Reimagining Research Ethics for the Participatory and Transformative Turn: Between Reflexive Accountability and Accountable Reflexivity

Abstract

As academic research becomes more participatory and transformation-oriented, university ethics governance faces mounting pressure to move beyond procedural compliance. Existing ethics review systems are often criticised for risk aversion and standardisation, yet less attention has been paid to how ethics governance is enacted, interpreted, and negotiated by those who administer it. This study examines how institutional ethics review can function not only as a regulatory mechanism, but also as a generative site for institutional learning. Drawing on an action learning research design, we collaborated with members of a university research ethics board in the Netherlands. This approach enabled close examination of how its members navigate evolving ethical demands associated with the growing normative responses and expectations for academia and research institutions. Our analysis identifies a set of persistent tensions that give rise to two patterned governance logics: reflexive accountability, which emphasises safeguarding, institutional defensibility, and ex-ante procedural stabilisation; and accountable reflexivity, which frames ethics as an ongoing, relational practice oriented toward ongoing dialogue and situated judgment. Rather than representing opposing positions, we show how these logics coexist in productive tension in practice. Maintaining this tension helps explain why procedural reforms alone often fall short; it also reveals openings for more adaptive governance arrangements. Methodologically, the study contributes a relational and practice-oriented approach that positions research ethics board members as reflective practitioners rather than procedural gatekeepers. Analytically, it advances debates on ethics reform by reframing governance as a dynamic institutional practice. The paper concludes with four institutional imaginaries that operationalise the governance logics: regulatory ethics governance, embedded ethics facilitation, community-integrated ethics stewardship, and post-institutional research ethics ecosystems. Future research and engagement efforts can use these imaginaries as dialogical and dialectical anchor points for negotiating research ethics governance and institutional change.

1. Introduction

What counts as ethical research has never been merely a matter of following procedure. It is a question of politics, power, and purpose in a research landscape where scholarship is expected to be both impactful and inclusive. While universities have long sought to regulate ethics through formal procedures and protocols, these mechanisms have always been limited and are now increasingly inadequate, even problematic, as ethical demands on research multiply and diversify.

In recent years, renewed attention to scientific credibility has converged with broader societal demands for ethical accountability. Funding agencies, ¹ publishers, ² knowledge holders, civil society organisations, ³ and industry lobbyists ⁴ have become increasingly influential in shaping not only how research is conducted, but also how researchers are trained and evaluated. While such influence is not new, the current moment reflects a pronounced shift: these actors are now entangled with socio-political movements such as the decolonisation of academic knowledge, Open Science, and the global turn toward impact-driven research. Each embeds distinct ethical expectations into institutional practice. Within this evolving research ecosystem, university research ethics boards and committees (hereafter REBCs) are tasked not only with regulatory oversight, but also with interpreting and enacting ethical norms amid expanding and sometimes competing imperatives.

Despite extensive literature on institutional ethics review (see Section 2.1), much of this work examines REBCs primarily from the perspective of researchers navigating approval processes to critique proceduralism, risk-aversion, and form-based compliance. Far less attention has been paid to how these ethical demands are experienced, interpreted, and enacted by REBCs themselves as part of their everyday institutional work. Yet, REBCs operate at the intersection of institutional policy mandates, disciplinary norms, and diverse external expectations, while mediating tensions between academic freedom, methodological innovation, and responsibility for safeguarding scientific credibility.

This article responds to this gap by examining research ethics governance from the perspective of those who enact it. Rather than treating REBCs solely as procedural gatekeepers, we approach ethics review as a form of situated institutional practice shaped by recurring tensions between safeguarding, support, and accountability. We show that many REBCs occupy a structurally paradoxical position: they are charged with administering institutional governance frameworks while also recognising their limitations and unintended consequences in practice. This dual positioning can be generative, as it creates openings for reflection, innovation, and institutional learning within ethics governance. To examine these dynamics, this study asks: How can institutional environments be adapted or transformed to better support researchers in conducting ethical, socially engaged, transformative research? To answer the question, we draw on an action learning research design at a Dutch university. This methodological approach is well suited to the relational and value-laden nature of research governance, as it allowed us to identify patterned institutional responses to recurring tensions and to use these insights as a basis for developing empirically grounded scenarios that reimagine ethics governance.

2. Research Ethics in a Changing Policy and Research Landscape

Research ethics is often framed in institutional and policy discourse as a matter of compliance with pre-defined standards and procedures. In this article, we adopt a broader and more practice-oriented understanding. Research ethics refers to the principles and practices that guide responsible research conduct by safeguarding the rights, dignity, and welfare of those involved and affected by research, while also maintaining the integrity of the research process (Mena & Stenico, 2022). This understanding extends beyond harm prevention and informed consent to encompass fairness, transparency, accountability, and attention to the broader political and societal consequences of research. It safeguards against abuse by researchers and foregrounds power relations, particularly in contexts shaped by intersecting histories of inequality and colonialism, and treats ethical conduct not as a matter of a one-off regulatory hurdle, but as an ongoing, situated practice through which trust between researchers and society is established.

Drawing on this conceptualisation, this section situates the study within three interrelated strands of scholarship. Section 2.1. revisits persistent critiques of institutional research ethics review, with a view to highlighting structural limitations that recur across disciplines and national contexts. Section 2.2 discusses how participatory and transformative research practices expand the scope of ethical responsibility and intensify demands on both researchers and institutions. Section 2.3. reviews normative responses to these developments; it shows how emerging ethical frameworks and expectations place new pressures on ethics governance.

