By Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang and Julia Wittmayer.
2. Julia Wittmayer (biography)
How can we design an ethics governance system that can better respond when ethical dilemmas emerge after institutional approval has been granted?
This question is increasingly pressing for researchers engaged in participatory, transdisciplinary, and transformative work. Ethical concerns often arise in-situ where partnerships evolve, power dynamics shift, community expectations change, and research begins to have effects beyond the original project design.
These concerns do not fit neatly into conventional ethics review procedures at universities, which still tend to be organised around upfront review: researchers submit an application, a committee assesses it, and approval is granted before the research begins. This model matters for safeguarding participants, researchers, and institutions. But it is increasingly misaligned with the type of engaged research that emphasises social learning and democratically deliberative process for positive societal change.
Two logics in productive tension
To support researchers in handling ethical concerns once the research has started, ethics committees need to be able to hold two logics in productive tension:
- Reflexive accountability emphasises safeguarding: protecting participants, researchers, and institutions through consistent procedures and defensible approval decisions. It provides clarity and reassurance, but risks abstracting ethics from the lived realities of engaged research.
- Accountable reflexivity treats ethics as an ongoing, relational practice that unfolds across the research lifecycle through dialogue, situated judgement, and shared responsibility with partners and communities. It is more responsive to the realities of engaged research, but raises questions about consistency and institutional accountability.
Both logics are necessary. The challenge is how institutions can hold them in productive tension. This has opened up four questions for reimagining ethics governance:
- What if research ethics boards held expanded mandates, with standardised exemptions, mandatory training, and lifecycle monitoring?
- What if community-led protocols took precedence, with research ethics boards repositioned as coordinators, capacity builders, and mediators?
- What if research ethics boards evolved into learning hubs: offering coaching, iterative review, and relational check-ins alongside formal oversight?
- What if formal research ethics boards were phased out, and replaced by embedded ethics officers, drop-in labs, peer reflection circles, and anonymous advice hotlines?
We summarise each of these in the table below, highlighting the key institutional adaptation, the trade-offs and the potential benefits. These proposals do not all point in the same direction. Some strengthen formal oversight. Others distribute ethical responsibility more widely. Some emphasise institutional accountability. Others emphasise relational judgement and learning. That is precisely the point!
| Illustrative Scenario | Key Institutional Adaptation | Trade-offs | Potential Benefits |
|
Regulatory Ethics Governance: Compliance-focused, centralised oversight |
Expand REBCs’ mandates; align with legal departments; standardise exemptions; require mandatory training; use IT-based dashboards for lifecycle monitoring and audit trails |
Creates a surveillance culture; reinforces top-down control; risks compliance-driven disengagement; limited attention to wider social and ecological impacts |
Strengthens scientific credibility and participant protection; shields researchers and institutions; ensures consistent procedural safeguards |
|
Embedded Ethics Facilitation: Iterative learning and supportive monitoring |
Transform REBCs into learning hubs; use pre-review consultations and iterative feedback; reframe IT monitoring as supportive check-ins; embed ethics training and peer learning |
Requires sustained investment and coordination; iterative cycles may slow research; risk of overburdening staff |
Positions REBCs as guides; fosters continuous ethical reflection; integrates societal and ecological impacts into the research lifecycle |
|
Community-Integrated Ethics Stewardship: Decentralised, relationship-based governance |
Decentralise governance; prioritise community-led protocols; reduce university review to a minimal checklist; position REBCs as coordinators and mediators; invest in trust-building |
Lack of structure can unsettle researchers; negotiated outputs may affect academic independence; risks overlooking indirect or long-term impacts; clinical contexts still need external safeguards |
Enhances legitimacy and reciprocity; builds shared responsibility; strengthens links between institutional and societal ethics |
|
Post-REBCs Ethics Ecosystem: Fully embedded, decentralised ethics |
Phase out formal REBCs; embed ethics officers in projects; create drop-in labs, advice hotlines, whistleblower mechanisms, and peer reflection spaces; integrate embedded ethics approaches |
Accountability challenges without formal oversight; uneven practices; lack of clear rules may discomfort researchers; conflicting values can complicate negotiation |
Embeds ethics as ongoing practice; integrates wider societal and ecological impacts; enables adaptive, context-sensitive governance |
Four potential ways research ethics governance could better support participatory, transdisciplinary and transformation-oriented research. (RECBs is the abbreviation for university research ethics boards and committees; IT is the abbreviation for information technology.) (For those using small screens, please note: this is a four column table and columns that flow off the right-hand side of the screen can be scrolled to. An image version of this table is also available.)
