On tīkarokaro and Pākehā science
Why current science policy fails Māori & non-Māori. Open-ended complex public-good science is all too often, outside policy scope.
I often reflect on Rereata Makiha’s advice in E-Tangata that tamariki and mokopuna should
‘not get distracted by the Pākehā science, which is based on tīkarokaro, or pulling things apart.’
Rereata was speaking to the wisdom and insight that arises from observation of the tohu of the taiao — the signs of the environment. These signs, or events – such as the start of a rainfall, flowering or foraging season over time formed patterns and data. This ancestral knowledge is referred to as the maramataka, the Māori calendar.
Pākehā science … which is based on pulling things apart.
In Aotearoa New Zealand tīkarokaro culture is embedded in longstanding Western approaches to the management and funding of our research, science and innovation (RSI) system. Tīkarokaro culture threads through our science funding policies, shapes greater government policy and pervades regulatory systems. It means that our science advice systems lag in identifying harm, and frequently fail to identify complex, systemic risks.
And we are the poorer for it.
Science systems are a product of the societies, cultures and powerful interests that shape them. Because RSI is resource intensive and expensive, RSI is all too often harnessed to suit the strategic ends of powerful institutional actors.
The hyper-competitive nature of funding systems means that cautious funding committees’ default to safe, understandable forms of science, likely to bring a return on investment. Hypercompetitive environments favour, all too often, males that don’t leave for child-rearing purposes (therefore publishing more frequently); and encourage a pressure to publish that might be linked to science’s current reproducibility crisis. These shifts have research in applied science.
Basic and interdisciplinary science research has stagnated or declined while applied research has increased. Basic science is important, as broader scientific discovery provides the jumping off points for further endeavour. Often the drivers of human health and environmental harm have political and social roots, yet somehow, decision-making is presented as ‘apolitical’. Folks, it’s political.
TIKANGA MAORI
Inserted into our laws is a space for Mātauranga Māori
‘Māori knowledge’. Within this a body of knowledge originating from Māori ancestors are Māori world views, values and perspectives, Māori creativity, and cultural practices and recognition of the inter-related connectedness between all life forces, both those seen and unseen with the human eye.
Professor Hirini Moko Mead’s book Tikanga Māori on customary Māori law emphasises that Tikanga Māori is a part of, or embedded in Mātauranga Māori. Tikanga Māori comprises of social and customary norms, but with an ethics-based underpinning. Drawing on a Living Webster, 1973, Mead notes:
‘the Māori ethic, referring in particular to a ‘system of philosophy of conduct or principles practiced by a person or group.’ (p.6)
Legal eagles might be more likely to consider Tikanga Māori as customary Māori law - a
‘body of rules or principles, prescribed by the authority or established by custom, which a state, community, society or the like recognises as binding on its members.’
Mead suggests how Mātauranga Māori and tikanga Māori interact:
‘While Mātauranga Māori might be carried in the minds, tikanga Māori puts that knowledge into practice and adds the aspects of correctness and ritual support. … Tikanga Māori might be described as Māori philosophy in practice and as the practical face of Māori knowledge.’
Tikanga Māori varies with tribal region, and if Mātauranga Māori is to be correctly applied in law, are regional considerations taken into account by government officials? For, Tikanga and Mātauranga Māori were actively suppressed ‘by agencies of the Crown for over a century’.
As P.A. Joseph states (ch.2), tikanga forms part of the broader common law of New Zealand. Tikanga has relevance in informing equity and the common law, but not where applicable legislation “covers the field”, or where it is contrary to statute or to fundamental principles and policies of the law.
ARE MĀORI FAILED TOO?
All the Mātauranga Māori inserted to laws in the world fails Māori, if central government artfully constructs legislation that prevents officials from being required to establish policy and funding channels for the latest science to understand the drivers of harm in open biological systems, from a section of a river to a child.
When the executive construct Bills as technical statutes that overrides principles and ethics, or maintains guidelines that lock in stated positions, this can not only displace long-standing principles of public law and fail to protect health, but it likely can also over-ride Tikanga Māori.