2.1. Persistent Critiques of Institutionalised Research Ethics Review

Institutional ethics review mechanisms, such as Institutional Review Boards and Research Ethics Boards, have long been criticised for their standardised and biomedical foundations. Particularly in the contexts of participatory, community-engaged, and sensitive research, risks (including reputational, relational, emotional, or latent harm) tend to emerge relationally and evolve through context-specific interactions, value commitments, and power dynamics (Ansell et al., 2023; Hosseini et al., 2022). Consequently, one-size-fits-all review procedures often struggle to accommodate these research practices (e.g. Ferris et al., 2021; McCracken, 2020).

Such concerns recur across national settings. Scholars have documented similar tensions in Australia (Israel et al., 2016), Brazil (Guerriero & Bosi, 2015), Canada (Bell, 2016; Gontcharov, 2016), New Zealand (Tolich, 2015), South Africa (Posel & Ross, 2014), the United Kingdom (Dingwall, 2012; Hammersley, 2009), and the United States (Schrag, 2010). They also draw attention to how institutional ethics review can privilege particular ethical imaginaries that are mainly grounded in Western liberal assumptions. Israel (2018) characterises this power asymmetry as a form of “ethical imperialism (p. 89),” whereby institutional ethics frameworks shaped by liberal-individualist logics crowd out alternative ethical traditions centred on care, reciprocity, and non-contractual trust.

Critics have also questioned the credibility and legitimacy of ethics review processes themselves. Inconsistencies in decision-making, limited transparency, and insufficient contextual sensitivity have raised doubts about whether REBCs can adequately engage with the lived realities of researchers and participants (Brown, 2023; Cox et al., 2020; Iphofen & Tolich, 2018; Wood & Kahts-Kramer, 2023). These procedural shortcomings are compounded by recent evidence suggesting that both reviewers and applicants may overestimate their own ethical competence (Lindkvist et al., 2024).

While these critiques consistently call for more context-sensitive approaches to ethics review, they also expose a persistent implementation challenge. Translating ethical ideals into institutional practice remains difficult within governance structures designed for standardisation and risk management (Posel & Ross, 2014; Potthoff et al., 2023). Existing literature thus helps explain why ethics governance is under strain; however, it does not fully account for how ethical responsibility itself is being reshaped by changing research practices and expectations. The following section elaborates on this point.

2.2. Expanding Ethical Responsibility in Participatory and Transformative Research

Participatory and transformative research approaches further intensify the limitations identified above. Often associated with post-normal science (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993; Ravetz, 2006), these approaches unfold in research contexts where facts are uncertain, values are contested, stakes are high, and decisions are urgent. They arise from growing recognition that conventional models of knowledge production, rooted in ideals of objectivity, neutrality, and detachment, are ill-suited to addressing complex, contested, and uncertain societal challenges such as climate change (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001; Simon & Vienni-Baptista, 2025). In response, scholars have advocated for research practices that cross disciplinary and sectoral boundaries and engage diverse societal actors (Kastenhofer, 2024; Lang et al., 2012; Schneider et al., 2019; Scholz, 2020; Strand, 2017).

The collaborative and engaged nature of participatory and transformative research reconfigures researchers’ roles, thereby expanding both the scope and the stakes of ethical responsibility (Bulten et al., 2021). Ethical dilemmas arise not only from choices of research methods, but from long-term relationships with collaborators, communities, decision-makers, and other stakeholders (Scholz & Renn, 2024; Wittmayer et al., 2024). Researchers must navigate competing value commitments and preferences (Cash et al., 2002; Swilling et al., 2025), balance scientific rigour and practical relevance (Lang et al., 2012; Nowotny et al., 2001), and engage with contested notions of what constitutes as ‘good’ research and legitimate impact (Huang et al., 2024; McLean et al., 2020; Partelow et al., 2025). These dilemmas are deeply situated in researchers’ positionalities and institutional responsibilities.

At the same time, expanding ethical responsibility introduces new risks and unintended consequences. As society increasingly calls on researchers to contribute directly to socio-political, socio-ecological, and socio-economic transformation (e.g. UNESCO, 2024; United Nations, 2013; World Science Forum, 2024), pressures to align with policy agendas or activist causes intensify. Well-intentioned efforts to ‘do good’ can inadvertently reproduce extractive dynamics, instrumentalise community knowledge, or overstate the capacity of research to deliver transformative change (Harding, 2023; Popa et al., 2015). These tensions highlight the limits of treating ethical responsibility as an individual attribute and point instead to the institutional conditions under which ethical judgment and accountability are exercised.

2.3. Normative Responses and Emerging Expectations for Ethics Governance

In response to these expanded ethical demands, a diverse set of normative frameworks and engagement principles have emerged to guide participatory and transformative research practice (e.g. Caniglia et al., 2023; Fazey et al., 2018). Some focus on a feminist ethos of care (Gilligan, 1993; Noddings, 1984; Staffa et al., 2022; Tronto, 2020). They also draw on Indigenous protocols to prioritise reciprocity, community consent, and relational accountability to people, land, and the more-than-human world (Datta, 2015; Donald, 2012; Gould et al., 2023).

Other frameworks focus more explicitly on power, justice, and inclusivity. Calls for epistemic justice (Meisch, 2024) and decolonial research ethics highlight how knowledge production is shaped by structural inequalities and whose knowledge is recognised as legitimate. These perspectives emphasise researchers’ responsibilities to address asymmetries of power and to make explicit the normative commitments to the “right relations (Gram-Hanssen et al., 2022, p. 673)” and equitable research collaboration and partnerships (Tetley & Koch, 2024).

A small but growing strand of scholarship emphasises researchers’ ethical responsibility for societal transformation (e.g. Gardner et al., 2021; Kaiser, 2025; Meskens, 2024). Concepts such as “political rigour (Temper et al., 2019, p. 164)” underscore the need for transparency about values, allegiances, and intended outcomes alongside methodological robustness. Building on renewed calls for impact-oriented research, Greenwood and Lee (2025) and Jensen et al. (2025) advocate that ethics review bodies should move beyond narrow gatekeeping roles, toward serving as enablers of research that contributes to societal and political transformation.

