Ethics research codes and contracts may oppress vulnerable and Indigenous groups

Codes of conduct and contracts for scientific research should protect vulnerable populations, such as Indigenous peoples, from exploitation and promote their role in research. But with the San in Southern Africa, I have found that they can also backfire and even oppress them.

By Stasja Koot

Ethical rules for scientific research are important to prevent research from being conducted in a way that would never be accepted domestically (‘ethics dumping’), or when scientists from high-income countries conduct their research without involving local scientists or communities (‘helicopter research’). So for good reasons, various codes of conduct and contracts have been drawn up over the years for and by scientists, often in collaboration with NGOs. This is also the case among the San, an Indigenous group of (former) hunter gatherers in southern Africa. Based on San peoples’, colleagues’, and my own experiences with ethnographic research, together we published two papers analysing some core issues regarding research codes and contracts. Here I describe three of these important limitations of research codes and contracts that are often overlooked.

San distribution in Southern Africa. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02101-0/figures/1

Suppressing unwelcome ideas

First, authorities (often NGOs) in the country where research is conducted sometimes want to push their agenda by keeping unwelcome ideas among the ‘vulnerable’ group out of the research. In South Africa, a colleague of mine was once told by local ‘representatives’ (or ‘gatekeepers’, who in this case live 200 kilometres away from the San) that her research with San people could only take place if these gatekeepers themselves gave permission. However, she would only get that permission if she would interview community members designated by these same representatives. A tool intended to promote ethical research was now being misused to keep certain people from the community, or their ideas, out the door. This effectively amounts to preventing vulnerable, Indigenous groups from deciding for themselves whether to tell their opinions to researchers, something that only further silences these groups. Of course, fortunately not all representatives act as in this example and we have also experienced very helpful collaborations. But more generally, however, aside from the independence of research thus compromised, essentially Indigenous San are treated as if they cannot make their own decisions about who they want to talk to or not. This is highly problematic at a more structural level, and can be considered a neo-colonial form of oppression that greatly limits their freedom of expression.

Impact?

Second, most codes of conduct and contracts include a clause that the research must have direct local ‘impact’. However, this is simplistic, unrealistic and sometimes undesirable for three reasons: 1) It is an incentive to promise more than one can realistically do (to get the permission) and it might thus lead to expectations that cannot be met later. 2) It ignores the essence of what scientific research is: almost every scientist likes to see her research have impact. But the vast majority of scientific research is fundamental (knowledge derived from curiosity) and not applied (immediately practical to implement). Fundamental knowledge is precisely what is needed to make applied research possible in the first place: I myself have worked on research about a land claim by the San in northern Namibia. That claim is much more likely to succeed thanks to ‘old’ fundamental research (mainly historical and anthropological research) that thus only proves its value much later. And also in other areas of southern Africa, San groups have regained or managed to retain land thanks to such research. This also plays out in other branches of science: Pfizer could only bring the corona vaccine to the market because of fundamental (medical) knowledge accumulated over many years before. 3) Impact often translates into ‘benefits’, but this ignores heterogeneity and different interests within communities. A benefit for some may be detrimental to others. For example, I have witnessed how research that helps to promote wildlife management and tourism created valuable jobs for some, while it also constrained other livelihoods in that same community (e.g. by limitations on hunting, small-scale farming, or keeping livestock). Of course, a researcher will be tempted to highlight potential benefits and to disregard the constraints when negotiating a research contract.

Fieldwork in Southern Africa. Photo credit: Stasja Koot

Practical limitations

The third limitation is practical: in southern Africa, it is often unclear in advance who you need to contact to discuss and sign something. E-mails often remain unanswered, and local San often do not even know of the existence of the codes of conduct and contracts, or they are simply not interested. From their perspective this makes sense: many have other things on their mind to worry about. Where this is indeed the case, research codes and contracts essentially only legitimise the researchers’ and gatekeepers’ role in research, but not the role of the Indigenous group.

Trust

The above three issues are not the only ones. More investigation is needed about the often unambiguous legal basis of such agreements, and them functioning as an imposition of a Red Tape culture in which paper agreements are used to communicate with cultures that are originally unfamiliar with this. Moreover, some members of these groups are illiterate and can thus not partake in this communication equally. And even if researchers sign a contract, they can still show undesirable behaviour without clarity about what potential repercussions would be. To be clear, I am not against instruments that can support the empowerment of vulnerable and Indigenous groups in research. However, they are not a panacea and therefore we need to scrutinise their inherent and complex challenges. Some San have instigated positive initiatives to increase their participation in research, including community training to increase awareness. In such cases they like to collaborate with researchers they trust, normally because they have been in contact with them for many years already. Such trust is at the heart of the collaboration, and is much more important than paper agreements.

Author Bio:
Stasja Koot has been working with Indigenous groups in southern Africa since the late 1990s, as a researcher and practitioner. As an environmental anthropologist, his core focus is on political ecology with an emphasis on power dynamics in tourism and nature conservation. He works at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and since 2019 he is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg. Personal site: https://stasjakoot.com/