Can you please all of the people some of the time? Ethical challenges in making research relevant to academia, policy and practice

Abstract

This was how the organizer of a WaterAid workshop described my status among the staff of WaterAid Mali about halfway through my fieldwork. In many ways it captures some of the ethical challenges that I faced in balancing the demands of academic fieldwork with my commitments to the partner organization involved in my doctoral research. My research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as a Collaborative Award in Science and Engineering1 (CASE) studentship, with Royal Holloway, University of London as the host institution and the international NGO WaterAid as the non-academic partner. My own background before starting the studentship was not in the social sciences, but rather in engineering and NGO management, a position I discuss later in this chapter. The research project’s original title was Improving local-level governance to meet the Millennium Development Goals for Water and Sanitation: The case of WaterAid in Mali. This initial broad proposal was developed by the project’s supervisory team, comprised of academics from the geography department at Royal Holloway and representatives from WaterAid in the UK and Mali. The project was designed as an opportunity to work with WaterAid in examining the organization’s approach to working with communities and local governments in Mali, where decentralization reforms have left local governments with the responsibility for ensuring drinking water services, but a lack of experience and resources with which to do so. The intention was that the scope of the research could then be narrowed down further during the course of the doctorate. Much of this process took place during an 18-month period which I spent based in the WaterAid office in Mali. The research topic that emerged was an analysis of how the recurrent costs of rural water supplies (operation and maintenance, technical and management support, and eventual rehabilitation of old systems) are shared between different actors including the users, WaterAid and its partner organizations (local NGOs and local governments), and national government. Financing arrangements forrecurrent costs are a crucial element in ensuring the long-term provision of rural water services, but few countries have yet developed adequate frameworks to plan for and allocate these costs (Lockwood and Smits 2011). This chapter explores some of the ethical challenges that I faced before, during, and after my fieldwork period as an academic researcher embedded within an NGO. I discuss the careful negotiation of the exact research topic that was necessary to ensure that it would benefit my own research needs as well as the organization and the communities it worked with. I explore the difficulties of having an ambiguous position which was simultaneously researcher, consultant, and practitioner. I also explore the complexities of seeking to ensure that my research would be relevant to academia, policy and practice.