In this section, we elucidate that ethics review processes are increasingly positioned not only as mechanisms of harm prevention, but as institutional sites where ethical responsibility, normative commitments, and societal relevance are negotiated. These scholarly discourses thus point to the limits of procedural reforms alone and underscore the need to examine how ethical dilemmas are lived and negotiated within institutional governance practices. This is indeed the issue we take up empirically in the remainder of the paper after explaining the study design.

3. An Action Learning Research Design

This section begins by introducing our methodological orientation to action learning and its relevance for examining ethics governance as a situated and relational practice. We then describe the policy context that shaped the study to situate the inquiry within the evolving European and Dutch research ethics landscape. Next, we detail the data collection and analytical process, which unfolded through four interlinked phases.

3.1. Methodological Approach

This study adopted an action learning research design (Coghlan & Coughlan, 2010), an iterative and participatory methodology grounded in the principles of action research. Action learning is particularly well-suited to the study of ethics governance, as it enables cycles of inquiry, reflection, and co-learning that are embedded in real-time institutional dynamics. Rather than treating REBCs solely as subjects of study, this approach positioned them (along with other institutional actors) as co-researchers and reflective practitioners. By embedding ourselves in ongoing institutional practices, we sought not only to identify persistent challenges within the study context, but also to co-generate actionable insights and to inform institutional innovation (Coughlan et al., 2021). This orientation thus aligns with our aim to create conditions for co-productive engagement across diverse roles and perspectives within the university for change.

The study was conducted at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), selected for three primary reasons. First, the first two authors initiated the inquiry building on their previous work on ethical research in that university. Second, the second author has been engaged in ongoing work related to research ethics education at EUR, which provided a foundation of mutual trust. Third, EUR has demonstrated a sustained institutional interest in fostering an ethical research culture. For example, the development of the ‘Dilemma Game’ mobile app in 2020––a tool for exploring research ethics dilemmas—signals a proactive approach to supporting responsible research conduct (Else, 2022). Additionally, the introduction of a cross-faculty secretarial support system for REBCs has enabled greater coordination, responsiveness, and institutional learning. These factors made EUR a conducive site for enacting an embedded action learning process.

3.2. Institutional and Policy Context Shaping the Study

In Europe, the formalisation of institutional research ethics review outside biomedical and clinical research is a relatively recent development. A key reference point is the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity ⁵ introduced by ALLEA (ALL European Academies) in 2010 and subsequently revised. This document series now functions as a foundational framework for national policies, funding requirements, and institutional guidelines across European universities.

The Code centres on research integrity, which is defined through principles such as reliability, honesty, respect, and accountability (ALLEA, 2017). This values-based approach reframes ethics not as a matter of procedural compliance alone, but as part of a broader commitment to research quality and responsible scientific conduct (see ENERI, 2020). In doing so, it shifts the emphasis from individual risk management to collective responsibility for maintaining trust in the research system.

Subsequent revisions of the European Code have expanded its scope to address emerging ethical challenges, including those related to digital technologies, social media, data governance, and research in crisis-affected contexts. These additions reflect a growing awareness of the situated and evolving nature of ethical practice in contemporary research environments. The most recent 2023 revision underscores a further shift toward decentralised accountability. It calls for “active responsibility” from all actors involved in research—not only individual researchers, but also institutions, funders, and societal partners (ALLEA, 2023, p. 4). Importantly, the updated Code explicitly addresses citizen science and participatory research, urging those involved to protect both individual and collective interests while contributing to “society at large” (p. 4). While this expanded ethical horizon is promising, it also increases the interpretive burden placed on REBCs, researchers, and research collaborators, particularly in politically sensitive or contested fields. This is thus an issue that directly shaped the empirical focus of this study.

It is worth noting that, despite this growing scope, national-level uptake remains uneven. The European Code is a non-binding framework for self-regulation, and while this flexibility allows adaptation to local contexts, it has also resulted in a fragmented policy landscape. Divergent national regulations and funder expectations contribute to misalignment and uncertainty between researchers, reviewers, and institutions (Godecharle et al., 2014; Lanzerath, 2019). Moreover, research ethics governance in the Netherlands is shaped by a relatively decentralised system. Unlike countries with national ethics committees overseeing all research, Dutch universities largely hold responsibility for developing their own procedures within the framework of the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2018). Ethics review for social sciences and humanities research is not mandated by law, resulting in institutional variation and ongoing debates about scope, consistency, and resourcing (e.g. Gopalakrishna et al., 2022). At the same time, recent initiatives such as the national Guideline Quality Assurance of Research Involving Human Subjects (NFU, 2023) have sought to provide shared standards while maintaining flexibility for disciplinary and institutional differences. This evolving national landscape forms an important backdrop for our case study at EUR, where the ethics review policy went into effect on January 1, 2021. ⁶

3.3. Data Collection

This action learning study spanned a year and unfolded through four interlinked and iterative phases: (1) actor and content mapping, (2) problem identification and co-framing, (3) formation of the action learning group, and (4) collective sense-making and co-inquiry. These phases are described in detail below.

The initial phase focused on understanding the institutional and policy context shaping research ethics governance at EUR. To this end, the first author mapped relevant actors, structures, and normative frameworks. This included reviewing internal documents (e.g. Principles and requirements pertaining to Research Ethics Review at EUR, 2021), and regional-level guidance, such as the Guideline Quality Assurance of Research Involving Human Subjects (2023), the Code of Ethics for Research in the Social and Behavioural Sciences Involving Human Participants (originally accepted by the Deans of Social Sciences in the Netherlands in 2016 and updated in recent versions), the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2018), and EU’s Ethics in Social Science and Humanities guidance (2021). This phase also enabled the identification of key informants with expertise in ethics governance and/or firsthand experience of ethical dilemmas in transformative research, many of whom were subsequently invited to participate in interviews and workshops.

