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Research Ethics

This note is about participatory research (which is to say most of research) but especially research with multiple agents with unequal power.

Nonhuman Participation

Cf.

  • animal-informed consent
  • animal privacy
  • environmental data protection
  • welfarism, the 3Rs (replacement, reduction, refinement)
  • abolitionism
  • sentientism, biocentrism, ecocentrism
  • moral status, moral patiency, moral agency
  • assent, dissent, refusal
  • mediated consent, proxy consent, surrogate decision-making
  • bodily privacy, informational privacy, locational privacy
  • guardianship, trusteeship, relational representation
  • legal personhood, legal beingness, rights of nature
  • animal citizenship, membership rights
  • compassionate conservation, conservation welfare, One Welfare
  • paternalism, wardship

Going beyond welfare, regulation based on the human assessment of sentience, suffering and pain.

Types of agents (examples):

  • Animals, plants, etc.
  • Ecosystems, biomes, places
  • Microbial life
  • Inanimate matter
  • Artificial agents

The boundary of an agent is itself contested. Individuality comes in degrees and levels, from cells and holobionts to populations, so each project decides which unit it treats as a participant. Cf. Biological Individuality, the evidence ladder in Agency, and self and no-self in Self.

The Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation

2026: Special Issue. ANIMAL PRIVACY: Historical and Conceptual Approaches | Privacy Studies Journal

Positions in Dispute

Grounds of Standing

Each ground includes some beings and includes others poorly or not at all.

GroundIncludesIncludes poorly or not at allSources
Sentience and welfareVertebrates, some invertebratesPlants, fungi, microbes, rivers, machines1, 2, 3
Capacity and practical autonomyAnimals with demonstrated cognitionBeings that act without evidence of mindsPersonhood
Legal incidentsWhatever a legal order chooses to recogniseNothing in principle, so recognition becomes a political choice4
Flourishing, autonomy and dignityPlants and other living beingsAbiotic entities, machines5, 6, 7
Membership and citizenshipDomesticated and liminal animals in shared communitiesWild, distant or collective beings8, 9, 10
Embodiment, vulnerability, relational beingnessAnimals beyond cognitive testsCollectives, abiotic entities11
Ecological function and relational valueMicrobes, rivers, ecosystemsIndividuals whose interests conflict with the function12, 13
First Law and kinshipCountry, rivers and ancestral beings, as the legal order gives themBeings outside the relations that order recognises14
Social relationsRobots and AI systems that take part in social lifeBeings without human-facing interaction15, 16

Forms of Participation

  • Interest representation, listening, empowerment. Three legal standards: humans consider animals' best interests, humans solicit animals' input, or animals make decisions with legal effect.17
  • Ongoing embodied assent. Mediated consent from a human representative is necessary but insufficient. Researchers also watch for willingness and stop when an individual dissents.18
  • Principles with a score. Animal-centred ethics from Animal–Computer Interaction treats animals as stakeholders and contributors, and scores procedures against relevance, impartiality, welfare and consent.19, 3
  • Political voice in community. Sanctuary ethnography studies how resident animals shape the norms of a shared community.10
  • Negotiation through place. Design with nonhuman species targets place-based relationships and negotiates through materials, structures, spaces and spatiotemporal patterns instead of speech.20 Humans still interpret the preferences they design for.
  • Resistance. Nonhuman beings also participate uninvited, when they resist human ordering. Cf. Ladder, Resistance.
  • Articulation bias. Participatory processes privilege articulation, deliberation and formal representation. They exclude beings that express constraints through behaviour, growth, metabolism or slow environmental change.21
  • Things as participants. Democratic theory has begun to treat objects as participants in assemblages.22

Ladders and Stairs

  • Arnstein's ladder ranks citizen power. Its critics object to linearity, missing context and the assumption that more control is better. See Ladder.
  • The Ladder of More-than-Human Participation runs from paternalism through recognition, solidarity, autonomy and conviviality to commoning, and explains participation through niche construction and symbiosis.23
  • Used as a stair, it becomes a diagnostic. What degree of participation does a project achieve, and what prevents nonhuman leadership?24 Cf. Personas: a persona performs recognition and cannot deliver autonomy.
  • The Ladder of Multispecies Participation, from urban planning with kittiwakes, runs from paternalism through recognition to conviviality.25
  • The stair organises the praxiology axis of Three Axis Framework, beside axes for who exists and how participants know.
  • Open questions:
    • Does the stair apply to a biofilm or a river as it does to a bird?
    • Can one being have different degrees of participation in different decisions?
    • How does the stair account for protective duties?

