Participatory approaches and methods in gender equality and gender-based violence research with refugees and internally displaced populations: a scoping review

Abstract

Using participatory approaches or methods are often positioned as a strategy to tackle power hierarchies in research. Despite momentum on decolonising aid, humanitarian actors have struggled to describe what ‘participation’ of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) means in practice. Efforts to promote refugee and IDP participation can be tokenistic. However, it is not clear if and how these critiques apply to gender-based violence (GBV) and gender equality—topics that often innately include power analysis and seek to tackle inequalities. This scoping review sought to explore how refugee and IDP participation is conceptualised within research on GBV and gender equality. We found that participatory methods and approaches are not always clearly described. We suggest that future research should articulate more clearly what constitutes participation, consider incorporating feminist research methods which have been used outside humanitarian settings, take more intentional steps to engage refugees and IDPs, ensure compensation for their participation, and include more explicit reflection and strategies to address power imbalances.

Always the Ideal? Exploring the Risks of Refugee Participation in Research

“…There remains no standard definition or framing of what exactly participation means. For research, this has meant the concept is often used carelessly to describe various kinds of research, as we found in a recent scoping review (Lokot et al, 2023). In this paper, we use Lenette et al's (2019) framing of participatory research to distinguish between approaches to enhance participation and participatory research methods as we explore the implications of participation in research.…”

“…a participation "paradigm" in a "holistic" way throughout the research and the use of participatory "methods" (p. 164). Our study draws on this framing, which we also used in a scoping review linked to this study, recognizing the difference between using strategies such as refugees and IDPs participating in research advisory groups/committees or in design, analysis, and feedback processes, and using specific research methods, such as PhotoVoice, which are often labelled as participatory (Lokot et al, 2023). Humanitarian actors, including international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), United Nations actors, local NGOs and other community-based actors, and academic researchers working in humanitarian settings increasingly emphasize the need to centre the perspectives of people with lived experience of displacement within research with refugees and IDPs (Global Refugee-Led Network [GRN] et al, 2022;Ormel et al, 2020;Pincock & Bakunzi, 2021;Potts et al, 2022;Starodub, 2019).…”

“…In this process, refugees and IDPs may be engaged symbolically without real effort made by researchers to engage them in making decisions within the research process. While humanitarian narratives emphasize that participation is essential, ethical, and important to research, how participation occurs in practice is less clear (Lokot et al, 2023). Amid the fixation on pushing participation as always being a good thing, there has also been insufficient reflection on the challenges and even risks that may be caused by participation.…”

Correction: Participatory approaches and methods in gender equality and gender‑based violence research with refugees and internally displaced populations: a scoping review

“…Following publication of the original article [ 1 ], the authors identified an error in caption of the Table 1. The correct Table 1 caption is given below.…”