Contribution short abstract:

This paper lays the contours of a decolonial approach to evaluation of climate resilience building interventions aimed at marginalized communities in Northeast Nigeria. It reflexively engages with the question of whether and how this approach was able to shift power for epistemic justice.

Contribution long abstract:

Evaluation of humanitarian and development interventions within Africa have mostly been commissioned, designed and carried out using colonial approaches. This ethically flawed ‘colonized’ approach takes power away from the primary stakeholders in the context. This paper is an analytical reflection on the decolonial approach to evaluation of climate change adaptation interventions in Malakyariri, Mafa in Borno state Nigeria. The decolonial approach to evaluation involved the following components:

i) participation of the members from marginalized communities in the co-design of the evaluation criteria and questions so that the evaluation is relevant to the local context and evidence need,

ii) usage of participatory data collections such as photovoice, transect walks, road block etc so as to give centrality to knowledges of communities),

iii) co-designing the development of the knowledge products and dissemination plan with the members from the marginalized communities.

The authors reflexively engage with the question of whether and how this approach was able to shift power for epistemic justice. Hence, we reflect on whether the evaluation was able to prioritise diverse voices and knowledges of the communities whilst engaging in a process of reflection regarding our own positionality as evaluators. We hope that this learning will inspire and challenge your approach to development evaluation as a practitioner or as an academic.

Contribution short abstract:

The incidence of epistemic injustice rises when the researcher is from a historically privileged background & the researched from a historically marginalized one. But when both belong to the same group, does it automatically imply that the research was decolonial and epistemic justice was achieved?

Contribution long abstract:

In 2022, we concluded the fieldwork for our study on alumni trajectories in planning education. The study was a part of Work Package-5 of the KNOW project which was funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund(GCRF) and led by University College London. The study was situated in 4-important locations of planning education in Tanzania, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, to investigate the site-specific phenomena that influence the target groups' engagement with values of equity &equality.

The presence of IIHS researchers in institutes in Tanzania, Thailand and Sri Lanka presented us with a dilemma. Conducting the study in these nations put us in a “contact zone, where since both the researcher and the researched subject came from the Global South (GS), different cultural backgrounds could meet without asymmetrical power relations. But as IIHS researchers, coming from the GS, working on a project funded by the Global North (GN), we ourselves were carrying multiple legacies of knowledge production, both southern and northern in characteristics, requiring us to revisit our understandings of how we thought about the south and north in our study. In particular, how the established practice of research ethics, historically emerging from the GN, was being played out in the GS, across both disciplines and sites. This situation allowed us to examine this through our encounters in these contact zones. In this paper, we reflect on the ethical challenges we faced by virtue of our geography and discipline, how we recognised them and what steps we took to rectify them.

Contribution short abstract:

Recognizing knowledge production is currently dominated by western and colonial systems of meaning–making, the authors explore an innovative model for shifting power in development research and doing research ethically with communities in a development programme.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation draws on a piece of work published in: Community Development Journal, Volume 58, Issue 1, January 2023, Pages 121–135.

The case study engages critically with the challenges of integrating research into an international development programme. Recognizing knowledge production is currently dominated by western and colonial systems of meaning–making, the case study also explores how development research can be less extractive and how it can promote more equitable forms of knowledge production. This is explored and illustrated through the ethical challenges raised in the Evidence and Collaboration for Inclusive Development (ECID) programme. This was a four-year programme, funded by the UK Government, and delivered through a consortium of nine partners led by Christian Aid, and implemented by in-country partner organizations in Myanmar, Nigeria and Zimbabwe during 2019–2021.

The article begins by contextualizing the ECID programme within the wider research environment and within the Nigerian country context (which is given particular focus). It then explores the ethical challenges that emerged from the programme and how these were addressed. The paper concludes by offering an innovative model for shifting power in development research and doing research ethically with communities in a development programme. This requires thinking about how ethics in development research and practice can be reviewed in organizations, which typically do not have their own ethics review boards, and in ways which do not reproduce western hegemony in relation to whose knowledge and ethics count in research practice.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper reflects on a year long process within Christian Aid on centering co-creation as part of an effort to work towards epistemic justice. The paper discusses the team’s focus on the conceptualization of co-creation and the challenges faced in actualizing such an approach.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper reflects on a year long process in which our research team, embedded within an international NGO, has begun the process of pursuing epistemic justice. This was guided by the question ‘How can evidence and learning spaces be transformed so that our Southern partners can exercise epistemic freedoms in knowledge creation processes?’ This paper draws from our attempts to collaboratively create these spaces in research projects based in Colombia, Haiti and Nigeria, and a deep-dive study on social protection in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. Each project applied an approach of co-creation, with an emphasis on co-designing the research, intentional participant selection, participatory data collection, diversifying research methods and outputs, and intentional reciprocity and reflexivity at all stages of research and design. The paper analyses how such approaches to knowledge creation work towards the transformation of epistemic power structures. The paper provides special reference to the ethical challenges and opportunities found within an INGO, noting that such a space has different concerns than a purely academic space, particularly in terms of epistemic and fiscal power.