Protection, Paternalism and Agency

  • Protection through human competence. Licensing pet-keeping would require keepers to demonstrate competence before acquiring an animal, which extends enforceable standards of care into the private sphere.26
  • Critique of wardship. Wardship paternalism excludes those judged incapable from the contract among "rational" adults.27 Cf. Paternalism.
  • Agency turn. The law assumes animals are passive non-agents, and an agency turn in animal law reassesses that assumption.17
  • These positions conflict when the same animal needs protection from its keeper and a say in its own life.

Individuals, Populations and Systems

  • Compassionate conservation opposes killing individuals for conservation goals. Critics answer that consequences for populations and species matter, and that do-no-harm can worsen welfare outcomes.28, 29 A critical review sets out the arguments on both sides.30
  • Some ethicists argue for intervention in nature to reduce wild animal suffering.31 Cf. Suffering.
  • Animal agency already shapes conservation and management outcomes.32
  • Rights to microbes protect functions that all life depends on. Rights of microbes recognise their intrinsic and relational value. The two can diverge.12

Privacy and Data

  • Ethics review has lagged behind privacy and consent concerns for other-than-human participants. Privacy applies to each being, bodily and informational, and anonymisation and protection of location data reduce exposure to harm.33
  • Public sharing of wildlife locations can endanger individuals, species and ecosystems, which creates duties for observers, researchers and platforms.34
  • Telemetry can expose tracked animals to disturbance or poaching, so studies should assess vulnerability before tagging.35
  • Data justice asks who collects, owns and benefits from biodiversity data.36
  • Places also store information: dunes, river channels and animal paths record past events. Cf. More-than-Human Explorations.

Indigenous Law, Relational Governance and Their Limits

  • Indigenous partners hold authority over Country, knowledge, data and outputs. Collaboration Charter (Private) places that authority above ordinary decision rules.
  • An Indigenous critique argues that critical animal studies can reproduce settler-colonial logics.37
  • Human knowledge about more-than-human worlds cannot, by itself, satisfy a nonhuman version of "nothing about us without us". Cf. Inclusion (Private).
  • River defence debates reveal competing ontologies of what a river is and who speaks for it.38
  • River personhood takes several legal forms, and its effect depends on guardians, resources and mandates.39, 40
  • Relational representation proposes speaking with nature, with mandates that others can review.41

Beyond Animals

AgentLive questionsOur workSources
PlantsCan plants consent to those who represent them? Does flourishing justify respect? What does autonomy mean for a modular, clonal being?Plants as designers;42 a tree as first author435, 6, 7
FungiWhich unit participates: hypha, mycelium or symbiosis?FungiGap in these notes
MicrobesRights to microbes or rights of microbes? What would a microbe say?Microbe12, 13, 44
Rivers, ecosystems, placesWho has a mandate to speak, and who reviews it?Rivers in Eel Project; Country in vegetal leadership4314, 39, 40, 41, 45
Inanimate matterCan objects participate in democratic assemblages, and what obligations follow?Ice, Water, dunes as memory22
Artificial agentsCan and should machines hold rights? How does AI change what counts as intelligence?Decision-making by creatures and gadgets4615, 16, 21

Eel Project as a Test Case

  • Unit of participation. An individual glass eel, a catchment population, a species, eels with their parasites and microbiomes, or the river system. Each choice changes who can assent and whose interests count. Cf. Biological Individuality.
  • Grounds of standing. Eels test sentience-based review as fish, and partners also value them as indicator, umbrella and model species. Record which ground each partner uses. Cf. "non-cuddly species" and "from food to kin" in Eel.47
  • Degree of participation by method. Assess eDNA, telemetry, captive diet experiments, hydrophone mapping and passage design against the stair. Ask which methods let eel behaviour change the next decision.
  • Assent and dissent. Which behaviours in captivity or at passage structures count as refusal, and who interprets them?
  • Individuals against populations. Restocking, translocation and captive experiments can trade individual welfare for population recovery, so the compassionate conservation debate applies directly.28, 29
  • Privacy. Hydrophone maps, telemetry and public sound maps can reveal migration routes and aggregation sites. Decide what to publish, delay or aggregate.34, 35
  • Indigenous governance and eel agency. The Gunditjmara aquaculture system at Lake Condah records long relations between people, eels and engineered waterways.48 Ask how Gunditjmara authority, eel behaviour and river dynamics each shape project decisions.
  • Eel roles. Witnesses, ambassadors, engineers, designers, coordinators, strategists. Which roles could a project support? Cf. Eel Leadership.
  • Capability accounts. Use the account-makers approach in Eel Project to record who defines eel thriving.

Implications for More-than-Human Design

Candidate Guidelines

Provisional. Each responds to a tension above, and projects should test them.