Is there a deep irony, a pulsing hypocrisy that sits there. Māori can think Mātauranga Māori all they like, as long as they are supporting the status quo which is the existing economically and scientifically approved (by corporate science) reality. That’s why (non-legal) equity narratives return to medical status and hospital numbers, or everyone getting digital identities - not access to whole food and protection of the mauri (life) of freshwater. Where government installed rules and guidelines prioritise technical industry data, prioritise modelling but fail to fund monitoring and epidemiology, and ignore open systems and ignore synergy effects - Māori are screwed too.
You might find the co-governance politically, legally, culturally and sociologically troubling, but I speculate that perhaps most Māori continue to be gamed by the executive as badly as the rest of us. We’re all in this together.
OUTSIDE POLICY SCOPE: MIXTURES & SYNERGIES
Modern technologies can monitor and screen for mixtures of pollutants and conduct in-depth analysis to identify the extent and nature of pollutants (and nutritional deficiencies), in our babies and in our freshwater -and the biomarkers in our bodies and the bodies of native species. Interdisciplinary work is valuable, drawing attention to deeper relationships outside the cultural lens of a single discipline, from understanding hormone disruption to the interconnected drivers of global ecosystem collapse.
If the legislation that states the government is required to ‘protect us’ fails to make a meaningful space for long-term scientific research on such issues - it demonstrates how current policy is failing.
Ignorance creates a domino effect where media, our elected members and the judiciary are also under-equipped, because the knowledge is not there. Increasing pollution and health harm indicate that decision-makers default to what are recognised as Type II errors, where harms are concealed or overlooked rather than Type I errors, where they act too quickly and the harm would not occur.
Why is the precautionary principle out in the cold? Perhaps it has something to do with so little funding for the science that might inform decision-making. It’s too hard for officials faced with big institutions defending their patch, and a paucity of local scientists willing to enter the fray of a courtroom.
I’m not sure that the executive wants to know. At PSGR we were writing before mandates came in about how important food and diet were to immune health, and how Māori and Pasifika were on the frontlines. When consultations were open for the new Medicines Act, the Therapeutic Products Bill we discussed how the state was failing to adhere to the principle of active protection because dietary nutrition continues to be excluded from mainstream health policy. When the Ministry for Business, Economy and Innovation consulted on a new science system, we drew attention to the lack of an overarching purpose, and we recommended that kaitiakitanga, or stewardship, be positioned to help guide policy and funding. We continue to be systematically ignored, along with other citizens and organisations.
DOVETAILING CRISES
There is a dovetailing of twenty-first century crises but some crises are largely silent. By design, funding for policy relevant science is more likely to be granted when it is politically approved (see: climate change and invasive species, not invasive chemical pollutants). When it doesn’t conflict with the large oligopolistic industries that develop and market technologies, and control supply chains, nor contradict long-standing central government policy, it’s ‘apolitical’.
The hands-off approach to human, or Anthropogenically driven non-greenhouse gas harm is happening at the wrong time. The chronic disease syndemic has become a global health catastrophe. Ultraprocessed diets have replaced ancestral diets, through marketing, colonisation, poverty and policies that persistently favour big business.
Escalating pollution and the risks associated with the release of emerging technologies have been under researched, downplayed and under-regulated for decades. Our monitoring, analysis and reporting of risk associated with pollution and the emergent technologies have not kept pace with output. It is human, or anthropogenic activities that drive existential risk, and with changing climates a subset of these risks. Our safe operating space is shrinking, and the production and release of novel entities, ‘new substances, new forms of existing substances and modified life forms’ is vastly out of control.
