Embedding research ethics into an international development programme: a case study of Evidence and Collaboration for Inclusive Development (ECID) in Nigeria

Abstract

This case study engages critically with the challenges of integrating research into an international development programme. Recognizing knowledge production is currently dominated by western and colonial systems of meaning–making, the case study also explores how development research can be less extractive and how it can promote more equitable forms of knowledge production. This is explored and illustrated through the ethical challenges raised in the Evidence and Collaboration for Inclusive Development (ECID) programme. This was a four-year programme, funded by the UK Government, and delivered through a consortium of nine partners led by Christian Aid, and implemented by in-country partner organizations in Myanmar, Nigeria and Zimbabwe during 2019–2021.

The article begins by contextualizing the ECID programme within the wider research environment and within the Nigerian country context (which is given particular focus). It then explores the ethical challenges that emerged from the programme and how these were addressed. The paper concludes by offering an innovative model for shifting power in development research and doing research ethically with communities in a development programme. This requires thinking about how ethics in development research and practice can be reviewed in organizations, which typically do not have their own ethics review boards, and in ways which do not reproduce western hegemony in relation to whose knowledge and ethics count in research practice.