirical evidence of the link between outlook and practice among farmers, foresters, and growers in New Zealand. Specifically, we use a large, nationally representative survey to assess how foci on production and environmental outcomes influence the adoption of six good management practices aimed at increasing agricultural sust...

There is an increasing need for research organisations conducting applied research to change from a traditional linear approach to extension to a more collaborative model. This paper outlines how AgResearch (the Crown Research Institute for New Zealand’s pastoral industry) is focusing on partnering with next-users to deliver research outcomes to th...

This 2004 conference paper describes important aspects of computers and the Internet as they related to rural New Zealanders. We focused on answering four questions, i.e. 1) do rural New Zealanders have access to computers and the Internet; 2) what are their attitudes towards computers and the Internet; and 3) towards using those; and 4) what do th...

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research teams are becoming an increasingly common approach to dealing with complex or wicked problems, and for developing public policy to deal with such issues. Transdisciplinary projects generally have a research team charged with the integration of a range of different scientific disciplines and the local...

A recently implemented research and development (R&D) programme in New Zealand is attempting to implement co-innovation principles throughout the country's agricultural sector. It is based on an agricultural innovation systems (AIS) approach, using five innovation platforms (IPs) based in the leading industries, plus a national-level IP. This paper...

A recently implemented research and development program; Co-learning and Coinnovation to Achieve Impact in New Zealand’s Biological Industries (Primary Innovation for short) aims to stimulate innovation in the New Zealand agricultural sector, which is an important contributor to the New Zealand economy, mainly through exports. The program is attemp...

In this paper we describe an approach, which involves inclusive participation by a wide range of community stakeholders, policy makers, and an interdisciplinary science team. This approach can be used to enable communities to take an active role in, and contribute to, the management of natural resources. This process is based on participatory delib...

www.i2sconference.org

The exploratory study aimed to understand the range of community responses to three pest eradication technologies proposed for use in New Zealand and to examine community perceptions of past incursion responses, with the aim of improving future responses. Qualitative techniques were used to elicit information from a small group of people selected f...

Tools that incorporate information from different disciplines can greatly assist policy development of today's complex and interconnected issues and result in more informed decision-making. Over the past years the councils of the Waikato region in New Zealand have, in collaboration with several research organisations, developed an Integrated Spatia...

LCA is the evaluation of all environmental impacts of a function (product or service) on natural capital, human health and resource use. However, current sustainability definitions are considerably broader in both environmental and social aspects than is commonly treated in LCA. The egg of sustainability model which places ontological priority on t...

Key to implementing a sustainable development approach is the ability to build and act on knowledge integrated across social, cultural, economic and environmental issues in space and time. This knowledge can be sourced in many forms from a range of people and the acceptability of the resulting conditions deliberated by a number of affected stakehol...

Better integrated knowledge of coupled ecological-socio-economic systems can assist regional policy development and planning in moving towards sustainable development by assessing the viability of those systems to meet the needs of current and future generations. Developing models that will yield such integrated knowledge poses significant challeng...

Land-use in New Zealand poses risks to water quality in streams and lakes, yet there have previously been few tools used in New Zealand to predict the effects of land-use change at catchment to national scale. The CLUES spatial decision support system has been developed recently to assist with the assessment of land-use change on water quality, far...

Spatial decisions support systems (SDSS) are integrated frameworks designed to help explore weakly-structured or unstructured problems characterised by many actors, many possibilities, and high uncertainty. In principle an SDSS represents an ideal tool to support long-term integrated planning for sustainable development In practice SDSS development...

The political imperative of increasing commercialization of science is frequently viewed as contributing to a problem of public mistrust in science. One proposed solution, favored in political circles, is increased public engagement and participation in the science agenda. This study aims at exploring and explaining scientists' responses to calls f...

Sustainability models are analysed and the ontological relationship between the dimensions of sustainability are discussed. A sustainable values framework generated from some New Zealand research is presented. The focus is then narrowed predominantly to social sustainability and technological development. It may be argued that in democratic societi...

In considering social, economic and ecological impacts of new technologies it is essential to start from an understanding of human nature. This paper explores this issue drawing out some implications for ecological and neoclassical economics.The paper presents two key arguments. First, we argue that there is a growing tension between our evolved hu...

Understanding the likely market response to the products of genetic engineering is crucial to their success. Views of a random selection of the public were obtained for a hypothetical milk product derived from cows genetically modified to produce a compound giving consumers protection from gastroenteritis or food poisoning. Approximately 55% of the...

What is the relationship between biotechnology employees' beliefs about the moral outcomes of a controversial transgenic research project and their attitudes of acceptance towards the project? To answer this question, employees (n=466) of a New Zealand company, AgResearch Ltd., were surveyed regarding a project to create transgenic cattle containin...

An assessment was undertaken of the attitudes of individuals within the science community towards a program to produce genetically modified cattle for altered milk composition, expectantly allowing for research into the treatment of multiple sclerosis in humans. The majority of respondents to an electronic survey expressed favorable attitudes to th...

by author(s). Readers may make copies of this document for non-commercial purposes only, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.

Cross-species genetic engineering is considered in order to examine the rights and responsibilities of science in society. A distinction is drawn between two principle types of argument that dominate the debate; intrinsic and extrinsic arguments. The paper focuses primarily on intrinsic arguments claiming these to be primary. Intrinsic arguments co...

Criterion‐related validities and inter‐rater reliabilities for structured employment interview studies using situational questions (e.g. “Assume that you were faced with the following situation … what would you do?”) were compared meta‐analytically with studies using past behaviour questions (e.g. “Can you think of a time when … what did you do?”)....

Focus groups were held with high achieving New Zealand Farmers in four pastoral sectors: sheep, dairy, deer and beef. First, data were gathered regarding the reasons for farmers looking to adopt new technology and strategies for intensification of production. Next, potential technologies for adoption in each sector were identified. Finally, farmers...

Every extension strategy, like the actions of individual extension staff, reflects particular world views about the nature of knowledge and truth. These worldviews become the (usually) hidden assumptions about why we are doing extension, and why we prefer particular methods or approaches over others. Extension has a long heritage in science, and ap...

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc. Psychology)--University of Waikato, 1996. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-128)