Ethical Issues

Ethical Issues

Fieldwork in developing countries and/or with marginalised people can give rise to a plethora of ethical dilemmas, many of which relate to power gradients between the researcher and the researched. Combined with this are complex issues of knowledge generation, ownership and exploitation. Ethical issues which arise in relation to cross-cultural situations thus need to be considered and questioned seriously by all scholars pondering fieldwork in the developing world, and ethical principles should in turn inform all stages of research, from the inception of a research project through to writing up results.

However, for many graduate students in particular, ‘ethics’ has come to be equated with a gruelling test to write an ethics proposal acceptable to the powers that be within their university. This is not what ethics is fundamentally about. Doing ethical research in a foreign or cross-cultural setting, as indicated by the starting quote for this chapter, requires building mutually beneficial relationships with people you meet in the field and acting in a sensitive and respectful manner. There is also a moral imperative which should inform Development Studies research (Sumner, 2007). As Madge asserts, ‘ethical research should not only “do no harm”, but also have potential “to do good”, to involve “empowerment”’(1997: 114). Corbridge (1998: 49) similarly argues that the interdependencies of the world economy mean that those [Page 161]of us who are privileged should be ‘attentive to the needs and rights of distant strangers’. Furthermore, he suggests that Development Studies scholars have an obligation to inform development practice, specifically, ‘to provide plausible alternatives to existing social arrangements or patterns of development’ (Corbridge, 1998: 42).

In this chapter, we explore the typical principles under which university ethics committees operate, before moving on to explore a much wider range of ethical issues likely to present themselves to students in the field, including questions of who sanctions one's research, balancing the expectations of different stakeholders, reciprocity, deception and the dilemmas associated with sexual relationships in the field. These warnings should not, however, necessarily deter researchers from engaging in development fieldwork. As noted in Chapter 1, there can be many benefits from cross-cultural research and there are ways to do research in a responsible manner and to avoid harming our research participants.