A call for institutional experimentation
Moving forward on improved ethics governance requires experimentation on what kinds of ethical support different forms of research need, and who is best placed to provide that support.
We suggest four possibilities that many universities already have the foundation to explore:
- Proportionate and staged review. Not all research needs the same level of scrutiny. Clearer routes for low-, medium- and high-risk research, with more iterative review for projects where risks evolve over time, could make oversight both more efficient and more responsive.
- Community and data ethics protocols. In engaged research, communities and partners often have their own ethical expectations and data governance practices. Universities could create ways for these to be recognised and connected to institutional responsibilities.
- Cross-faculty learning. Many ethics committees face similar grey-zone cases but handle them separately. Shared repositories of anonymised dilemmas and regular learning sessions could build collective judgement across the institution.
- Ethics coaching and embedded facilitation. Researchers working with societal partners often need timely support during fieldwork, not just before it. Ethics coaching, peer reflection, or embedded ethics roles could help researchers navigate dilemmas as they arise.
In developing such experiments, small pilots may initially be more useful than large reforms. A university might test ethics coaching with a group of doctoral researchers, pilot staged review in one faculty, or convene a cross-faculty discussion around anonymised cases.
What do you think?
Do the limitations of the ethics governance system that we have described apply in your research? How have you experienced this? What kinds of ethical support would have been useful? What do you think of our suggestions for re-imagining ethics governance? Are there additional trade-offs and benefits that you would add? What experiments do you think your university would be well-placed to conduct?
To find out more:
Huang, Y. S., Wittmayer, J. M., Gelens, T., Bauer, K., Mena, R., Egger, C. and Stenico, C. (2026). Reimagining Research Ethics for the Participatory and Transformative Turn: Between Reflexive Accountability and Accountable Reflexivity. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 25, 16094069261436025. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069261436025 and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/16094069261436025
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution or the work on which the contribution is based. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang PhD is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. In September 2026, she will join the Erasmus School of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as a postdoctoral researcher. She is interested in transformative research transdisciplinary collaboration, with a specific focus on how research governance and social learning processes shape science-policy-society interfaces for sustainability and climate justice.
Biography: Julia Wittmayer PhD is Professor of Transdisciplinarity and Societal Transformations at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, and senior researcher at the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) – both at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. To support the development of knowledge and action which addresses societal challenges, she designs and implements various collaborative action-oriented research formats. Recent work analyses how the academic system itself is changing – and must change – to more effectively address intensifying challenges such as climate change, inequality, and polarisation.
This is a very well thought-out piece , for which many thanks. I agree with Raymond that it is an “Excellent article that provides real possibilities and alternatives beyond just critique”. I would add that often researchers envisaging participatory and transdisciplinary research where knowing is co-generated with participants and stakeholders have good ideas as to how to proceed to engage with communities, but ethics committee members may not take these into account when “assessing” the application. So the “coaching” should be a two way process where researchers envisaging a project can discuss in dialogue with ethics committee members options for assessing the worthiness and ethical content of the application. In other words, it is not only in situ that issues arise; it may already be from the start that discussions between ethics committee members and concerned researchers take place in a two way learning process. Meanwhile I found all your suggestions for accountability in the field as all insightful in terms of real possibilities to consider ethical issues as an ongoing process. Thanks!
Thanks Elaine and Julia for sharing your work on this. I’m a PhD candidate and my dissertation research studies a form of engaged research (patient oriented research) and uses an engaged approach. Consequently, I’m repeatedly noticing blurred lines and gray areas. It’s led to many discussions with my dissertation chair and program director. In some ways, the study participants are also collaborators such as in a participatory data analysis process. A tension I find myself struggling with is not wanting to overburden participants but also wanting to give them the opportunity to be engaged as much as they’d like. All of which to say, I would LOVE to see some of your recommendations for drop-in labs and coaching become commonplace. In the interim, do you have any best practices for researchers navigating this?
Thank you, Allison, for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it.
Your struggle is shared by many peers, myself included. I’ve found that going back to the more fundamental questions — e.g. who is this study for, why are they prioritised, and with what trade-offs — helps me navigate the grey areas you identify.
I also resonate with your practice of seeking advice from your dissertation chair and program director. Too often, we forget that ethical research is a shared responsibility across the academic community, rather than something that rests on an individual researcher or project team alone.
Of the many practices that can help researchers navigate these tensions, three come to mind:
I value relationships with my collaborators and participants, so that’s my starting point for thinking about core research ethics principles — respect for persons, informed consent, and justice. I try to take fair compensation seriously by being open about what participants receive in return, both in monetary terms and through the benefits of the engagement itself (e.g recognition, training, advocacy).
