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Themed article
Marijn Faling is Associate Professor of Private-sector Engagement in Development at ISS
Towards societal engagement:
‘Ethics work’ in action research
T
he importance of closer connections between science and society is increasingly recognized, in the Netherlands as well as abroad. Examples are manifold. EUR’s Strategy 2024 ‘Creating Positive Societal Impact: The Erasmian way’, presents societal engagement as central to addressing contemporary societal challenges. Societal engagement is believed to benefit science in different ways. Facilitating dialogue among stakeholders such as policymakers, citizens, business and civil society may help to disclose ambiguities and the conflicting needs of stakeholders, while engaging them in the co-creation of knowledge. This allows science to incorporate differing and often excluded views, manage confrontations and seemingly incompatible tensions, and make sense of complex situations (Alvarez-Pereira, 2019). As such, it is believed that science is better able to contribute to addressing pressing challenges such as climate change, poverty, displacement and conflict. One way to embed societal engagement in research practices is through action research. Action research relates to ‘a participatory process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes. It seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people’ (Reason & Bradbury, 2008:4). It challenges researchers to invest in reciprocal relations with stakeholders and engage in unpredictable learning processes.
Besides placing specific demands on researchers, due to its interactive and collaborative nature, action research is characterized by certain specific ethical considerations. It is a normative endeavour, founded on ideals such as mutual learning and social inclusion, with the principle of beneficence as its ethical starting point. While it is a moral responsibility of the researcher towards action research participants to explicitly incorporate ethical considerations in research practice, it also helps to safeguard the reliability and integrity of science and may facilitate protecting and maintaining healthy relations among action research participants. However, simply capturing ethics in protocols is usually insufficient, because this overlooks the dynamic and messy ways in which ethical issues tend to emerge throughout the research process. Rather, ethical considerations require continuous attention and tailormade approaches once they reveal themselves. To emphasize the everyday and situated nature of ethics, and based on my own experiences with action research, I refer to the incorporation of ethical considerations as ‘ethics work’ (Abma, 2020). I identify four points of attention when engaging in ethics work. I hope these contribute to a dialogue, so that the collective journey towards more societal engagement remains mindful of ethical considerations. The issues I identify here are loosely based on Davidson et al. (2021) and Abma (2020) and illustrate some of my own struggles with ethics work.
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The first point is collaboration. Action research fundamentally requires collaboration to ensure that actions proposed are acceptable to those involved. Research activities may bring forth significant costs for participating actors or may lead to tensions among participants. Therefore, to facilitate a smooth and fair process, the researcher has to give up their – privileged – position of control over the research. This requires the researcher to accommodate the wishes and needs of research participants, while simultaneously safeguarding quality standards of academic research. The researcher thus needs to navigate in ways so that activities are accepted by all participants. This is not always easy. Once, a colleague and I introduced a theoretical framework we considered suitable to track the development impact of a partnership. Although we sensed hesitation from the participating business and civil society partners, they accepted the framework and we continued working with it. Throughout the process we experienced how partners failed to embrace the framework, most likely because the underlying view of what development entails was not shared by all parties. We ultimately did not manage to create ownership of the framework with the partners, who neglected it in their own activities such as annual reporting.
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The second point is competence. Action researchers have a duty to develop cognitive competence regarding the social and historical context of the research in question. Even more so than in other research approaches, the action researcher needs to invest in