What are the emerging trends in development studies and ethic?​

Explanation:

Development studies has an ethical or normative

point of departure – it seeks change or to ‘do

good’, thus it intervenes in the lives of others often

claiming to know what is good for ‘the Other’.

z Development studies involves work with research

participants at completely different levels of

social/economic/political/cultural power to the

researcher.

z Development studies addresses sensitive issues –

war, corruption, inequality, HIV/AIDS, poverty

generally, to name but a few.

z Development studies is cross-cultural and crossdisciplinary – so whose ethics count? Do

researchers give preference to universal principles

(even if concepts such as the primacy of the

individual are ‘alien’ concepts in the context in

which they are working) or to local principles

(even if contradictory to researcher’s personal

notions of social justice or equality)?

In spite of our growing awareness of this complexity,

development studies as a field of enquiry has yet to

explore fully many of the ethical dilemmas raised by

doing research in developing countries. This is

surprising, perhaps, given that many researchers come

to development studies with a strong sense of social

justice and given the recent rise in interest in ethics in

social science generally. That said, some constituent

disciplines of development studies have been far more

reflective than others. As Brown et al. (2004: 4) put it:

It is fair to say that there is a notable paucity of

literature that deals specifically with the ethical

dimensions of social science in developing

contexts… Of the few disciplines to more directly

reflect on these issues, anthropology has been

engaged in sustained debate, especially since the

early 1970s. With a few notable exceptions very

little from within quantitative social science has

been published on the ethical difficulties

presented by the methodological complexities of

underdeveloped regions since … the early 1980s.

Often ethical dilemmas in research are ‘sanitised’ and

rarely appear in final research outputs. However, it is

not as if researchers in development studies are short

of guidance. Development studies has a plethora of

ethical guidelines to choose from: each constituent

discipline in development studies can offer one. Most

funders have one (take for example the UK Economic

and Social Research Council), many universities have

their own guidelines or committees by which

research must be approved. But what about the

ethics and perspectives of participants and the

communities in which research is conducted? One

issue is whether guidelines simply serve to protect the

researcher from legal challenge rather than address

deeper concerns about recipro

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