Oped»
Time to change tack
- (un)common sense
APR 05 -
It is ethics time, as they say in graduate school. I am preparing to defend my dissertation research proposal in front of my graduate committee three weeks from now. Pretty soon, I have to get clearance from my university’s ethics department, after I defend the proposal and before I head home to conduct the research.
“Hey, have you done your ethics yet?” A friend came rushing to me 10 days ago. He was in the process of filling out the 17-plus pages of the ethics clearance form. I have not even looked at it, but from what I have heard from others, I have to ensure that I do not cause any harm to my informants, and that I keep their confidentiality unless they authorise me to make their identity public.
For a long time, this was not much of a concern in the universities. We must say, this is yet a matter of concern in universities in our part of the world. In Western universities these days, there is a very rigorous process of ethical revisions before any research is given the go-ahead. This is more so when direct intervention on people’s bodies are involved — such as medical testing, health interventions or biological research. Or when people’s cultural practices are concerned, such as when doing archaeological surveys around cemeteries or places of worship. Even if biological interventions or cultural sites are not involved, researchers have to show that they have made enough arrangements to make sure no harm is going to result to their informants. An extra amount of precaution is to be taken if one is to conduct research among children or differently abled persons.
There have been many biological researches conducted among powerless people to test drugs before they were introduced in the Western countries. Many researches associated with military interventions have also come under sharp questioning. All of this has led to strict ethical clearance procedures. These procedures address some of the past injustices committed by powerful research institutions when students and researchers went around the world and conducted research without respect for the biological or social integrity of the people among whom they conducted their research.
However, this rigour in ensuring what we might call procedural ethical positions is only one part of the story in research. A friend told me not long ago that there has not been any rejection of research by the ethics committee. One only has to know how to fill up the forms well.
There are very substantive issues that often remain outside the discussions, however. Production of knowledge has become central public activities in our time. Public institutions, in more and more places, cannot operate without producing knowledge. They need evidence to organise interventions. They need research to produce public policies. States, international development agencies and even corporations now have to justify their interventions based on evidence.
The most substantive ethical issue involves when there is vast asymmetry between those who conduct research and among whom the research is conducted. When institutions are not involved, such as in graduate research, the choices often come down to individuals. For the past two years, I have been trying to grapple with a dilemma. Situated as I am at present in a Western university’s graduate programme, my immediate goal has to be getting my degree. These locational differences create specific dynamics in the process of knowledge production. I will conduct my research in Nepal. I gather documents, interview people and record my observations. I carry those things back to the West as raw materials to be processed for the final product, which would primarily be my dissertation, but also a series of journal articles, most likely in the English language and most likely published in the West. I have come to realise that, barring a substantive commitment back to the place we conduct our research in, it will be hard to resolve this raw-material-final product difference.
In a couple of months from now, I am planning to begin my research among some of Nepal’s pioneers in sustainable agriculture. My final decision to conduct this research was motivated by two things. One, there has now been a wide range of agreements that conventional agriculture, that had been promoted as agricultural development in the last six decades, is not going to solve the problems. For the last three decades, this position had remained on the fringes. However, some of the very institutions that promoted conventional agriculture, based on the use of chemicals and machines, have come to accept that this path needs radical remaking.
For example, in an extraordinarily frank and thorough assessment of the existing agricultural knowledge, science and technology (AKST), the International Assessment of Agriculture Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) — a multi-institutional four-year collaboration supported by the World Bank and four UN agencies, endorsed by over 50 countries and involving over 400 experts globally — acknowledges that the prevailing agriculture has been top-down, has excluded small farmers, women and indigenous peoples, and has exacerbated ecological degradation and social inequalities.
Meeting the challenges of increasing agricultural productivity, ensuring better human health, maintaining ecological sustainability, confronting climate change and ensuring equity requires, according to IAASTD, “a fundamental shift in science and technologies, policies and institutions, as well as capacity development and investment”. It has been argued that the revalorisation of small farmers’ knowledge and their active participation in the process of knowledge and technology generation has to be central to this shift. Likewise, a growing worldwide network of farmers movements has also demanded a shift towards ecologically sustainable, socially just and economically viable agriculture.
For a long time, Nepal’s farmers in general and ecological farmers in particular had remained completely marginal to the public discussions about the direction of agricultural development. Economists set the tone. Politicians danced to the tunes. Bureaucrats organised the affairs and experts carried the packages. That has to change. I am hoping that my research will, albeit partially, contribute to revaluing ecological farming as central to addressing most of our pressing needs. We have had all kinds of dream sellers — bikase technocrats, populist politicians, educated elite — tell us that their expertise will take care of the problems. They have failed miserably. It is time to change tack. It’s time to see those who have worked under the shadow to create different paths. It is this substantive ethical quest that was my second motivation for the research.
Anil Bhattarai
anilbhattarai@gmail.com
Posted on: 2010-04-06 07:29
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