Reflections on ownership in participatory action research

Participatory action research (PAR) is a collaborative research process, frequently between communities with lived experiences of a social issue and researcher(s), which they try to address by generating knowledge-for-action and/or knowledge-through-action.

In practice a lot of these collaborative relationships are often laden with power inequalities. One of the key areas of concerns in PAR relates to the notion of ownership of knowledge created in this collaborative process.

In research, especially in University based settings, ownership of data and results generally appears to be something that goes to the researcher by default. However, such default assumptions pose serious ethical challenges while working with communities through PAR with challenges spanning across data access and control, interpretation and dissemination of the research.

In discussions of ethics on ownership, an important point to acknowledge is the entrenched inequalities in the support available to researchers, especially in Universities and large scale organizations, through legal recourse to protect and safeguard their intellectual property in contrast to absence of such mechanisms for local communities.

Additionally, these inequalities continue to be perpetuated through existing guidelines for research ethics by University research ethics committees (RECs) or institutional review boards (IRBs) underpinned through their narrow conception of agency in the research process where 'participants' are merely seen to be the objects of inquiry. Such conventional understandings are rooted in the coloniality of the knowledge production process.

There is a need to disrupt such notions and take a contextualized approach to research ethics which acknowledges the relational nature of "everyday ethics," going beyond the institutional understanding. This would help to address specific issues of ownership arising across different stages of the research process and weigh the benefits and risks associated with it for PAR in practice.

The notion of ownership in PAR, therefore, needs to prioritize agency and voice of the communities and sharing of power and resources through shared decision making with communities about some of the following concerns: what counts as data, knowledge and who decides that, whose analysis and interpretation is it, how does it depict the communities, who decides what needs to be disseminated and how, who should it be disseminated to, for what purpose/agenda is it being used for, what are the key messages that are being shared, who will be involved and whose responsibility it is.

There needs to be a joint plan from the onset of the project addressing these concerns through collective thought, mutual respect and care. All of these aspects need to be continuously negotiated and balanced across research partners through trusting relationships, ongoing dialogs, critical reflections, and reflexivity about the nuances in each of these stages specific to the project.

At the core, PAR projects have to strive for true partnership across all stages of the project to ensure all the parties involved in the project are able to co-govern it to prevent colonization, co-option and appropriation of the stories of the less powerful. It would require pushing the current boundaries of existing structures and systems in research to encompass a reconceptualization of "ownership."

Provided by University of Sheffield