THREE WAYS WATER IS DEVALUED
Why isn’t there massive funding throughout New Zealand to understand the diffuse emissions that destroy water quality, i.e. reduce the life, or mauri of water? Nope. Here’s three ways freshwater is devalued by the executive: The national standards, aren’t accompanied by compulsory screening for industrial and agricultural chemicals. It’s out of scope. The tīkarokaro National Policy statement is that regional councils have to test for biophysical limits (such as dissolved oxygen, cyanobacteria, ammonia etc), while chemical pollution has been left out of policy for years. Of course water is dying. We don’t have all the data to understand what is present when the biophysical limits go haywire.
Then of course, the New Zealand governments’ environmental accounts don’t measure water quality – only stocks and flows. From local to regional, to central government, water pollution from our technologies – from pharmaceutical emissions in urban waste, to industrial and agrichemical emissions, pollution is fundamentally ignored.
Then there is the brand new Natural and Built Environments Act – where greenhouse, noise and odorous emissions are discussed, but not mixture effects from diffuse emissions from industrial, agricultural and urban sources. No-one is obligated to test for this stuff. That Act cannot address an increasingly contaminated and polluted environment from man-made technologies because there is no clear requirement that those emissions are tested for, monitored and documented over time. (Correct me if I am wrong on this).
They can talk about discharges of contaminants that ascribe to environmental limits until they are blue in the face, but firstly, where is state-led monitoring of pollutant chemicals that can determine what limits they accrue, and where is long term block science funding to understand whether the mixtures at prescribed environmental limits are toxicologically safe or not? How they bioaccumulate in sediment or magnify through the food chain? Whether these mixtures drive antibiotic resistance?
Mātauranga Māori knowledge systems align with a demand that the government take into account mixture effects of chemicals, makes perfect sense when we consider ancestral knowledge and tikanga – because for example, a rāhui will be placed on a dangerous place without knowing at which time a problem will cease to be dangerous.
We could be reading the signs of the environment with monitoring and data - for tech emissions - but' it’s out of scope.
There is a tonne of exciting new technologies that can help us understand how chemical classes, mixtures and synergy effects impact us and our environment – from the molecular scale to the impact on populations when tech is rolled out at scale.
But it is the corporate industry that supply the scientific studies that prove that their technologies are safe.
‘At present the actors with the deepest pockets can buy the science they need, frame issues according to specific agendas and enforce these on the rest of society.’
But our government is not providing the science that might provide a counter-balance to these claims, and our science systems are not keeping up with research that can shed light on the risk of PBT – persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity from non-greenhouse gas emissions.
In a just-released discussion document PSGR argues that without the counter-balance the industry claims are simply propagandistic. The claims are to ensure civil society acquiesces to the next emission, no matter the age and vulnerability of the child.
INTERDISCIPLINARITY & COMPLEXITY LOGICS SHOULD BE NORMAL
Our current siloed science system cannot comprehend open ended biological systems - from the mauri of a single river ecosystem to the environmental and dietary health impacts that drive neurodegenerative decline in a child.
The work being done to observe the tohu of the taiao — the signs of the environment – but using 21st century technology to take account of 21st century pollutant threats that may be far more extensive and problematic right now for New Zealand than the forecast future impact of climate change, which might be overstated (but this is a taboo subject).
Over the last 30 years there has been sustained upwards pressure from emerging technologies which include pesticides, e-waste, microplastics, ultraprocessed food, chemicals, pesticides, radiation and digital technologies. Yet there has not been a parallel research commitment to understanding how these institutional activities, pollution and emerging technologies impact health. Such research is scarce and precariously funded.
Such science would likely accord with principles of Te Tiriti and accord with the values and ethics embedded in Tikanga Māori. But it usually remains undone.
Ignoring indigenous knowledges and sidelining modern interdisciplinary science means policy-makers don’t have to address big issues. They can delay policy that addresses the upstream social and political drivers of harm because there’s no compelling ‘evidence’. Of course, science has always been an instrument of power, because it is resource intensive and because it produces knowledge, which becomes information. Information is usually valuable to someone.
We know that scientists can ‘cope’ with complex interdisciplinary environments, that scientists can identify patterns of complexity that can show harm that might be otherwise brushed over. These scientists work in what has been referred to as ‘post-normal’ environments – where acts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. Post-normal environments of course, are not new.
