CRP Faculty Statement on Ethics of Planning Research and Practice
Adopted by the CRP Faculty December 5, 2006, revised April 21, 2020
Community and Regional Planning faculty, students and staff are dedicated to creating an environment in which ethical practice and academic integrity are valued and upheld by all. This statement explains the CRP Department’s ethical principles.
The Ethics of Community-based Practice
We define planning ethics as the foundational belief system that underlies planning practice and research. The CRP Department takes a community-based approach to research and practice, in which planners engage as co-participants with collectives including communities, groups or publics, and pay particular attention to the social location of all participants (including the planners), interests, resource allocation and capabilities. In this approach, community-based problem solving and analysis comes from community members’ existing knowledges and collective deliberations along with planners’ additional expertise, facilitation skills and interpretative capacity.
An ethical practice uplifts voices of community participants, while being careful not to misrepresent community members’ perspectives. We recognize that all communities are not equally powerful, and an ethical practice furthers social justice in both processes and outcomes. An ethical practice respects community decisions to protect and limit sharing of community knowledge including the location and meanings of community spaces. It is critical that members are not negatively impacted by participating, and an ethical practice respects community members’ anonymity, if desired, when they are participating. The CRP Department’s commitment to ethical practice aligns with and exceeds the principles laid out by the American Planning Association and the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP/APA 1992; AICP 1991). At UNM, the CRP Department is working actively for a more justice-oriented planning discipline.
Students are expected to reflect on their own positionality relative to that of community participants, recognizing that those relationships are social, complex, shifting, historically and culturally situated, and manifested in the power to interpret facts and events. They bring that knowledge and self awareness forward throughout their careers. The CRP faculty members take responsibility to make students aware of their role and obligations, emphasize the need for self-reflexivity and their positionality in all planning work, and understand and respectfully navigate community protocols. This includes acknowledging that people have equally important commitments in other domains of their lives including to family, caretaking and community in addition to more visible areas such as paid work and school.
American Institute of Certified Planners “Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct” (Adopted March 19, 2005, Effective June 1, 2005, Revised April 1, 2016) is available here.
American Institute of Certified Planners/ American Planning Association “Ethical Principles in Planning” (Adopted May 1992) is available here.
Academic Honesty
CRP students are responsible for ensuring that the authorship of the ideas and information in their work is appropriately acknowledged. This is equally important in practice and professional work. Plagiarism occurs when someone—knowingly or unknowingly—presents the words or ideas of another person or group of people as their own. This includes information gleaned from formally published documents, and from interviews, newsletters, web sites, or casual conversations. Of course, any work that students turn in must meet UNM’s standards for academic honesty. In addition, planning requires particular care in acknowledging the multiple sources of ideas, collaborators and co-researchers.
UNM Policy on Academic Dishonesty, UNM Pathfinder.
Research and Human Subjects
The UNM Institutional Review Board provides guidance on conducting research with human subjects. All research studies, including theses or professional projects, intended for publication or wide distribution must submit protocols to the IRB. Human subjects are defined as “living individuals about whom an investigator obtains data or identifiable private information through intervention or interaction.” The UNM IRB requires that all such work whose purposes and activities meet the definition of research: “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge” go through IRB review. Expedited review by the IRB occurs when research involves no more than minimal risk to participants and can be reviewed by one member of the IRB or the IRB chair. When in doubt, students should contact their faculty members and/or the IRB to determine whether approval is required.
Classroom projects, problems courses, or independent studies that are exclusively for instructional purposes need not undergo IRB review. Faculty members are responsible for oversight of student research ethics in classroom contexts.
Formal research intended for publication may be exempted if it includes the use of existing data, documents, records or other publicly available sources that do not identify participants. Certain survey procedures, observations of public behavior, or educational tests may also qualify for exemption if the data are not sensitive, do not involve children, and are recorded anonymously. Such research does, however, require formal exemption by the IRB.
Research projects may be subject to review through another Institutional Review Board or established process, if occurring in Indigenous nations or other countries. This must be identified early in the process to ensure that all reviews are complete prior to starting research.
