Paper short abstract:

We share our experiences of censorship in evaluation research, reflecting on what our experience reveals about the changing meaning of 'informed consent'. Legalistic approaches to ethics extend protections to organizations, challenging social scientists' ability to protect the public interest.

Paper long abstract:

In a Viewpoint recently published in the medical journal The Lancet, we shared our experience of censorship in evaluation research for global health. During our ethnographic policy research into donor-funded NGOs' efforts to influence reproductive health policy in several countries in Africa and Asia, the NGOs issued "concerns" to our university ethics committee that we had not followed appropriate procedures for obtaining informed consent. Moreover, in a coordinated move, three individuals retroactively withdrew consent for using their specific contributions in our research. In this paper, we reflect on what our experience reveals about the changing meaning of 'informed consent' and research ethics more broadly. In particular, we analyse how increasingly formalized research ethics and governance frameworks promote a legalistic approach to research ethics, and serve to extend protections intended for vulnerable individuals to powerful organizations. This tendency, we argue, not only challenges the independence of research, but may also undermine the critical role of social science research in questioning social, economic and political structures and processes and protecting the public interest.