The second phase focused on surfacing and co-framing the core challenges faced by REBCs in adapting to emerging research practices. This was pursued through two parallel processes: one initiated internally by EUR’s leadership and led by the third author as part of institutional monitoring and policy evaluation, and another led by an external researcher (i.e. the first author) as an organisational case study. The second author (and the remaining authors in the subsequent phases) acted as a boundary spanner who wove connections, facilitated exchange, and enabled synergies between the first and third authors, as well as with the broader EUR system. Together, these processes generated qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with REBC chairs, ⁷ members, and policy officers. Demographic details of the interviewees are provided in Table 1. All interviews were transcribed and analysed thematically to identify key tensions, dilemmas, and latent possibilities within the current ethics governance system, with a view to guiding the design of subsequent action learning cycles.

Table 1.

Demographic details of the interviewees

​	Study 1: Internal monitoring and policy evaluation	Study 2: Organisational case study
Interview period	November 2023-February 2024	June-July 2024
Total numbers of Interviewees	20	17
Role of Interviewees within the REBCs at EUR	Chair: 10	Chair: 3
	Reviewer: 10	Reviewer: 9
		Policy officer (incl. secretary): 5
Gender breakdown	Male: 13	Male: 8
	Female: 7	Female: 9

While the interview data were not collected for direct comparison, the parallel processes enabled triangulation between insider and outsider interpretations as well as created a safe environment for reflection on sensitive issues, such as informal workarounds and institutional inertia. The combination of insider familiarity with institutional dynamics and outsider distance countered some of the weaknesses of each approach: interviewees could choose whom they felt more comfortable speaking to, dependencies on insiders were balanced by the outsider’s neutrality, and insider knowledge of the system was complemented by the outsider’s ability to surface blind spots.

The third phase focused on forming the action learning group. Building on insights generated in the previous phases, we invited interviewees, key stakeholders, and members of the broader EUR research community to two interactive workshops held at EUR in June and October 2024. Approximately 40 individuals participated, with some attending both sessions. These workshops laid the foundation for an emergent action learning group—a temporary, cross-role community of reflective practitioners. Through case-based discussions, role-playing, and collective mapping, participants engaged with real-world ethical dilemmas, ⁸ using these to reflect on the study’s preliminary findings. Participants explored gaps between institutional processes and the lived realities of research ethics from diverse standpoints, including those of community-engaged researchers, university administrators, supervisors, students, and university partners. These engagements supported the co-articulation of shared concerns (reported in Section 4) and cultivated a collective motivation for institutional change (discussed in Section 5). Fieldnotes, team reflections, and participant contributions were incorporated into our ongoing analysis.

The fourth phase focused on collaborative sense-making. Key actors and workshop participants were invited to formally join the action learning group, resulting in the author team of this manuscript. Insights from previous phases were brought into this group to co-explore the study’s central research question: How can institutional environments be adapted or transformed to better support researchers in conducting ethical, socially engaged, transformative research? The manuscript-writing process served as a boundary object for reflection, dialogue, and co-creation. Through collaborative drafting and three team meetings between January and May 2025, the authors exchanged notes, learned from one another’s perspectives, and negotiated diverse imaginaries of what ethics governance could become. This sense-making process allowed us to hold a wide range of concerns, values, and tensions in productive dialogue rather than resolving them prematurely into fixed policy or practice recommendations.

A key outcome of the three team meetings is the development of four future-oriented scenarios presented in Section 6. Our objective was to propose provocations for broader dialogue. This analytical step also reflects our commitment to collective learning for institutional change: engaging as reflective practitioners, embracing complexity, and creating space for plural values and orientations. These scenarios are not predictive forecasts or prescriptive models but exploratory tools to support institutional adaptation and policy deliberation. Scenarios help researchers and decision-makers engage with complexity by translating abstract governance dilemmas into tangible, relational narratives grounded in situated contexts. They make visible the values, trade-offs, and consequences that may be obscured by procedural or linear representations (​Van der Heijden, 2004). In sustainability and systems thinking literature, scenarios have been used to clarify assumptions, identify causal linkages, and explore implications within dynamic social-ecological systems (​Carpenter et al., 2006; ​Bohensky, et al., 2006). More broadly, scenarios offer “possible views of the world” (Ringland, 2002, p. 3) that can surface multiple perspectives, challenge dominant logics, and create space for imagining alternative futures (Johnson, et al., 2012). In our case, the four scenarios also enabled members of the action learning group to carry forward concrete actions across diverse professional settings and institutional scales.

3.4. Data Analysis and Ethical Interpretation

To enhance analytical transparency, we clarify how insights from interviews, workshops, and reflective exchanges were integrated across phases of the study. Interview transcripts from Study 1 and Study 2 were initially analysed separately. Author 1 and Author 3 conducted first-round coding using a hybrid inductive-deductive strategy: combining emergent patterns with sensitising concepts from the semi-structured interview guides.

In a second step, the first three authors compared preliminary coding and jointly reviewed selected transcripts to identify convergences, discrepancies, and blind spots across insider and outsider perspectives. This involved an additional round of focused coding by Author 1 and Author 3, with validation by Author 2. Insights from this joint analysis directly informed the design of the action learning workshops in the third phase of data collection, shaping the cases and prompts used to explore real-world ethical dilemmas.

Workshop fieldnotes, participant contributions, and facilitation artefacts were subsequently analysed using the consolidated codebook and compared with interview findings. Through this triangulation, three cross-cutting institutional tensions were distilled (Section 4). These tensions informed the development of the two governance logics presented in Section 5 and served as generative axes for scenario development during collaborative sense-making (Section 6).

