Neither right nor wrong? Ethics of collaboration in transformative research for sustainable futures

The paper situates itself in the context of persistent, complex, and urgent socio-ecological challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and inequality that conventional, disciplinary research has struggled to address. This has spurred a rise in socially engaged approaches including transdisciplinary and transformative research that collaborate with policy-makers, communities, enterprises and civil society to co-produce actionable knowledge. However, such approaches often misfit with institutional traditions geared toward linear, value-neutral research and fixed designs. Transformative research (TR) explicitly embraces a normative agenda to support just sustainability transitions and sees researchers as interveners, raising ethical dilemmas over what counts as good research, whose knowledge to prioritise, and who participates under which conditions. Existing ethical review processes, largely derived from medical ethics and designed for predefined, ostensibly neutral research, inadequately guide TR. The authors therefore ask: Which ethical dilemmas do researchers face in research collaborations that seek to catalyse transformations, and how do they navigate these in collaborative practice? They respond through a collaborative autoethnography, sharing and analysing experiences across axiological, ontological, and epistemological commitments to develop practical wisdom for navigating ethics in situ.

The paper reviews three strands: (1) Transformative research (TR) foundations: TR adopts a normative stance aimed at just and sustainable transitions, emphasises methodological pluralism, pragmatist and critical realist orientations, and recognises multiple realities. It reframes researchers as sense-makers and change agents and values collaboration to elicit diverse, including tacit and phronetic, knowledges for social learning and action. (2) Institutional ethical standards: Dominant ethics frameworks, rooted in medical ethics (e.g., Beauchamp and Childress), focus on pre-defined designs, researcher neutrality, and the primacy of knowledge generation. These conflict with TR’s emergent designs, explicit positionality, and action-orientation. Issues include the inadequacy of one-off informed consent, the fiction of researcher non-involvement, and neglect of action as ethical imperative. (3) Peer heuristics for TR ethics: Scholars propose informal guidance emphasizing practical wisdom and virtues (justice, care, humility, courage), action-oriented research essentials (e.g., working with normative aspects, reflexivity, acknowledging intervention), equity-centered participatory strategies, guiding questions for relationships, and non-Western/relational ethics (e.g., Ubuntu, right relations). Yet principles alone are insufficient; ethics must be enacted through situated practical knowledge and reflexive skills to navigate plural, uncertain contexts.

The authors employed collaborative autoethnography to critically reflect on and synthesise their lived experiences with ethical dilemmas in transformative research collaborations. Over approximately 18 months, they engaged in iterative cycles of writing and discussion in three phases: (1) Starting up: An April 2022 online dialogue (≈30 participants) convened by the Design Impact Transition Platform (Erasmus University Rotterdam) surfaced diverse ethical dilemmas in TR. Interested participants continued deliberations and decided to codify insights in a publication. (2) Exploring: Authors wrote individual narratives of ethical encounters and uploaded them to a shared online document, holding meetings in varying constellations to discuss and refine themes. (3) Co-working: In May 2023, the team conducted a collective sensemaking session, identifying Mertens’ paradigm heuristic (axiology, ontology, epistemology) to structure analysis and elicit additional dilemmas. Intensive co-writing followed, culminating in a December 2023 session to align emergent insights with relevant scholarship. The team is diverse in disciplines, nationalities, and contexts, though largely affiliated with academic institutions in high-income countries. Analytical framing: The narratives were organised around philosophical commitments—axiology (values and ethics), ontology (nature of reality), and epistemology (nature of knowledge)—to interrogate how positionality, institutional norms, power dynamics, and collaborative relations shape ethical dilemmas and responses. The output includes 13 experiential encounters clustered by these dimensions, with cross-references to literature. The approach emphasised reflexivity, positionality statements, and recognition of TR as situated practice and craft, building practical knowledge through experiential learning.

