New Zealand authors: using complexity theory is the only way to achieve equity

Here we have another article in a science journal (Nature Human Behavior, which has published stuff like this before), which says almost nothing, but uses a lot of words to do so. I recognize some of the writers as New Zealand activists, including Priscilla Wehi, first author of a dreadful article in Journal Roy. Soc. New Zealand (JRSNZ) arguing that Polynesians made it to Antarctica in 700 A.D. This is, of course, a Māori-centered article, and Wehi was trying to “empower” her people by making a palpably false claim, one that was later refuted even by Māori scholars. (Note that a couple of authors work in other countries.)

Click to read, or see the pdf here.

I really don’t want to analyze this paper in detail (you can imagine how wearing it is to deal with this stuff for several hours a day), so I’ll sum it up in a few points.

1.) Structural racism has operated in science (indeed, is promoted) by science to keep minorities down. Here’s one sentence:

Science has been described as promoting exclusion and oppression by rewarding those who practice entrenched norms, including individualism, hypercompetition and productivism, and penalizing those who challenge them.

2.) Attempts to solve this problem by creating new organizations and dispensing grant money haven’t been successful.

3.) Of course we still need to keep boosting the Māori through affirmative action and dispensing more money,but the real solution to the problem requires “embracing complexity theory“.

The idea of interconnectedness is an important part of Māori “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM), and article’s point is that making more connections between people and organizations will, in the end, bring equity.

H0w does that work? The authors give a helpful diagram, starting with the fact that birds do better when they fly in flocks than singly (this is “complexity”).The bird point is made in a) below:

The diagram at the bottom, which isn’t all that enlightening (and is also given in Māori, a language not customary in Nature) , argues that poor health outcomes for Māori (“health inequities”) can be solved by the complexity-theory solution diagrammed in (b) above:

In Aotearoa–New Zealand, our health system has also been unsuccessfully grappling with how to address long-standing and increasing inequities. Although these emergent outcomes have been known for decades, and despite targeted policy and resources, our underlying health systems — and thus trajectories of community health and well-being — remain largely unchanged¹².

The whole-of-community systems approach (Fig. 1b) taken by Healthy Families NZ has been described as a game changer in its most recent evaluation report. The initiative makes a strategic move away from fragmented, small-scale and time-limited programmes by supporting existing local action on health, while influencing local and national funding and policies to be more responsive to communities and their diverse contexts (Box 1). Sharing success and failures across the community teams has been key to the initiative’s success, along with fostering a responsive, timely and trusting contractual relationship with the central agency funder.

If you can understand how this works (the caption supposedly will help enlighten you), please explain it in the comments.

At any rate, I’ll close giving the five lessons from “complexity theory” that, say the authors, will help bring equity:

How we act.  This is their explanation of necessary change:

We encourage scientific communities and organizations to identify their shared values and uphold contextually responsive ethical and professional principles. For instance, our approach to research at Te Pūnaha Matatini (a Centre of Research Excellence in Aotearoa–New Zealand) is guided by four principles, which are expressed through a Māori lens. Pono, or a commitment to truth and genuineness, provides the foundation principle to guide both the purpose and practice of our research, and thereby frames the following: tika is to undertake research in ways that are just or right for a given context; and tapu is to do so in ways that recognize the intrinsic value, and rights, of every person and thing. Manaakitanga is to do so in ways that enhance reciprocal relationships of care.

These are taken from MM, and include both moral and technical principles that are often fuzzy (what does it mean to undertake research “in ways that are just or right for a given context”?).

How we lead.  They call for more mentorship and respectful collaboration and trust. That’s fine, but is it either novel or an outcome of complexity theory?

How we resource. What they mean is to incorporate principles of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion into giving money; in other words give more resources to Māori.

How we evaluate others.   The paragraph below suggests getting rid of traditional merit-based evaluation, replacing it with “community-driven approaches to research evaluation” and “narrative-style CVs”, which to me means obscuring traditional indices of scientific merit (scores, grants, publications) by telling a story. (Pardon me for being cynical):

Many institutions and funding schemes — even those designed to address complex intergenerational challenges — still rely on narrow market-based metrics such as publication productivity and journal impact factor to evaluate ‘excellence’. We support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which promotes practical, robust and community-driven approaches to research evaluation. DORA’s recommendations have informed NSERC Canada’s recent guidelines and the widespread introduction of narrative-style CVs, including in Aotearoa–New Zealand. Initiatives such as these can be used to recognize and affirm diverse expertise, societal impact and care work (such as equity work, mentorship, teaching and peer support) in promotions, hiring and funding decisions.

How we evaluate ourselves. This seems to me to be a long-winded way of saying “adopt the principles of DEI”:

We encourage reflexivity when performing relational duties of care. We urge scientific communities, organizations and funding bodies to recognize diverse histories; to investigate how funding and authority are distributed; to attend to qualitative and quantitative data about why people enter, leave and remain in the science system; and to evaluate and adapt policies accordingly. In general, ongoing reflection on how we are situated in relation to others in the science community — including the purpose and consequences of our work — will help to navigate real-world complexity in ways that are consistent with our principles, and which support the messy work of ‘getting along’ in just ways.

When I got to this point I was getting burned out, for that paragraph (and the entire paper) looks to me like a lot of abstract language about justice and equity without any concrete proposals save “give more power to the indigenous people.”  And even if that were the solution to unequal representation, you don’t need “complexity theory” to implement it.  What the authors seem to have done is appropriate technical language as just a different way of indicting New Zealand for systemic racism, but beyond that add very little of substance. I’m again chagrined that a respectable journal would publish this stuff, but what editor would dare refuse it? What they would refuse to publish is a critique of the authors’ arguments. There is no social-justice paper about STEM so dreadful that a journal will refuse to publish it.

Oh, I forgot to put the authors’ closing challenge:

Our challenge: