Healthier, wealthier, happier communities by advancing key policy research through timely, high-quality analyses.
Erin Brockovich, whose fight with Pacific Gas & Electric was dramatized in the 2000 film starring Julia Roberts, recently launched a data center complaint tracker at brockovichdatacenter.com. Within a week, more than 1,600 residents living near new and proposed data centers had filed complaints: noise that never lets up, water tables they are watching drop,…
Policy researchers owe more to the populations their findings shape than conventional research ethics describes. At least since the 1980s, the evaluation-ethics and capability-approach literatures have been making the case for as much. Policy research differs from medical research: the population most affected by our findings is rarely the population we ask. Researchers conduct studies…
What does an ethical approach to policy research look like? Most researchers I know would answer with some version of the same framework: do no harm, get informed consent, treat people as ends rather than means. That framework — call it the Kantian one — is the bedrock of modern research ethics, and it should…