Ethical principles guided not only data collection but also data interpretation and analytical decision-making. Given the institutionally embedded and participatory nature of the study, particular attention was paid to role negotiation, power asymmetries, and the ethical handling of disagreement. The development of scenarios provided a structured way for the author team to hold divergent perspectives without forcing consensus; it allowed differences in interpretation to remain visible and generative. When disagreements arose, the team deliberately used multiple communication formats, including smaller group discussions and open channels for individual correspondence, to reduce the dominance of particular voices in larger group settings and to support more reflexive collective sense-making.

4. Surfacing and Co-Framing Institutional Tensions in Ethics Governance

This section synthesises the interview data around three recurrent institutional tensions that REBCs navigate in practice. These tensions reflect structural fault lines in contemporary ethics governance where REBCs must balance competing responsibilities shaped by institutional mandates, professional judgment, and evolving expectations of ethical research. They also illustrate how ethics review operates as a form of situated governance. This analysis provides the empirical grounding for the governance logics developed in Section 5 and the future-oriented scenarios imagined in Section 6.

4.1. Tension A: Safeguarding versus Institutional Support

REBCs consistently described ethics review as a mechanism for ensuring compliance with university policies and national regulations. Some framed their role as helping researchers “play by the rules (1-R9),” because “so much is happening in science” that it is increasingly unrealistic to expect individual researchers “to be able to oversee it all (1-C3).” Others emphasised the protective function of review, such that researchers “respect institutional ethics and national requirements (1-C9).” As one reviewer put it bluntly: “Yes, we help [researchers] comply with the rules and laws. Not because we like all that much, because otherwise it can cause big shit if you don’t (1-R4).”

At the same time, REBCs also described their role as safeguarding not only participants, but also researchers themselves, particularly those conducting fieldwork in politically sensitive settings such as “dangerous countries or within interest groups (1-C7)” (also 2-S1, 2-S2, 2-M4). This protective role often extended to addressing power asymmetries within research teams. One interviewee recalled a case involving a female student research assistant expected to conduct interviews in a male-dominated setting. This prompted the interviewee to challenge the principal investigator, “Is this safe?” and require a risk mitigation strategy to protect the student during fieldwork (2-M4).

While acknowledging “a legalistic aspect (1-R4)” of their work, most REBCs resisted a purely mechanistic application of rules. Instead, they emphasised collective experience, professional judgment, and sensitivity to disciplinary and situational nuance. As one Chair noted, review “is not about stopping research but steering it in the right direction (1-C5).” Others described their role in relational terms by highlighting efforts to build “a community of practice where [researchers] learn from each other […] and from making mistakes (2-M4).”

4.2 Tension B: Procedural Snapshot versus in Situ Ethical Reflection

A second tension concerned the temporal limits of ethics review. Many REBCs argued that ex ante approval provides only a snapshot and is poorly suited to the dynamic ethical challenges that arise during research. These challenges often involve uncertainty, shifting relationships, and dilemmas that cannot be anticipated through a standardised form. As one Chair put it, “things change after approval. That’s when the real ethical challenges begin; but by then, [REBCs] are no longer involved (1-C2).” Others also stressed that “research ethics is not about filling out the form” but “a dialogical process where [researchers] are constantly learning and relearning and assessing the risks and the opportunities” (2-M5, also 2-M4 and 2-C3).

This tension became especially visible in discussions of research independence, which is a core principle of the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2018). Several REBCs questioned the applicability of this principle in collaborative research contexts. One Chair described it as a “dubious” concept, especially in research involving external actors (1-C2). Another Chair asked: “How do we know whether a certain firm will harm the independence?” (1-C7). Although REBCs could advise on contracts or data ownership, “ensuring independence is beyond [the] mandate” of REBCs (1-R2). Reflecting on contemporary research environments where collaborations with industry, pharmaceutical firms, or state agencies are common, one reviewer remarked:

We’re talking about research teams here most of the time or even in a subproject, a sub work package of a larger international or consortium project. So I don't understand why that ‘perform truly independent research’ is necessary. I get the spirit of it, but I think that it's probably a little bit more complex than that for most projects. (1-R6)

REBCs also raised concerns about downstream and long-term risks, such as data misuse by partners or unintended consequences for marginalised communities. In such cases, epistemic uncertainty and moral ambiguity were unavoidable. As one Chair noted: “Are we actually also looking at the long-term potential implications of that? That’s not entirely predictable either (1-C2).” Similarly, another interviewee cautioned against a false sense of permission that ethics approval might give researchers by stating:

That’s a broader question of what a community even entails We’re all parts of a lot of different types of communities. Sometimes, we don’t even know it. So who gets to speak for you? [Even] if someone says, Yeah, sure. That doesn’t give you also a free license to then just do whatever you want, which is not what an ethics approval should be. (2-M8)

Despite these limitations, REBCs continued to attribute pedagogical value to ethics review. Feedback processes were seen as supporting early-career researchers in developing ethical awareness and judgement. As one Chair explained: “I hope that people learn from the feedback” and begin to “apply the ethical principles themselves as much as possible (1-C10).” Another Chair shared how students “come back with a new application and a very good story of how they would address [the issue]. For me, already [...] something effective, because when they go to the field, they have already thought [about ethics] (1-C7).”

4.3 Tension C: Centralised Ethical Authority versus Distributed Responsibility

A third tension concerned how REBCs understood the locus of ethical responsibility within the university. While REBCs recognised their formal mandate to review and approve research protocols, many were uneasy about becoming the primary or sole locus of ethical authority. Several REBCs expressed concerns that ethics review risked being reduced to “a hoop and stamping machine (1-R4)” in which responsibility for ethical research is effectively outsourced to a central committee rather than embedded within everyday research practice.

