Ethics approval is not the same as community accountability.
CARE, Community Power, Accountability, Reciprocity and Ethics Beyond Compliance, is a framework for research partnerships between universities, institutions and communities. It asks what ethical research looks like when communities have the power to define accountability, negotiate benefit, challenge harm, and shape what happens next.
Why CARE was created
A research project can pass an ethics review and still fail the community involved in it. Ethics committees ask important questions, but they tend to ask them once, at the start, and rarely ask what happens to the people, and the knowledge, a project leaves behind once it ends.
CARE was developed through extended work with community organisations, practitioners, and people with direct experience of taking part in research, to answer that question properly.
What ethics approval asks, and what it doesn't
Ethics approval asks
Was this research designed and conducted properly?
Have participants given informed consent?
Are risks to participants identified and managed?
CARE also asks
Did the community have a say in the questions being asked?
Will they ever see what was found?
If something goes wrong, who is accountable, and for how long?
The four CARE principles
A structured, four-part system
C
Community Power
Communities have genuine authority to shape research questions, methods, interpretation, and what happens with findings.
A
Accountability
Named contacts, documented commitments, and consequences when things go wrong, accountability that doesn't end when a project does.
R
Reciprocity
What communities give to research is matched by what they receive: payment, credit, capacity, and influence.
E
Ethics Beyond Compliance
Ethics as an ongoing relationship and practice, not a certificate issued once at the start of a project.
Recommendations for six audiences
Universities
What CARE asks of research governance, partnership agreements and institutional culture.
Research councils
How CARE could inform funding criteria and reporting expectations.
Funders
What CARE could mean for what's required, encouraged or rewarded in funded research.
Policymakers
What community accountability in research could mean for wider policy on research justice.
Ethics committees
Where CARE sits alongside, and beyond, existing ethics review processes.
Community organisations
What you can expect, ask for, and refuse, set out in the Community Rights Charter below.