Across three philosophical dimensions, the study surfaces a repertoire of recurring ethical dilemmas and practical navigational strategies: Axiology (values, what ought to be): (1) Role clarity vs. conflicts of interest in co-authorship and supervisory constellations when partners have stakes in programme outcomes; (2) Prioritising among stakeholder interests (e.g., patients, clinicians, managers, policy-makers) under beneficence and justice; (3) Immediate action to improve participants’ learning journeys vs. maintaining fixed designs for academic rigour and publishability; (4) Career precarity and publication imperatives vs. societal impact goals, with disproportionate burdens on early-career scholars; (5) Responding to invitations from incumbents (e.g., fossil energy firms) and risks of co-optation vs. opportunities for inside change, with decisions hinging on conditions for independence, open science, and transformative ambition. Ontology (what is real): (6) Legitimacy of practitioner framings (e.g., science anxiety) vis-à-vis clinical constructs like maths or eco-anxiety; (7) Political labelling (e.g., climate displaced persons) vs. participants’ self-identification and lived multi-causal realities; (8) Risk of reinforcing deficit narratives and othering in research on marginalised communities, necessitating transparency, listening, and trust-building to avoid helicopter or seagull research patterns. Epistemology (knowledge and knowing): (9) Whether and how to engage oppositional groups (e.g., 5G activists) as situated knowers rather than dismissing them, reframing opposition as participation; (10) Researcher voice and influence when findings challenge corporate narratives, especially under asymmetric power and researcher dependency; (11) Navigating favouritism and elite capture in workshops and building safe, facilitated spaces that enable diverse voices, particularly in politicised settings; (12) Tensions for embedded researcher-bureaucrats balancing impact-oriented action with academic publication and co-productive timing for institutional uptake; (13) Persistent challenges of establishing shared understandings and transparent assumptions in participatory modelling, with implications for trust and perceived black-boxing. Overarching insights: Formal, medical-model ethics are insufficient for TR’s emergent, relational, and interventionist practice. Ethical navigation relies on practical wisdom developed through reflexivity, explicit positionality, and skillful facilitation; attention to power, equity, and decolonising knowledge relations; and iterative, processual ethics (e.g., ongoing consent, negotiated roles).

The findings address the research question by demonstrating that ethical dilemmas in transformative research are situated at the intersection of values, realities, and ways of knowing, and are intensified by institutional incentives and power asymmetries in collaborations. The encounters show that deciding what counts as good or right action cannot be outsourced to static principles or one-off ethics approvals; rather, it requires in-situ judgement, positionality awareness, and collective reflexivity to balance obligations to participants, science, funders, and society. Recognising researchers as interveners reframes ethical responsibility toward both process and outcomes, underscoring action as an ethical imperative alongside knowledge production. The study highlights mechanisms for navigating dilemmas: co-defining roles and boundaries to pre-empt conflicts of interest; practising continuous, negotiated consent; creating facilitated spaces to broaden participation and counter elite capture; resisting deficit labels and politically expedient framings that misrepresent lived realities; and designing research that integrates action and learning without sacrificing transparency and rigour. The broader relevance lies in proposing ethics as craftsmanship—building practical wisdom through experiential learning and community dialogue—while calling for institutional transformations (e.g., iterative ethics review, mentoring, moral education) that align academic incentives with TR’s normative aims.

The paper contributes a practice-grounded account of ethics in transformative research by articulating 13 experiential dilemmas across axiological, ontological, and epistemological commitments and by advancing ethics as a situated craft supported by reflexivity and practical wisdom. It shows that formal, principle-based ethics are necessary but insufficient for the emergent, relational nature of TR and that peer heuristics become effective only when internalised as action repertoires. The authors propose a bottom-up approach to ethics—continuous reacting, reflecting, and questioning—that can strengthen both individual and collective capacities to act responsibly in plural, uncertain contexts. They also call for structural and cultural changes in universities and research environments to provide external guidance and accountability, reducing the trade-off between doing good and doing ‘good’ research. Practical steps include moving from one-off approvals to processual ethics review, establishing mentors for TR ethics, and investing in moral education. Future work should explore how institutions can reform ethics governance and incentive structures to support TR’s distinctive demands, how to scale communities of practice for ethical reflexivity, and how to further decolonise knowledge co-production and address Global North–South inequities.

The author team is entirely affiliated with academic institutions, with all but one institution located in high-income countries, which shapes the contexts and dilemmas encountered and limits generalisability. The collaborative autoethnography synthesises disparate but still limited experiences and reflects the positionalities of the authors; thus, it is not intended to be universally representative. While the study foregrounds bottom-up ethics and reflexive practice, these alone cannot ensure ethical conduct without supportive institutional frameworks. The narratives do not include systematic participant perspectives beyond the authors’ experiences, and no quantitative evaluation of outcomes is provided.