(Illustration by Ben Hickey)
In the summer of 2022, Christopher Pallas and Elizabeth Bloodgood were presenting findings from their co-edited volume Beyond the Boomerang at an international conference. The book examined how the increasing agency of civil-society organizations from low- and middle-income countries of the Global South, combined with new opportunities for partnership and leverage, was upending traditional advocacy relationships.
The presentation attracted substantial interest, but also pointed questions. One practitioner from East Africa asked why the editors developed a new analysis of patterns in the Global South with almost no participation from authors from the Global South. The question was humbling.
That episode helped launch our current collaboration. Our team, a group of scholars from Brazil, Canada, Ghana, Nepal, Poland, and the United States, came together to examine the origins of local civil-society organizations and reflect on issues of power and participation. Examining our own experiences and the state of the field, we observed that scholars from institutions in the Global North tend to dominate the civil-society research process. What, we asked, might these scholars miss by failing to engage Southern counterparts as equal cocreators of research?
Northern research norms and structures risk inaccurate and unreliable findings because they do not fully leverage locally informed, empirically grounded understandings of civil society. To address this, our collaboration is rethinking research dynamics to facilitate the inclusion of Southern voices and perspectives on an equal basis.
Structural Inaccuracies
Scholars from the Global South often partner with Northern scholars. Yet most of these research relationships are unequal and hierarchical. Typically, Northern scholars develop research proposals and solicit funding, while Southern partners are employed as project implementers, supervising data collection. Northern scholars lead the analysis of this data and claim authorship of the results, which are typically published in journals from the Global North to which many universities in the South have limited access.
Northern scholars and institutions have also played an outsize role in establishing and enforcing research norms. One such norm is that leadership authority and authorship credit are allocated to members of research teams in proportion to each member’s contributions. On its face, this norm seems neutral and meritocratic, but its implementation is conditioned by a host of questionable assumptions.
How does one decide which contributions are most valuable? Northern scholars may answer that value comes from obtaining funding, research design, and access to the most prestigious publication venues. These are all assets that Northern scholars typically contribute to projects. The assets Southern scholars bring, including local knowledge and language, access to data, and experience with local or regional publishing, are subordinated. If one set of researchers from the Global South are unwilling to provide data, others can be hired in their place.
Such valuations reflect colonial dynamics. In the world of research, data are the ultimate raw material. Northern researchers extract this data from Southern populations, often in exchange for wages instead of authorship credit, and take it to the North, where it is converted into the finished products of research publications and policy briefs, advancing the careers of their authors.
This pattern not only is unjust and illegitimate but also produces bad research. While all research aspires to objectivity, it is inevitably shaped by the knowledge, ideas, and biases of its authors. This subjectivity begins with the very questions researchers ask and continues through decisions about which data to collect. Asking the wrong questions and misunderstanding data lead to research that is misleading at best and fundamentally damaging to science and societies at worst.
Decolonized partnerships improve the reliability of research data and the accuracy and credibility of findings.
Even culturally sensitive Northern scholars are susceptible to confirmation bias. Research designed in the Global North typically reflects a set of assumptions about context, relationships, and norms that is born in the Global North, often to the exclusion of perspectives from Global South researchers. Because most phenomena have multiple causes and possible explanations, Northern scholars may find their hypotheses supported and reify these “findings” through publication—while remaining wholly ignorant of alternative, possibly better explanations.
Finally, such research faces structural limits to peer review. Civil-society researchers in the Global South are members of a robust and vigorous community of scholars who share their ideas in their own knowledge networks and in academic journals that are published and read within the Global South, most of which are open access. When the fruit of North-South collaborations is published in paywalled Northern journals, good research fails to benefit the Global South. Bad research is insulated from Southern scholars’ critiques because those scholars best positioned to critique it are unable to access it.
Language barriers magnify this outcome. Not only is much academic publication in English, but the style of English expected by Northern editors and reviewers often diverges from how English is spoken and written in many Southern contexts. The rapid development of AI in support of linguistic adaptations can help reduce these latter barriers, but only if publishers promulgate policies permitting the use of generative AI for language revision purposes—policies most publishers currently lack. Alternatively, journals can provide resources to authors from the Global South for professional translations of their work into English, as was recently done by Voluntas for a special issue on Latin America.
Moving Forward by Stepping Back
Promoting better research and more just collaboration requires resolving the structural imbalances between Northern and Southern researchers. Learning from decades of critiques and calls for decolonized research, our team seeks to achieve this through critical reflexivity, radical equality, and reciprocal feedback.
Critical reflexivity involves considering the context of how research and researchers are situated with respect to the project and the research participants, as well as any power dynamics that result. We consider the potential biases that may have been introduced into previous scholarship and treat such work circumspectly, and we also recognize our own potential for bias and error.
To produce better research, our research team creates structures of radical equality and reciprocal feedback. We begin with the assumption that the perspective of each team member is equally valuable to the entirety of the project. Every decision—including research design, funding applications, data collection, and publication choices—is subject to discussion and feedback from the entire group. This norm ensures that the project always represents the views of all members and does not become defined, for example, by the parameters included in a funding application or publication commitment by a single member of the group.
We expand reciprocal feedback to create a generative relationship beyond our editorial group to include any researchers who provide data to the project. Rather than asking them only to provide data that address our research questions, as extractive research does, we also ask them to comment on the validity of those questions in their local context and suggest additional questions we may not have considered to ensure that the entire research project is relevant to them.
Presentations, publications, and any other possible outputs are handled with similar attention to equality. Authorship credit is alphabetical by default, unless a change is agreed to by the whole team. Publication and presentation venues are selected with attention not just to prestige but also to access. For instance, we present our work at local and regional conferences hosted in the Global South, as well as the international conferences most often hosted in Europe and North America, and we plan to make our published outputs accessible via institutional repositories and open-access publishing.
Equality requires continual effort, and the processes that ensure it may be time-consuming or difficult. For instance, logistics require that someone lead meetings and keep schedules on track. In a traditional project, such a role would merit additional authority or senior author status. In a radically equal one, these functions are performed as volunteer service without expectations of increased authority or influence.
Valuing other forms of knowledge production may slow down the speed at which mainstream research is published. Editors seeking rapid decisions may not initially understand why, in the interests of transparency, the entire team is copied on many exchanges or why decision-making (by consensus across five time zones and seven busy schedules) is so slow.
Yet, the upsides are worth the effort. Decolonized partnerships not only are more democratic and inclusive but also improve the reliability of research data and the accuracy and credibility of findings. Regular cycles of feedback make us less likely to miss a crucial local perspective, source, or datum, giving us greater confidence in our research. Moreover, by engaging with contributing participants and fellow team members in a more equitable way, we create spaces for mutual learning, build collegial relationships, and enhance student training, forming the basis for future engagement and continued shifts in research culture.
Read more stories by Christopher L. Pallas, Anna Domaradzka, Cristina M. Balboa, Elizabeth Bloodgood, Dipendra KC, Emmanual Kumi & Patricia Mendonça.