Sthembile Ndwandwe and Jaci van Niekerk look back at an ethics session delivered by members of the Bio-economy team at the 26th Conference of the Indigenous Plant Use Forum (IPUF) in August 2024.

The Bio-economy team had the pleasure of being invited by Prof Ben-Erik van Wyk from the University of Johannesburg to facilitate a workshop on “Ethical Research in Ethnobotany” at the IPUF conference earlier this year. The conference took place at the San cultural centre, !Khwa ttu, located on the West Coast of the Western Cape Province in South Africa.

Led by the Bio-economy Chair Prof Rachel Wynberg, the workshop was highly interactive and centred on discussions about conducting research with communities and traditional knowledge holders in an ethical manner. A team of researchers, postgraduate students, and postdoctoral fellows—including Sthembile Ndwandwe, Jaci van Niekerk, Jennifer Whittingham, Jessica Fortes, and Brittany Kesselman, supported the facilitation of the workshop and guided participants through a series of participatory activities.

As an introduction, Jennifer Whittingham, Sthembile Ndwandwe, and Jessica Fortes facilitated a meditative session on “Emotions of discomfort”. This session delved into the challenging emotions and positionalities encountered by early-career researchers and practitioners in biodiversity-based industries. It highlighted often-overlooked ethical dynamics that are inadequately addressed in academic institutions. The session positioned the academy as the “Master’s house” striving for transformation while still relying on the “Master’s tools”—a metaphor borrowed from Audre Lorde’s seminal work, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”.

Jaci van Niekerk led a discussion on ethical considerations across the entire research cycle, emphasising the importance of embedding ethics not just during data collection but throughout all phases of research. This means that reflecting ethically should be an integral part of planning research, doing a literature review, reporting findings, disseminating research, practising aftercare for participants, and ensuring researcher well-being, among others. Loosely based on Helen Kara’s (2018) book “Research Ethics in the Real World”, the session also pointed out key differences between the Euro-Western and indigenous research and ethics paradigms.

In a second input, Jaci van Niekerk highlighted various tools such as codes of conduct and guidelines developed to help researchers and practitioners engage with communities ethically. These included:

• The San Code of Research Ethics
• The Trust Code
• International Society of Ethnobiology Code of Ethics
• Te Ara Tika: Guidelines for Maori Research Ethics
• First Nations Ethics Guide on Research and Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge

Brittany Kesselman, (who co-designed the session with Maya Marshak who could not attend the conference), facilitated an interactive discussion on “How not to do research.” This session underscored the subtle ways in which researchers may unintentionally engage in unethical practices. All the sessions featured dynamic discussions facilitated through buzz groups and other participatory activities, encouraging participants to reflect on their own research and work.

Conducting ethical research is central to the Chair’s focus on engaged scholarship and scholar-activism. Members of the team are conscious of enabling needs-driven research wherever possible; going beyond consent; developing processes based on trust and reciprocity; recognising other ways of knowing and being; acknowledging positionality and privilege; recognising that patents or other forms of Intellectual Property Rights may be antithetical to community values; realising that knowledge needs to be co-created; and going beyond being a researcher to become a community resource. These approaches are embraced by the researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and post-graduates in the Bio-economy Chair.