Image: Plan International Indonesia, Institute for Sustainable Futures and local research consultant facilitating participatory community mapping with youth in eastern Indonesia for inclusive climate-resilient WASH. Credit: Jeremy Kohlitz.
In the face of a pandemic, where individuals and societies are stretched to their limit, the place of research to inform and support positive change is critical. However, research that is extractive, focused on participants as ‘subjects’ and aims to publish findings in high-ranking journals to the benefit of northern researchers’ careers does not fit the bill. Ethics must be our guiding light. Not just in the narrow sense of avoiding potential harm to specific participants in data collection as required by typical research ethics approval processes, but as the very basis of any research initiative and the contribution it sets out to make.
Now more than ever, our research questions, research design and research influence must be aligned with the priorities and demand of the country contexts in which we work. There is no place to waste the time and the scant resources of participants and stakeholders on questions developed in the minds of researchers divorced from local context, or based solely on researchers’ interests. Rather, the origins of research questions ideally come from individuals and organisations working to create positive social and institutional change while embedded in their context. RDI Network’s previous study on research impact identified key facilitators of research impact, one of these was lasting engagement: ongoing engagement and continuity of relationships, which gives familiarity with local issues, actors, questions and concerns. It is from this familiarity that research must be built. The ethical principle of ‘beneficence’ must surely mean that benefits from the research must be realised through actualised research impact.
Within our practice at ISF-UTS, we have taken steps over the past decade to improve our practice in impact and ethics, and in these ‘COVID times’ we feel they are even more important than ever. We have further to go, that is for certain. But we take this opportunity of disruption and reflection offered by a halt to our familiar travel routines to stop and consider where we’re at and where we might go next in our approaches, as well as which broader sector dynamics and funding arrangements might need to change to better accommodate new practices.
Our first reflection is on the importance of ensuring prospective users of research have early input and ownership, are engaged throughout, and that where needed, we proactively facilitate ‘research translation’ activities to assist uptake and use of findings. Wherever possible, we elicit priorities and questions of expected users at the time of research conception, or even before. For instance, when we applied for funding for the DFAT Water for Women Fund, we shared a breadth of different ideas with civil society organisation partners, they chose where their organisational interests lay, and we followed that lead. In many other instances our clients are the direct users of research they commission from us, and sometimes we are engaged as ‘learning partners’, which supports co-design and co-production of research or analysis processes. For example, we have a decade-long partnership with SNV Development Organisation where they drive the research agenda and we jointly produce outputs based on new thinking, reflections on practice, analysis and synthesis of their monitoring, evaluation and learning data or tailor-designed research studies. Another strategy we have started to adopt to engage prospective users, is facilitated ‘research translation’ processes, beyond written outputs. In these processes we step into the shoes of our partners or clients and enter their world, to identify together the potential concrete changes and actions that are meaningful on the basis of research findings, and fit realistically within their existing directions and resourcing. For instance, with Plan International and the East Meets West Foundation, we workshopped their program approaches, reflecting on the research findings to develop new actions. And in recent research with subnational governments in Indonesia, we have built in ‘response workshops’ to the research process, to jointly review findings on climate and sanitation and come up with actionable strategies. Given COVID, in current and future projects, we are making sure we employ these strategies to engage research users remotely, as a substitute for face-to-face engagement. We are also expanding our skills in online collaborative engagement, creatively using the many tools at hand (Jamboard, Miro, Google, PowerPoints etc.)
A second reflection is about our own ‘theory of change’ in terms of our role as transdisciplinary researchers with intentions to contribute to long-term social impact and environmental change. In our research, we attempt to address societal issues and injustices that may require slow and long-term change. This could potentially be at odds with the idea of short-term research impact, so we need strategies that work stepwise to create change that progress towards a long-term vision. For instance, in a recent research project on climate change, gender and social inclusion and water and sanitation, we formed a team of researchers from engineering, environmental science, social science backgrounds, since tackling the issue from only one research perspective would be incomplete, and less likely to result in sustainable long-term change. We also worked through an NGO-research partnership and supported research uptake through developing practical outputs as well as guidance and support for piloting and implementing them. Another way we keep in mind a long-term view, is to continue working in the same country and sector contexts such that sequences of projects, engagements and capacity building efforts, including with local research institutions, might contribute to longer-term impact and change. All of this takes a bit more thinking in the context of COVID, when we can’t travel to continue to build the trustful relationships that are needed for this long-term approach, so we are using this time to reflect on and refine our strategies and engagement approaches.
A third and final reflection is about the importance of seeing ethics as more than ethics about data collection and risk of harm to research participants. If we look at ethical research principles carefully – they include research integrity and beneficence (in short, providing benefit) – how can we genuinely uphold these principles within and beyond a research process in a development context? Immediately questions arise about who research serves, the importance of localisation in research practice, and choice of methods and approaches that best facilitate learning and transformation. Changed practice might entail more transformative research practice, moving away from assigning research participants roles as ‘research subjects’, and instead they would be given an active part in shaping research studies and guiding their own transformation. It also might mean even bigger questioning of what is ‘knowledge’ from different perspectives and well beyond Western research frameworks. We certainly have further to go in this area. As a first step, we are trying to get better at facilitating feedback on findings to research participants, either via our development partners, or directly, for instance, through validation workshops (a practice we’ve employed across multiple projects). In another example, our team shared the results of a government-commissioned water quality study with community members, so they were better informed of the safety of their household water sources, not just the local and national government, who is our main research partner on the study.
As a closing note, it’s one thing to look at how we can be intentional about changing our team’s practices in these areas. It’s another to consider how the sector at large could incentivise these types of practices going forward, both within the context of COVID and beyond. Some of the implications are that funding arrangements for research need to better consider ethics and impact as part of commissioning research or grant calls, taking a holistic view of both. Another concerns the ethical approval processes in research institutions, which need to shift to broaden their focus beyond protection of participants in data collection to encompass a wider definition of ‘research integrity’ and ‘beneficence’ that incorporates and monitors research uptake, use and impact and commitment to follow-through by researchers. Lastly, funding arrangements that promote longevity of research engagement in particular contexts or sectors and draw on a breadth of different research disciplines are critical for supporting the long-term processes needed to facilitate larger-scale evidence to impact cycles.