  • Declare the grounds of standing a project uses and the beings those grounds leave out.
  • Declare the unit of participation for each decision, from individual to system, and revisit it as evidence changes.
  • Assess each method against the stair, and state what would raise its degree of participation.
  • Record assent and dissent where behaviour makes them observable. Where it does not, as with many plants, microbes and rivers, name the proxy, its mandate and its review.
  • Register competing claims to speak for the same being, from Indigenous law, sciences, local knowledge and the being's own behaviour.
  • Record conflicts across scales and agents, between individuals, populations and systems, and state who resolved each and how.
  • Treat data collection as a risk of exposure. Assess bodily, informational and locational privacy for individuals and places before collection.
  • Count the costs of participation, including energy, materials and disturbance.21
  • Keep review open. Log decisions, dissents and consequences, and assign responsibility for changing or stopping methods.

Research Questions

  • What counts as assent or refusal for a glass eel, a eucalypt, a biofilm, a river or an AI system?
  • Can the stair represent participation by collectives whose members disagree?
  • When do protective duties conflict with agency-affirming duties, and how should projects decide?
  • Which review bodies could hear claims from plants, microbes or places?
  • How can data practices support nonhuman agency while limiting exposure to harm?

References

Footnotes

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  2. Martin, Angela K. “Animal Research That Respects Animal Rights: Extending Requirements for Research with Humans to Animals.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31, no. 1 (2022): 59–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963180121000499.˄

  3. Mancini, Clara, and Eleonora Nannoni. “Relevance, Impartiality, Welfare and Consent: Principles of an Animal-Centered Research Ethics.” Frontiers in Animal Science 3 (2022): 800186. https://doi.org/10.3389/fanim.2022.800186.˄

  4. Kurki, Visa A. J. A Theory of Legal Personhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.˄

  5. Kallhoff, Angela. “Plants in Ethics: Why Flourishing Deserves Moral Respect.” Environmental Values 23, no. 6 (2014): 685–700. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327114x13947900181518.˄

  6. Hall, Matthew. “Plant Autonomy and Human-Plant Ethics.” Environmental Ethics 31, no. 2 (2009): 169–81. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics200931218.˄

  7. Pouteau, Sylvie. “Beyond ‘Second Animals’: Making Sense of Plant Ethics.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27, no. 1 (2014): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-013-9439-x.˄

  8. Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.˄

  9. Kymlicka, Will. “Membership Rights for Animals.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 91 (2022): 213–44. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1358246122000078.˄

  10. Blattner, Charlotte E., Sue Donaldson, and Ryan Wilcox. “Animal Agency in Community: A Political Multispecies Ethnography of VINE Sanctuary.” Politics and Animals 6, no. 1 (2020): 1–22.˄

  11. Deckha, Maneesha. Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.˄

  12. Rizk, Anthony, Emily Jones, Anne Saab, Adam Strobeyko, Niko Soininen, Gian Luca Burci, Davina Höll, et al. “Microbial Rights for a Planetary Age.” Earth System Governance 28 (2026): 100331. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2026.100331.˄

  13. Cockell, Charles S. “The Rights of Microbes.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 29, no. 2 (2004): 141–50. https://doi.org/10.1179/030801804225012635.˄

  14. RiverOfLife, Martuwarra, Alessandro Pelizzon, Anne Poelina, Afshin Akhtar-Khavari, Cristy Clark, Sarah Laborde, Elizabeth Macpherson, Katie O’Bryan, Erin O’Donnell, and John Page. “Yoongoorrookoo: The Emergence of Ancestral Personhood.” Griffith Law Review 30, no. 3 (2021): 505–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2021.1996882.˄

  15. Gunkel, David J. “The Other Question: Can and Should Robots Have Rights?” Ethics and Information Technology 20, no. 2 (2018): 87–99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-017-9442-4.˄

  16. Harris, Jamie, and Jacy Reese Anthis. “The Moral Consideration of Artificial Entities: A Literature Review.” Science and Engineering Ethics 27, no. 4 (2021): 53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00331-8.˄

  17. Kurki, Visa A. J., and Paulina Siemieniec. “Towards an Agency Turn in Animal Law.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 45, no. 4 (2025): 923–49. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaf024.˄

  18. Van Patter, Lauren E., and Charlotte Blattner. “Advancing Ethical Principles for Non-Invasive, Respectful Research with Nonhuman Animal Participants.” Society & Animals 28, no. 2 (2020): 171–90. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-00001810.˄

  19. Mancini, Clara. “Towards an Animal-Centred Ethics for Animal–Computer Interaction.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 98 (2017): 221–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.04.008.˄