Indigenous knowledge systems have navigated such environments for millennia. The traversing of oceans, identification of drinking water in dry seasons, planting patterns and foraging routes - these were the original ‘post-normal’ knowledge systems.
Today broad-based work which might disrupt big business, which includes mātauranga Māori research processes, is discounted through the policy funding processes. Scientists who wish to conduct complex interdisciplinary research using state of the art technologies, predictive analytics and statistical techniques, struggle to get funding if there is no ‘innovation’ (a product, process good or service), such as a biomedical patent, treatment or device.
ABSENT: A RESEARCH SYSTEM WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE
Our research, science and innovation (RSI) system lacks an overarching principle that directs our RSI to prioritise science to steward and protect New Zealand. We’ve harnessed RSI to economic growth, under the economic growth Ministry. This has been a directly political shift, as it has removed the autonomy and agency of the RSI enterprise. Economic growth cultures have encouraged public-private partnerships, applied science, and genetic and biomedical science to blossom, dwarfing all other forms of science.
The overarching policies that guide decision-making for science and health research funding are embedded in tīkarokaro mindsets. ‘Excellent’ science is easier to identify if it is produced within a single discipline. This produces barriers to group oriented interdisciplinary scientific research. Current policies reward ‘innovative’ science that can be secured in patentable form.
Contested issues almost always involve debates over activities that are potentially harmful or extractive. These are more than ‘values’ debates, they are social, legal, scientific, ethical and biological debates over extraction and risk. They often involve powerful institutions who have a close relationship with government actors. These institutions have been producing their own ‘evidence’ for decades. It’s time to balance the books against corporate science.
These debates deserve more respect, more investment, and more attention, particularly if we are to protect future generations.
And it is becoming existential. Global systemic risks are mired in pervasive complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity - but the institutional structures and policy processes required to navigate these environments are absent.
As a consequence, there is little space for the often uncomfortable or confronting knowledges that might prioritise health and the environment, protect taonga, maintain sovereignty and digital public-good stewardship. For example, it is certainly very difficult to find an public-sector expert writing in New Zealand media who has the courage to draw attention to the potential for digital identity systems to erode human rights and freedoms.
Not only do these policies silence Māori, they leave publics, scientists and government experts and elected members ignorant and impotent when we convene in the ‘demosphere’ to navigate contested issues.
But when there is no funding scope – both Māori and non- Māori scientists are failed.
OFF GOVERNMENT AGENDAS FOR DECADES
Environmental drivers of health and disease, which are much more common than genetic drivers, have been off government agendas for decades.
In health, funding for physical scientists to research the upstream drivers of multimorbidity is inordinately difficult. Biomarker research to assess the relationship of pesticides with mental health; or research to identify how diets increase risk for hormonally relevant cancers would be outside this scope. As would data analysis that might scientifically analyse the cost of a nutritionally and culturally appropriate diet from conception through to age 18, and the impact on intelligence, behaviour and wellbeing. This data could then feed into policy to ensure that Aotearoa’s workforce is capable and healthy.
In the environmental and agricultural sciences, it has been easier to get megamillions for biotechnological development on ryegrass, than long-term, interdisciplinary funding for scientists and farmers. (It’s not clear where the money goes, from the royalties on the biotechnology patents on food crop ‘investments’.) Databanks could analyse patterns around local soil types, rainfall patterns, resilient food crops and soil quality. Scientists could explore whether (for example) goats represent the most sustainable source of protein in hill country; and aggregate regionally specific data on integrated pest management. This could inform both policy and culture, result in less triazine herbicides in our groundwater. That sort of thing.
In the digital world, interdisciplinary research could consider whether our democracy is robust enough to handle the ‘digital transition’. It is not apparent that technology and data scientists are resourced enough to actively challenge and criticise government policies and digital transitions which might limit public rights and freedoms. Might a transition to digital identity systems, or a cashless society impoverish citizens and lead to abuse of power, either for financial or political gain? Could this happen through Crown activities, or via large contracted offshore providers?