As a trained qualitative researcher, I still find the old-school advice on reflexivity useful. Keeping a research journal, for example, helps document the reasoning behind decisions, not just their outcomes. Talking things through with peers is another good reflexive practice, as it allows me to pressure-test my decisions and catch blind spots I might not see myself. These practices are less about finding the “right” answer than about being transparent about one’s own positionality (including my own motivations for who gets engaged), and how it shapes the decisions I make.
In this piece, colleagues and I discuss how different ethical theories in philosophy can help navigate value-based decisions in co-production: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-024-01582-7. Hope it offers another useful lens for thinking through some of these grey areas.
Excellent article that provides real possibilities and alternatives beyond just critique. The breakdown of options, with possible benefits and tensions, is very useful and can be appreciated by any researcher navigating ethics across different institutions. Perhaps institutional flexibility in the kinds of ethics procedures available might allow for recognising distinct paradigms and research values, while safeguarding practices in very different contexts that require an array of considerations. Moving beyond institutional gatekeeping and liability is so crucial, particularly for participatory and action-oriented research. Imagining an ethics ecosystem where care and equality between academic and non-academic researchers and communities are centred could make ethics less of a procedure and more of a crucial ongoing dialogue and an opportunity to continually engage with some of the most important issues that arise during the actual research process.
Thank you, Raymond, for your reflection. The “ethics ecosystem” framing really resonates with me, and it also connects closely with Alice Jing Shan’s comment below.
I agree with you that institutional flexibility and ongoing dialogue seem especially important for participatory and action-oriented research, where a single fixed procedure rarely fits the values and relationships at play. But when thinking about where to draw the line, I began to wonder whether they would be sufficient on their own.
I am raising this question because many colleagues encounter dilemmas in the field that call for something closer to practical wisdom: forms of judgment that have to be worked out relationally and in situ, rather than resolved simply through having the right procedure or space for dialogue. We reflect on this tension here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03178-z.
I’d be very interested to hear how this resonates with your experience. What kinds of “important issues” or challenges have you encountered most? What’s your experience of holding dialogues with collaborators and communities while navigating the tension between relational and ethical ways of doing academic work, and the scholarly expectations of the academy?
A very thought-provoking piece. From a Relational Dynamics™ perspective, one question I would add is whether the unit of ethical governance is still too often treated as the decision or the project, when in participatory and transformative research it may need to be the trajectory.
Ethical conditions can change even when the original research design does not: relationships evolve, power shifts, new actors enter, data travels, audiences change, and effects emerge that were not visible at the point of approval. This becomes especially important in the age of AI, where data, interpretation, mediation, and possible uses can move across contexts and interfaces in ways that are difficult to anticipate at the outset. In that sense, ethics is not simply something that needs to be revisited over the lifecycle; its meaning may itself be transformed by the evolving relational conditions of the work.
That makes the distinction between reflexive accountability and accountable reflexivity particularly interesting. Perhaps the institutional challenge is not only how ethics governance can become more iterative, but how it can recognise and respond to trajectory shifts and ethical transitions before they become visible failures.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment, Dr. Shan.
Spot on! These are exactly the kinds of questions we hope to open up with the wider academic community.
There’s a lot to build on here, but what strikes me first is the ‘governance function’ itself. Before asking whether the unit of research ethics governance should shift from a decision or project to a trajectory, we think it is worth asking what that governance is actually for, and whom it serves. Do we need a unit that provides oversight––perhaps to balance power between researchers and the “researched”; one that provides training; or one that offers legitimacy or certification of “ethical” research and engagement? Each implies a different relationship to the “trajectory shifts” you describe, and to whether governance can respond before they become visible failures.
That also makes me curious about which part of the distinction between reflexive accountability and accountable reflexivity interests you most: the conceptual difference, or the directionality of whether one is meant to lead toward the other? For us, it raises the question of not simply revisiting ethical decisions as conditions change, but recognising when those conditions have shifted enough to change what ethical accountability requires.
Your point also reminds me that much of the uncertainty and iterativity you describe is not new terrain. Action research and community-based research traditions have long grappled with evolving relationships, shifting power, and emergent effects. Part of what we want to do is bring that lineage into the conversation rather than reinvent the procedural wheel. The bigger move, then, is not simply to expand the menu of procedures that might work better, but to step back into a more axiological — or, more sharply, teleological — discussion of why a governance unit like this should or should not exist at all, and if so, toward what end.