In response, some emphasised the value of ethics review as offering “a systematic way (1-R7)” to engage with ethical dilemmas, particularly in relation to scientific standards and institutional accountability (also 2-M4, 2-C2). From this perspective, centralised review was seen as necessary for ensuring consistency, safeguarding institutional credibility, and providing a visible point of responsibility within increasingly complex research environments.

At the same time, others cautioned against overburdening REBCs with responsibility for changing institutional research culture. While supportive of broader ethical ambitions, such as enhancing the “augmented capabilities of scientists (1-R4),” they argued that ethical practice cannot be secured through REBCs alone. Instead, responsibility must be distributed across departments, supervisors, research groups, and training environments. As one reviewer put it, “a lot more is needed than an ethics committee. [It] is about [the] culture in a department and how you train researchers and how you look in on each other etc. (1-R4).” Over-emphasising the role of REBCs, they warned, risked reinforcing their image as “control bodies (1-R4),” which can undermine their potential to act as peer support structures.

Concerns about institutional reputation further complicated this tension. Some interviewees expressed discomfort with ethics review being framed as a mechanism of “reputation management” or a strategic asset for enhancing a university’s global standing (2-M6). One Chair criticised policy language suggesting that ethics review would “increase our opportunities” by calling it “not a very ethical statement (1-C9).” For these REBCs, such framing risked centralising ethical authority within administrative logics oriented toward institutional protection, rather than supporting shared ethical responsibility grounded in research practice.

5. Collective Sense-Making: From Institutional Tensions to Governance Logics

The findings identified in Section 4 reveal two patterned responses that REBCs enact when navigating institutional tensions. We conceptualise these responses as two governance logics: reflexive accountability and accountable reflexivity. Rather than fixed models or individual positions, these logics make visible the normative assumptions shaping contemporary ethics governance.

5.1. Two Governance Logics in Tension

The first governance logic, reflexive accountability, frames ethics governance primarily as a mechanism for anticipating and mitigating harm. It responds most directly to the tensions identified in Section 4 around safeguarding integrity and institutional responsibility. This logic thus positions REBCs as protectors of research participants, researchers, and the institution itself. Ethical authority is therefore concentrated within centralised review bodies, with responsibility anchored in defensible approval decisions.

While reflexive accountability incorporates reflective elements (e.g. encouraging researchers to think carefully about risks), it remains anchored in the assumption that ethical responsibility can and should be largely secured through ex ante procedures. Reflection is therefore typically enacted through front-loaded, form-based review processes aimed at ensuring procedural and legal compliance before research begins. This orientation provides institutional clarity and reassurance, but it also risks abstracting ethics from the evolving and lived complexities of fieldwork, collaboration, and engaged research practice.

The second governance logic, accountable reflexivity, frames ethics governance as an ongoing, situated practice, rather than a judgment settled at the point of approval. This logic emerges most clearly from the tensions identified in Section 4 between procedural snapshots and in-situ ethical reflection. Under this orientation, ethical responsibility is understood as unfolding across the research lifecycle and must be continually interpreted as contexts, relationships, and risks evolve.

REBCs enacting this logic emphasised dialogue, learning and support over approval requirements. Ethics review was framed as a pedagogical and relational process that supports researchers in anticipating, recognising, and responding to ethical dilemmas as they arise in practice. In some cases, they described experimenting with practices aligned to this logic, such as framing feedback dialogically rather than evaluatively to stimulate reflection and peer exchange. Accountability within this logic is thus oriented less toward institutional defensibility and more toward distributed responsibility to research participants, collaborators, and the broader societal purposes of research.

These two governance logics should not be read as opposing positions to be resolved. Rather, they coexist in practice and are held in tension within REBCs’ work. It is precisely this tension—between stabilisation and openness, protection and learning, and centralised authority and distributed responsibility—that structures how ethics governance is enacted and contested in institutional settings. In our collective-sensemaking meetings, the two logics helped the action learning group translate the empirical patterns in REBCs’ practice into an analytical lens for rethinking how ethics governance might be otherwise organised. In the following section, we show how this tension becomes analytically productive for imagining alternative configurations of ethics governance.

5.2. Governance Logics as Generative Axes

The institutional tensions surfaced in Section 4, when interpreted through the two governance logics discussed in Section 5.1, are translated here into two intersecting analytical axes that structure the scenarios presented in Section 6. The conceptualisation of these axes was developed through collective sense-making within the author team as part of the action learning process.

The first axis concerns the purpose of ethics governance, which ranges from institutional safeguarding to distributed ethical stewardship. At one end, ethics governance is oriented toward protecting the credibility and legitimacy of science through codified standards, risk management, and formal review procedures. At the other, it is oriented toward enabling practice that supports researchers and collaborators in exercising situated ethical judgment in response to uncertainty, power asymmetries, and emergent dilemmas across the research lifecycle.

The second axis concerns the structure of ethics governance, which ranges from centralised oversight to distributed enablement. Centralised models focus on formal authority within REBCs or equivalent bodies responsible for review and approval. Distributed configurations, by contrast, embed ethical responsibility across the research ecosystem through mechanisms such as embedded ethics officers in research groups, peer-led forums, advisory support, and community-based review processes.

These two axes provide the conceptual bridge between empirical insight and institutional imagination. They underpin the four illustrative scenarios introduced in the following section. Each scenario explores a distinct combination of purpose and structure in future-oriented configurations of university-based ethics governance.

