Epistemic Communities and Reciprocity. Case-study of an Environmental-Health Research Partnership
Résumé
Research ethics concerns three kinds of issues. First, it concerns research practices, like observation, intervention, data collection, presentation of results etc. For all that, it is worth asking how diverse stakeholders taking part in the same research come to understand one another, maintain appropriate relationships, and account for differential power and varying relationships to values. Apart from actual interactions in the research arena, ethics imposes a system of regulation, which is traditionally based on standards or principles dictated by committees that evaluate research projects according to certain gold standards. (This paper does not discuss this second kind of issues). Research ethics is ultimately a field of conceptual analysis that help to clarify the complexities of moral order arising from research activities and enriching conversations among researchers, participants and society in a broader sense. In this last sense, research ethics belongs to the broader field of science studies, in which it addresses the issues generated by the multidimensional nature of scientific activities, their intersection in various axiological or value-oriented registers (epistemic, ethical and social values), and the various positions of research communities with respect to competing social interests. One key transversal issue concerns the participation process itself. In global health research, genuine collaborations and partnerships became an ethical imperative (Emanuel 2004). Building relationships based on trust, mechanisms for sharing information, areas for formal discussions about the research, the ability of the research protocol to be impacted by the participants' involvement ..., all these issues became a matter of strategies or social techniques, as can be seen for example in the concepts of "community engagement" (Tindana 2007). Going away from this instrumental approach, I question in this paper the epistemological dimension of partnership building, which actually has direct ethical implications. My aim is to show that research cooperations between scientists and participants-non-scientists suppose a certain kind of knowledge concerning the epistemic attitudes of each partners, a reciprocal knowledge that contributes to buid something like an "epistemic community". I examined the case of an applied research program conducted by an international team in the brazilian amazon region, about the emergent problems of mercury contamination and Chagas disease related to poor land-use. Three small-scale communities participated in this 4 years project within which various interdisciplinary subprojets were conducted simultaneously about a range of environmental, health and social issues. In 2010, I conducted a qualitative inquiry on the research process itself, observing a serie of field work activities and interviewing researchers and local participants (n=45). I looked for situations of ambiguities and epistemical tensions, and tracked their modalities of resolution. This resulting paper paper focuses on two steps of the research process : when data are collected ; and when the researchers and participants evaluate the "results". (1) Research practices are, at the stage of collection of data, a mainly practical matter : it's all about preparing instruments, organizing transportations, interacting with people, collecting and storing samples, etc. These practices are contiguous and sometimes overlap with mundane local practices like planting, tending, harvesting, daily communications, etc. It appeared that research as a practice in its own right has sometimes a complicated relationship to the custom or local practices. Resolutions of these issue have been found during field experiences (for example, a researcher and a local repearing together a measurement device, giving an occasion of co-learning). (2) Concerning the step of sharing the results, a difficulty arose after a proposed intervention : farmers were encouraged to experiment with agroforestry techniques that differed from their usual slash-and-burn methods, on one of their own plots. This experiment, supported by the research team, was designed to be as realistic as possible, meaning as close as possible to their customary farming practices. Various factors (weather, land features, organizational models, etc.) altered the anticipated conditions and practices planned, resulting in the apparent failure of some of these trials (some plantings, not all, 'yielded nothing'). This lead to the revelation of a discrepancy between the criteria of success for an experiment and the criteria for a successful practice, i.e. since it is an experiment, rewards can be reaped even when the planting itself has not borne any fruit. There was a tension between the conducting of an 'experiment to learn' and the practical reality of obtaining truly operational results (good agricultural output) identified as being positive by the community itself. Dealing with this tension needed a range of mutual learning. These kinds of epistemic discrepancies reveal potential misconceptions - or at least a certain pluralism - about the interpretation of what it is to do "research", and possibly threaten the research partnership. In this case study, these issues have been managed by a range of practical, verbal and contextual activities that contributed to the building of an epistemic community, that is to say a more lucid - a more epistemically virtuous - research partnership.