The Ethics of Co-Production in Practice: Reflections

This chapter explores the complexity of ethics in co-production through critical reflection on the research activities of a large co-produced five-year programme of research entitled Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement. For co-production to reach its potential in this programme, the Productive Margins partners had to find ways to work with the reality that ‘participatory approaches cannot circumvent the paradoxes of power in research and representation’ (Pain et al., 2012, p. 121). This chapter pays attention to some of the ethical complexities and issues that co-production can throw up in practice. Though we encountered and negotiated many ethical problems, this chapter pays attention to two specific examples from Productive Margins: attempts to distribute power and resources more equitably between partners; and the ethics of collaborative fiction writing.