6. The Future of Ethics Governance for Participatory and Transformative Research

Grounded in empirical material presented in Section 4 and refined through collective sense-making, the four scenarios operationalise the governance logics developed in Section 5 into institutional futures. The institutional adaptations summarised in Table 2 and Figure 1 reflect responses proposed by interviewees and workshop participants to the limitations and challenges they identified in current ethics review practices. These adaptations combine practical experimentation with normative aspirations aimed at reconfiguring ethics governance to better support participatory and transformative research. Several elements are also informed by practices observed in other national and institutional contexts, including the roles of Data Stewards and Engagement Officers at EUR, community-led ethics frameworks embedded in Indigenous research protocols at Trent University in Canada, and the appointed Ethics Advisors or Ethics Advisory Boards for Horizon Europe projects.

Table 2.

Four Imaginaries for Research Ethics Governance to Better Support Participatory and Transformative Research

Illustrative scenario	Key institutional adaptation	Trade-offs	Potential benefits
Regulatory ethics governance: Compliance-focused, centralised oversight	Expand REBCs’ mandates; align with legal departments; standardise exemptions; require mandatory training; use IT-based dashboards for lifecycle monitoring and audit trails	Creates a surveillance culture; reinforces top-down control; risks compliance-driven disengagement; limited attention to wider social and ecological impacts	Strengthens scientific credibility and participant protection; shields researchers and institutions; ensures consistent procedural safeguards
Embedded Ethics Facilitation: Iterative learning and supportive monitoring	Transform REBCs into learning hubs; use pre-review consultations and iterative feedback; reframe IT monitoring as supportive check-ins; embed ethics training and peer learning.	Requires sustained investment and coordination; iterative cycles may slow research; risk of overburdening staff	Positions REBCs as guides; fosters continuous ethical reflection; integrates societal and ecological impacts into the research lifecycle
Community-Integrated Ethics Stewardship: Decentralised, relationship-based governance	Decentralise governance; prioritise community-led protocols; reduce university review to a minimal checklist; position REBCs as coordinators and mediators; invest in trust-building	Lack of structure can unsettle researchers; negotiated outputs may affect academic independence; risks overlooking indirect or long-term impacts; clinical contexts still need external safeguards	Enhances legitimacy and reciprocity; builds shared responsibility; strengthens links between institutional and societal ethics
Post-REBCs Ethics Ecosystem: Fully embedded, decentralised ethics	Phase out formal REBCs; embed ethics officers in projects; create drop-in labs, advice hotlines, whistleblower mechanisms, and peer reflection spaces; integrate embedded ethics approaches	Accountability challenges without formal oversight; uneven practices; lack of clear rules may discomfort researchers; conflicting values can complicate negotiation	Embeds ethics as ongoing practice; integrates wider societal and ecological impacts; enables adaptive, context-sensitive governance

Bold text highlights the titles of the four illustrative governance scenarios to facilitate comparison across the institutional adaptations, trade-offs, and potential benefits associated with each scenario.

Figure 1.

Two axes and four imaginaries of the future of ethics governance

6.1. Scenario A. Regulatory Ethics Governance

In this imagined future, ethics governance is a cornerstone of institutional oversight. REBCs hold expanded mandates and work closely with legal departments. Only high-risk or politically sensitive research undergoes full review, as exemption policies are standardised and all researchers complete mandatory training. An IT-based compliance dashboard tracks lifecycle monitoring and generates audit trails.

The system is credited with strengthening scientific credibility, protecting research participants, and shielding researchers and institutions from reputational risk when engaging with external partners. Yet many academics describe the emergence of a culture of surveillance. The pervasive monitoring infrastructure raises questions about whether the balance between safeguarding and trust has tipped too far toward control. Critics also argue that this model’s emphasis on compliance and immediate participants leaves little space to assess wider social and ecological consequences, including indirect or long-term impacts beyond the study’s formal scope.

6.2. Scenario B. Embedded Ethics Facilitation

In this future, REBCs have evolved into institutional learning hubs. While retaining formal authority, they prioritise guidance and advisory functions, rather than gatekeeping. Ethics review becomes a dialogical and iterative process supported by pre-review consultations, method-specific coaching, and ongoing feedback. An IT-based monitoring system is reframed as a relational tool: rather than enforcing compliance, it enables periodic check-ins during the research period through which ethics officers engage with research teams to navigate emerging dilemmas and reflect on indirect or long-term impacts of their work on wider stakeholders or systems.

Ethics training modules, peer learning spaces, and mentoring infrastructures are woven into academic programmes, enabling ethical issues to be addressed as they arise rather than as a one-time hurdle. This model broadens deliberation beyond immediate participants to include societal and ecological impacts throughout the research lifecycle. However, it requires sustained institutional investment and careful coordination among actors with diverse ethical frameworks and value systems. Some researchers and partners express frustration with the slower pace of research that extended reflection and iterative feedback can entail, particularly in contexts marked by urgency.

6.3. Scenario C. Community-Integrated Ethics Stewardship

In this future, ethics governance is grounded in relationships and shared responsibility among academics, community knowledge-holders, and co-researchers (formerly referred to as participants). Ethical practices are shaped through ongoing negotiation, with community-led protocols taking precedence. University-based ethics review is reduced to a minimal checklist, typically triggered only after local agreements are reached. REBCs shift toward roles of coordination, capacity-building, and conflict mediation, offering ethical expertise when needed and bridging institutional and societal boundaries.

This model enhances legitimacy and reciprocity, particularly in community-driven and decolonial research. At the same time, it introduces new tensions. Some researchers express discomfort with reduced formal structure and at times prefer clearer directives when setting up ethical protocols. Others highlight that deeply negotiated decision-making over priorities and outputs can create uncertainty around academic independence and career trajectories, especially when disciplinary publication standards or institutional mandates conflict with collective priorities. Negotiations also raise questions about balancing societal impact with the demands of academic progression when outputs are co-shaped with communities.

While this approach often broadens deliberation to include local social and ecological contexts, it can still focus narrowly on immediate partners, leaving indirect or long-term impacts underexplored. Clinical and medical research exposes further boundary conditions: patients may consent to harmful participation in the hope of a cure, highlighting the continued need for external safeguards and top-down protections in certain settings.

