New Zealand’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) rapidly implemented a major restructuring of national scientific research funding in 2012–13. The “National Science Challenges” (NSC) initiative aims to promote greater commercial applications of scientific knowledge, reflecting ongoing neoliberal reforms in New Zealand. These researchers analysed the texts of MBIE documents about the NSC from 2012–14, materials circulated by Māori researchers in the blogosphere in 2014, and data from ethnographic interviews conducted in 2013 with 17 Māori health researchers working in university-based research centers, government agencies, or independent consultancies. Through 2013, NSC rhetoric and practice moved to marginalise participation by Māori researchers, in part through constructing “Māori” and “science” as essentially separate arenas – yet at the same time the NSC appeared to recognise and value culturally distinctive forms of Māori knowledge. Māori health researchers contested this “neoliberal multiculturalism” by reasserting the validity of culturally distinctive knowledge, strategically appropriated NSC rhetoric, and marshalled political resources to protect Māori research infrastructure. The paper holds that by foregrounding scientific knowledge production as an arena of contestation over neoliberal values and priorities and scrutinising how neoliberalising tactics can include moves to acknowledge cultural diversity, new questions arise for social scientific study of global trends toward reconfiguring the production of knowledge about health.
