Ethics – Integration and Implementation Insights

Developing a ‘capabilities approach’ for measuring social impact

June 8, 2020November 27, 2018

By Daniel J. Hicks

daniel-hicks — Daniel J. Hicks (biography)

Why do familiar metrics of impact often seem “thin” or to miss the point of research designed to address real-world problems? Is there a better way to measure the social impact of research?

In a recent paper (Hicks et al., 2018), my coauthors and I identified a key limitation with current metrics and started to look at how concepts from philosophy — specifically, ethics — can help us explain the goals of our research, and potentially lead to better metrics.

What’s the problem?

To understand the limitations of current metrics for measuring the social impact of research, it is useful to understand two distinctions, between resources and goals and between inward-facing and outward-facing goals for research.

Negotiations and ‘normative’ or ‘ethical’ power

February 20, 2020June 26, 2018

By Lena Partzsch

What can we learn from international relations about how ‘normative’ or ‘ethical’ power can be used in successful negotiations, for example, for pathways to sustainability? Here I build on Ian Manners’ (2002) concept of “Normative Power Europe”. He argues that the European Union’s specific history “pre‐disposes it to act in a normative way” (Manners 2002: 242) based on norms such as democracy, rule of law, social justice and respect for human rights. I explore the broader ramifications of the normative power concept for empirical studies and for practical negotiation and collaboration more generally.

First, the concept of normative power implies that the spread of particular norms is perceived as a principal policy goal, whether that relates to foreign policy, environmental policy or other kinds of policy.

A guide for interdisciplinary researchers: Adding axiology alongside ontology and epistemology

January 19, 2021May 22, 2018

By Peter Deane

Can philosophical insights be useful for interdisciplinary researchers in extending their thinking about the role of values and knowledge in research? More broadly, can a model or heuristic simplify some of the complexity in understanding how research works?

It’s common for interdisciplinary researchers to consider ontology and epistemology, two major arms of philosophical inquiry into human understanding, but axiology – a third major arm – is oft overlooked.

I start by describing axiology, then detail work by Michael Patterson and Daniel Williams (1998) who place axiology alongside ontology and epistemology. The outcome herein is to cautiously eject and then present a part of their work as a heuristic that may help interdisciplinary researchers to extend understanding on philosophical commitments that underlie research.

Ten essentials for more impactful and integrated research on transformations

January 19, 2021February 27, 2018

By Ioan Fazey

What can we learn when we bring together different insights from the rich and diverse traditions of action-oriented research? Will this help us more effectively understand and navigate our way through a world of change to ensure knowledge production contributes more directly to societal needs?

In a recent publication (Fazey et al., 2018), we explored the critical question of how to develop innovative, transformative solutions and knowledge about how to implement them. Addressing these questions requires much more engagement with more practical forms of knowledge, as well as learning from action and change in much more direct ways than currently occurs in academia. It is like learning to ride a bicycle, which can’t be done just by watching a powerpoint presentation, and which requires learning by “getting hands dirty” and by falling off and starting again.

Keys to transformation: Interactions of values, rules and knowledge

January 19, 2021June 20, 2017

By Russell Gorddard, Matthew Colloff, Russell Wise and Michael Dunlop

Adapting to climate change can require profound alterations in environmental management and policy. However the social context of a decision process limits options and resists change, often dooming attempts to adapt to climate change even before they begin. How can decision makers in policy and management more effectively see the institutional and social water they swim in, in order to better drive change?

Values, rules and knowledge (vrk) provide a useful heuristic to help decision makers analyze how the social system shapes their decision context. Put simply, decisions require:

knowledge of options and their implications
values to assess the options
rules that enable implementation.

gorddard_values-rules-knowledge — Figure adapted from original in Gordardd *et al*. (2016)

Viewing the decision context as an interconnected system of values, rules and knowledge can reveal limits to adaptation and suggest strategies for addressing them (Gorddard et al. 2016).

Values are the set of ethical precepts that determine the way people select actions and evaluate events.

Rules are both rules-in-use (norms, practices, habits, heuristics) and rules-in-form (regulations, laws, directives).

Knowledge is both evidence-based (scientific and technical) knowledge and experiential knowledge.

Decision context is the subset of interacting subsystems that are at play in a particular decision process. One core idea is that the decision context may exclude relevant values, knowledge or rules from being considered in decisions. Adaptation may therefore involve change in the decision context.

russell-gorddard — Russell Gorddard (biography)

matt-colloff — Matthew Colloff (biography)

michael-dunlop — Michael Dunlop (biography)

Enabling co-creation: From learning cycles to aligning values, rules and knowledge

January 19, 2021January 19, 2017

By Lorrae van Kerkhoff

How do we improve? In the context of sustainable development, we continually confront the question of how we can develop meaningful and positive actions towards a ‘better’ world (social, ecological, economic outcomes) despite inherent uncertainties about what the future holds.

Co-creation is one concept among several that seek to reorientate us from simplistic, largely linear ideas of progress towards more nuanced, subtle ideas that highlight that there are many different aspects of ‘progress’, and these can be deeply contested and challenging to reconcile. Enabling co-creation, then – or operationalizing it – means finding practical ways to work together, to deal with our different experiences, aspirations and expectations as well as the uncertainties of the future.

Co-creation sits within a learning paradigm that suggests engagement, social and mutual learning, adaptation and flexibility are key to enabling action in the face of uncertainty. But how do we think about learning?

Storytelling ethnography as a way of doing transdisciplinary research

July 10, 2020November 29, 2016

By Jane Palmer

Storytelling ethnography is a valuable tool if your research traverses several disciplines and aims for insights that transcend all of them. Stories not only integrate knowledge from diverse disciplines, but can also “change the way people act, the way they use available knowledge” (Griffiths 2007).

The special qualities of transdisciplinarity are:

its potential for integrative inquiry and emergent solutions,
its engagement with community and other non-academic knowledges, and
the breadth of its outcomes for researchers, participants and the wider community.

These are also qualities of what I call storytelling ethnography.

What makes a translational ecologist? Part 3: Dispositional attributes

September 28, 2020July 4, 2016

By the Translational Ecology Group

This is the third and final blog post considering competencies to make ecologists more effective in informing and supporting policy and practice change (see the right sidebar for links to all four related blog posts on translational ecology). In other words these are the competencies underpinning a new discipline of translational ecology.

The two previous blog posts examined the knowledge and skills required in three major areas:

Socio-ecological systems
Communication across boundaries, with beneficiaries, stakeholders and other scientists
Engagement with beneficiaries, stakeholders and other scientists.

This blog post uses the same three areas to examine the dispositional attributes required.

What are dispositional attributes?

Each person’s internal cognitive and moral qualities are collectively known as dispositions.