Contribution short abstract:

Led by the question “Whose value counts?”, this paper explores what INGOs can do to decolonise evaluation practice. We reflect on current practices with a decolonial lens and propose steps Christian Aid and other INGOs could take to shift knowledge power towards local and indigenous stakeholders.

Contribution long abstract:

Scholars and practitioners around the world are critically reflecting on the ways in which current evaluative practices continue to reproduce colonial structures and logics, amid calls to decolonise aid and its associated epistemologies. Led by the question “Whose value counts?”, we ask what INGOs can do to move towards a decolonial approach to evaluation.

This paper shares reflections from more than 70 colleagues and peers, based in 15 countries, on how, why and for whom ‘conventional’ evaluation practice might be seen as problematic, when critiqued with a decolonial mindset. Following a discussion of the flaws in current practice, the paper argues that there is a need to rebalance knowledge power towards people who are experiencing poverty and injustice themselves.

The paper then proposes some practical ways forward which organisations like Christian Aid could consider. Through rethinking the evaluation cycle with an intentional decolonial mindset aimed at redistributing power at every stage, we hope to create space for change and contribute to a discussion on how the evaluation space can be “given back” to its primary stakeholders, meeting their knowledge management needs and valuing their ways of knowing.

Contribution short abstract:

In a community-driven research study on early childhood and women’s agency in Tanzania, community co-researchers have been conducting ongoing ethics review with key stakeholders to gather input/feedback and ensure appropriateness and relevance of objectives, methods, and potential findings.

Contribution long abstract:

While mainstream approaches to research ethics provide helpful consideration around protecting individuals and ensuring agency/choice, we argue that: they are limited and biased in the Western, Eurocentric assumptions values they reflect, and they overlook the roles of community leaders and organizations who have mandates to represent and protect their communities.

We are facilitating a community-driven research study examining the intersections of early childhood development and women’s agency and choice in Tanzania. Four community-based organizations (CBOs) are serving as community co-researchers in the study. They have been consulting with their communities and together developing the research questions, design, and methods for the study. CBO co-researchers have also been engaging in ongoing “ethics review” with community stakeholders to ensure that: stakeholders provide input and feedback on the objectives, research questions, and methodologies; the proposed questions and data collection methods are appropriate, acceptable, and relevant to communities; and findings are meaningful and useable by stakeholders to improve existing initiatives and/or advocate for change.

CBOs made substantial changes to their proposed questions, design, and methods based on the community ethics review. During a joint research development workshop, community feedback/ guidance was further reviewed and integrated into the overall study objectives, design, and methodology. A full research protocol was developed for submission to a national institutional review board in Tanzania for formal review and clearance.

We will share our process and learnings, and discuss them within the larger discussion of ‘decolonizing research ethics’, and what it means to have genuinely community-driven research or evaluation processes.

Contribution short abstract:

This case study captures the experiences of a community researcher who carried out research with a marginalized and vulnerable tribal community in India. It reflects on her research engagement with this community from an ethical perspective.

Contribution long abstract:

The case study is based on a first-person account of the experiences of a community researcher in India involved in community-based participatory development. It highlights the ethical stances taken by the community researcher during primary research that was carried out in remote villages in the state of Bihar among members of a denotified tribal community. It highlights her journey of reflecting on the research engagement, from an ethical perspective, after her engagement in an ethical review committee constituted by the Praxis Institute of Participatory Practices (herein, referred to as Praxis). The case study maps the journey of the researcher and the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that led her to reflect on her ethical practices while carrying out community research. It also highlights the reflexivity of the researcher during her journey of the research process.

Contribution short abstract:

This paper reflects on a hybrid ethics research panel process which was embedded in a gender based violence research project in Haiti. This process was put in place as the project was committed to a decolonial praxis. The paper discusses the learning and the challenges from this process.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper reflects on a hybrid research ethics panel process which was embedded in a research project on the dynamics of GBV impunity in Haiti. The purpose of this panel was to respond to the decolonial question of ‘whose ethics counts in research’ and to ensure it is the ethic of displaced communities and the GBV survivors that is centered in the research. The panel comprised of 2 representatives from women’s associations,1 G BV survivor, 1 judicial advisor,1GBV researcher and 1 academic. The research team viewed that this process would bring a more blended and multidisciplinary perspective to the validation of the ethics protocol. The hybrid ethics panel reviewed the ethics protocol documents (ethics risk assessment document, data management plan, participant information sheet and informed consent) to provide the research with ethical leadership and cultural and impact alignment. The insights of the panel were used to revise and finalize the ethics protocol of the project. This paper analyzes how this process worked towards shifting power for epistemic justice in a conflict prone context.