How do we safely integrate digital technologies and keep at a safe distance, predatory institutions that might, oh so naturally, seek to acquire political or financial data through the manipulation of the personal data of the citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand?
There has been no long-term, safe space for research and science that can identify risk to our water and soil from anthropogenic emissions. In a biosolids consultation, which the Ministry for Environment did not lead, dominant groups could be seen to cherry pick data. Biosolids contain heavy metals, microplastics, PFAS and pharmaceuticals. The issue of emerging contaminants were downplayed, ignoring the future cost to farmers and risk to our drinking water.
Work to refresh drinking water standards, similarly, ignored the increasing potential for persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic emerging chemicals to circulate through drinking water systems at hormonally relevant levels.
Why don’t we have scientists researching fluoride emissions from waste-streams and risk to aquatic fauna? How do we discuss risk and 5G or even geo-engineering in open public debate? We don’t, because it’s taboo.
TECHNO-SCIENCE - PUSHING IMPORTANT SCIENCE DOWNSTREAM
Tīkarokaro science is used to delay meaningful regulation of freshwater, biosolids, food and biotechnologies. The science applied to gauge risk, is often outdated and based on tīkarokaro (techo-science) modelling scenarios. It is a function of regulatory agencies, for decades, being decoupled from RSI systems. Regulatory science is more likely to come from global meetings with foreign industry scientists than from any local scientific knowledge. The truth is, we don’t fund local scientists – we don’t provide them with a safe place for long-term monitoring and analysis of relationships between emissions and health, which can then feed back into policy and regulatory systems.
Ministries have appeared to control RSI to suit strategic ends, leaving little place for scientific knowledges that challenge current policy trajectories. The effect – institutional ignorance – results in the machinery of government withdrawing from carrying out due diligence to appropriately inform the Crown, so as to honour Te Tiriti obligations.
This ignorance gap additionally leaves the public, scientists, public servants and the media unable to sufficiently articulate the escalation in risk – be it poverty-related diets, emerging technologies, pollution and new digital technologies – in such a way as to challenge the locked in status quo. This delays our capacity to respond to emerging threats to our health and freedom.
As a non-Māori, I steadfastly believe that Mātauranga Māori, Māori knowledge and ethics systems can harmoniously fuse with the latest science to monitor, research and shed light on why Māori and non-Māori are increasingly sicker and poorer than their ancestors.
Understanding the policy status-quo can shed light on why the COVID-19 response, a massive opportunity to reframe health towards reversal of chronic and mental illness, became unethically centred around a BNT162b injection that could not take account of immune-suppression, nor prevent transmission. It can help us recognise why no bioethics committee was ever convened to question why our youth Māori and non-Māori - should or should not take an injection yet to complete clinical trials.
It would have involved interdisciplinary and values-based discussion. Imagine.
BEHIND IN TECH DEV FOR PUBLIC GOOD
Importantly, the status quo also delays our capacity to not only regulate, but develop game changing technologies that are in global demand. This is because we need not only carrots (funding pathways) but sticks (domestic policy that demonstrate leadership).
Such technologies could substitute harmful products, process pollutants, and extract resources for reintegration back into the circular economy. Modelling systems could see how taxes on processed food could redistribute income to keep domestically grown whole-food prices low for locals (when they are subject to the flux of international pricing). We could finally put real investment in clinical trials to look at how dietary nutrition improves not only metabolic health, immune health, but mental health. Imagine. This is public good creativity. But funding scopes don’t really cover this stuff and this work is expensive, funding is required. It’s ethically bankrupt.
All these reasons, and more, explain why, as a trustee for the Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility (PSGR.org.nz) we submitted to the MBIE that kaitiakitanga become an overarching principle of Aotearoa New Zealand’s research, science and innovation system – and to get our science system outside of the clutches of the economic growth ministry.
Because tīkarokaro science is not even half the story.