6.4. Scenario D. Post-REBCs Ethics Ecosystem

In this imagined future, formal REBCs are phased out entirely. Ethical decision-making becomes a fully embedded and relational practice distributed across the research lifecycle. Institutions assign ethics officers to large projects, akin to data stewards, to accompany research teams from inception to completion. Drawing on the embedded ethics model from medical AI and technology governance (e.g. McLennan et al., 2022), these officers work collaboratively with researchers through ongoing, iterative reflection rather than formal approval.

Ethics support is provided through a network of campus-wide resources, including drop-in ethics labs, anonymous advice hotlines, whistleblower protection mechanisms ⁹ , peer-led reflection circles, and regular check-in sessions. This infrastructure is designed to enable continuous ethical reflection and integrate wider assessments of intended and unintended impacts on broader societal and ecological systems.

Despite these strengths, the model raises concerns about accountability and consistency. Some researchers are uneasy with the lack of formal structure and express a preference for clear protocols when designing studies. The highly relational nature of this ecosystem also brings difficult questions to the fore, including how to navigate conflicting values involving collaborators with extremist or harmful agendas. Excessive reliance on individualised reflexivity can produce reflection fatigue among researchers (e.g. Stoker et al., 2025). Ethics officers themselves also worry about sustaining accountability without formal oversight in complex institutional environments where structural and systemic factors shape ethical possibilities.

7. Conclusion, Limitations, and Future Research

7.1. Returning to Values and Cultural Shifts

University-based ethics review mechanisms are under increasing scrutiny. Recent evidence from the Netherlands shows that fewer than half of the academics regularly engage in practices associated with responsible science, such as pre-registration, with even lower uptake among early-career researchers (Gopalakrishna et al., 2022). While such findings are often interpreted as a failure of individual responsibility, they also point to a deeper problem: debates about ethics governance are often framed as a binary choice between individual self-regulation and institutional control. This framing obscures the more complex institutional dynamics through which ethical responsibility is enacted, negotiated, and sustained in practice.

By examining ethics governance from the perspective of REBCs, this study reveals a set of persistent institutional tensions that complicate this binary. These tensions give rise to two patterned governance logics—reflexive accountability and accountable reflexivity—through which ethical responsibility is interpreted and justified under conditions of uncertainty, plural values, and competing demands. Rather than representing opposing positions, these logics coexist within REBCs’ everyday work and structure how ethics governance is enacted and contested.

Drawing on concepts such as troubled subjectivity (Dashtipour et al., 2024) and the self as a site of conflict (Bergoffen & Burke, 2024; De Beauvoir, 1953), we argue that this tension should not be resolved through further procedural refinement. Reflexive accountability provides structure, safeguards, and institutional reassurance; accountable reflexivity foregrounds the relational, indeterminate, and value-laden character of ethical practice. It is precisely in navigating between these orientations that possibilities for transforming ethics governance emerge.

The four imaginaries developed in this article translate these tensions into alternative institutional futures to better support participatory and transformative research. Rather than prescribing solutions, these imaginaries function as devices for making visible how different institutional configurations of purpose and structure foreground distinct values and trade-offs. Each imaginary highlights a particular way of balancing science integrity, institutional risk, and support for methodological plurality. They demonstrate that the future of ethics governance hinges less on selecting a single model than on negotiating the cultural and value commitments embedded in governance arrangements.

Importantly, the study’s participatory and action-learning design did not merely generate analytical insight; it also functioned as a modest form of institutional intervention. Through interviews, workshops, and collective sense-making, REBCs and other institutional actors were invited to reflect on their roles, assumptions, and constraints in ways that extended beyond routine ethics review. At the time of writing, the study findings are starting to be taken up as boundary objects for organisational dialogue within the university and beyond. Early conversations about the composition and remit of a proposed interdisciplinary research ethics panel at EUR are also emerging. In this way, the action learning design of the study shows how empirical insight can be translated into reflective spaces that support institutional and cultural change without presupposing a singular institutional solution.

7.2. Limitations and Future Research

Several study limitations should be acknowledged. First, participants were largely self-selected and may have been more predisposed toward reflexive and participatory approaches to ethics governance, which may have limited the range of perspectives captured. Second, the study was confined to a single institutional context, which constrains the generalisability of findings to universities operating under different regulatory regimes, governance cultures, or disciplinary profiles. Third, several authors held dual roles as researchers and members of REBCs. While this was a deliberate design choice to surface insider knowledge and lived institutional dynamics, it also introduced the risk of interpretive bias. This was mitigated through triangulation across data sources, collaborative analysis, and the inclusion of external perspectives. Finally, time and resource constraints limited broader engagement with actors beyond the university, such as community partners, funders, national ethics bodies, and research ethics networks and associations, whose perspectives are increasingly influential in shaping ethics governance.

Future research could extend this work in several directions. Comparative studies across institutions and national contexts would help examine how similar governance tensions are negotiated under different regulatory and cultural conditions. Longitudinal research could explore how ethics governance evolves over time as universities experiment with new roles, infrastructures, and forms of distributed responsibility. Moreover, the scenarios developed in this study also offer a basis for further design-oriented inquiry. Future studies could use them to identify actionable institutional levers, such as enabling roles, governance adaptations, training infrastructures, and coordination mechanisms, as well as boundary conditions and points of resistance that shape implementation. Such work would support the development of context-sensitive pathways for strengthening ethics governance in ways that attend to the growing normative responses and expectations for researchers and research institutions. Taken together, these directions point toward ethics governance as a site of ongoing institutional learning—one that requires not only procedural competence, but also reflexive capacity, relational judgment, and sustained attention to the values that underpin ethical and socially responsible research and practice.