  20. Root-Bernstein, Meredith, and Anne G. Short Gianotti. “Design with Nonhumans Takes Wildlife Agency into Account to Reduce Conflicts.” Conservation Biology, 2026, e70358. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70358.˄

  21. Giaccardi, Elisa, Stanislav Roudavski, and Martín Tironi. “Participation and the Troubles with Intelligence.” PDC ’26: Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference 2026 (New York) 1 (2026): 385–90. https://doi.org/10.1145/3796624.3796632.˄

  22. Asenbaum, Hans, and Mathias Poulsen. “Objects as Participants in the Democratic Assemblage: A Playful Exploration of the Affective Materiality of Junk.” Theoria 72, no. 183 (2025): 132–55. https://doi.org/10.3167/th.2025.7218308.˄

  23. Roudavski, Stanislav. “The Ladder of More-than-Human Participation: A Framework for Inclusive Design.” Cultural Science 14, no. 1 (2024): 110–19. https://doi.org/10.2478/csj-2024-0015.˄

  24. Roudavski, Stanislav, and Alexander Holland. “Are You Blocking Nonhuman Leadership? Five Questions to Find Out.” PDC ’26: Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference (New York) 2 (2026): 372–81. https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796416.˄

  25. Førde, Anniken, Tone K. Reiertsen, Cecilie Sachs Olsen, Ingeborg Solvang, and Helen F. Wilson. “The Ladder of Multispecies Participation: Moving towards a More Convivial Urban Planning.” Nordic Journal of Urban Studies 6, no. 1 (2026): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.18261/njus.6.1.1.˄

  26. Pala, Davide, and Matthew Wray Perry. “Licensing Pet-Keeping.” Ethics, Policy & Environment, 2026, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2026.2682996.˄

  27. Simplican, Stacy Clifford. The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.˄

  28. Oommen, Meera Anna, Rosie Cooney, Madhuri Ramesh, Michael Archer, Daniel Brockington, Bram Buscher, Robert Fletcher, et al. “The Fatal Flaws of Compassionate Conservation.” Conservation Biology 33, no. 4 (2019): 784–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13329.˄

  29. Johnson, Paul J., Vanessa M. Adams, Doug P. Armstrong, Sandra E. Baker, Duan Biggs, Luigi Boitani, Alayne Cotterill, et al. “Consequences Matter: Compassion in Conservation Means Caring for Individuals, Populations and Species.” Animals 9, no. 12 (2019): 1115. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9121115.˄

  30. Coghlan, Simon, and Adam P. A. Cardilini. “A Critical Review of the Compassionate Conservation Debate.” Conservation Biology 36, no. 1 (2022): e13760. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13760.˄

  31. Horta, Oscar. “Animal Suffering in Nature: The Case for Intervention.” Environmental Ethics 39, no. 3 (2017): 261–79. https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics201739320.˄

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  34. Rubel, Alan, Martin Kaehrle, and Robert Streiffer. “Digital Platforms, Privacy, and the Ethics of Wildlife Information Sharing.” Philosophy & Technology 38, no. 1 (2025): 22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-025-00841-4.˄

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  36. Pritchard, Rose, Laura Aileen Sauls, Johan A. Oldekop, Wilhelm Andrew Kiwango, and Dan Brockington. “Data Justice and Biodiversity Conservation.” Conservation Biology 36, no. 5 (2022): e13919. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13919.˄

  37. Belcourt, Billy-Ray. “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.” Societies 5, no. 1 (2015): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001.˄

  38. Boelens, Rutgerd, Lena Hommes, and Jaime Hoogesteger. “Ontological Politics in River Defence Debates: Unpacking Fields of Contention in Eco-Centric and Non-Human Turns.” Water Alternatives 17, no. 3 (2024): 649–68.˄

  39. O’Donnell, Erin L., and Julia Talbot-Jones. “Creating Legal Rights for Rivers: Lessons from Australia, New Zealand, and India.” Ecology and Society 23, no. 1 (2018): art7. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-09854-230107.˄

  40. Clark, Cristy, Nia Emmanouil, John Page, and Alessandro Pelizzon. “Can You Hear the Rivers Sing? Legal Personhood, Ontology, and the Nitty-Gritty of Governance.” Ecology Law Quarterly 45 (2019): 787–844.˄

  41. Cano-Pecharroman, Lidia, and Erin O’Donnell. “Relational Representation: Speaking with and Not about Nature.” PLOS Water 3, no. 10 (2024): e0000236. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000236.˄

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  44. Höll, Davina, and Leonie Bossert. “‘What Would a Microbe Say?’: Paving the Way to Multispecies Communication.” Transpositiones 1, no. 1 (2022): 103–18. https://doi.org/10.14220/trns.2022.1.1.103.˄

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