There’s a version of research ethics that lives in checklists and sign-offs. Committee approval. Consent templates. Plans filed away before fieldwork begins. These processes matter, of course. But if they’re where your ethical thinking starts and ends, you’re missing most of what ethics actually requires.
Who helped shape the research questions? Are local partners genuinely leading, or lending their names to a framework designed elsewhere? What happens to the findings once the project closes and who gets to decide?
The language of ethical, locally led research has never been more widely adopted. The sector has done the conceptual work. What’s lagging is the structural side – and bridging that gap is the tension sitting at the centre of ethical research practice in 2026.
What ethical research actually requires
RDI Network’s Principles and Guidelines for Ethical Research and Evaluation has been a practical resource for researchers and practitioners since 2013. Updated in 2021, it’s built around four core principles: respect for human beings, beneficence, research merit and integrity, and justice.
These aren’t abstract ideals. They’re a working framework for the everyday decisions that shape whether research genuinely serves the communities it involves.
Respect means honouring the rights, privacy, dignity, and diversity of everyone contributing to research. Beneficence means managing risks and ensuring benefit – the familiar “do no harm” standard, applied rigorously. Research merit and integrity means high-quality, well-designed work conducted by people with genuine competence and experience. And justice means equity: fair processes, no unfair burden on particular groups, and fair access to the benefits of participation.
Together, these four principles protect the rights of research participants and provide a framework for what ethical practice looks like in reality, not just on paper.
Six questions worth asking from the start
Ethical research isn’t a checklist you complete before fieldwork begins. It’s a series of decisions made throughout the research process, often with imperfect information and competing pressures. These six questions, drawn from the Principles and Guidelines, are worth building into your research design from the start:
- Have the people most affected by this research helped shape the questions? True participation starts at the design stage and carries through every step.
- Are risks mapped for everyone involved, including local partners and participants? Harm can be social, emotional, cultural, or psychological – good research planning accounts for all of it.
- Is your methodology appropriate to the context you’re working in? Research merit and integrity requires genuine attunement to local culture, history, and political context, not just the application of a standardised framework.
- Do participants know what will happen with the data, and have they consented freely? Informed consent is an ongoing, participatory process – people should be able to ask questions and withdraw at any time, without fear of consequence.
- Have you considered who might be inadvertently excluded? Justice means actively dismantling barriers to participation, including time, location, language, and accessibility.
Will participants receive the findings in a way that’s useful to them? Research findings belong to the communities they’re about, not just the institutions that commissioned them.
What it looks like in practice: a case study
In the Voices of Pacific Children with Disability project, researchers from Deakin University and Save the Children Australia worked alongside the PNG Assembly of Disabled Persons and the Disability Promotion and Advocacy Association Vanuatu to collect self-reported data directly from children with disability in Vanuatu and PNG, a group whose voices are largely absent from development research.
The ethical challenges were significant: recruiting participants in communities with little experience of formal research, designing consent processes accessible to children with diverse disabilities, and navigating anonymity in contexts where data collection often happened in front of community members.
The most instructive tension emerged around photography. Children and families in Vanuatu wanted to be photographed and identified – they were proud of their participation and saw recognition as part of their right to be seen. Institutional requirements from the funder, the university ethics committee, and Save the Children required otherwise, citing child protection obligations. The team’s response was to photograph children’s artwork and objects of importance in their lives rather than the children themselves – a creative solution that tried to honour both participation and protection.
It remains, as the case study acknowledges, a complex and sensitive area. But the approach – local researchers, deep community relationships, continuous re-checking of consent throughout data collection – offers a model worth learning from.
This is what ethical research looks like in practice: not a checklist, but a series of genuinely difficult decisions made in real time, in context, with imperfect information.
The gap between principle and practice
At Exchange 25, Francesca Earp captured something that runs through a lot of ethical research work. There’s the ideological vision of how development research should work. And then there’s what actually happens on the ground. Bridging that gap is rarely straightforward.
Drawing on her PhD fieldwork with a local civil society organisation in Lao PDR, Francesca’s presentation explored the application of Feminist Participatory Action Research in practice, and what happens when a methodology that looks right on paper meets the complexity of a real community context. It’s one of the more honest and self-reflective talks from the conference, and worth watching in full.
Watch the entire session, Research and Practice Showcase: Reconsidering Research, Data and Evidence for Development, on the RDI Network YouTube channel.
Where to start
If you’re thinking about how to apply these principles in your own research practice, RDI Network’s Principles and Guidelines for Ethical Research and Evaluation offers a practical starting point. It was designed to support anyone who commissions, manages, conducts or reviews research and evaluation in international development settings – and it remains as relevant today as when it was first developed.
Become a member and read the full Principles and Guidelines here.
