Blog One

My experience at the Ethics in a Crowded World conference held by the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics (AAPAE) is a critical point I reflect upon when thinking of the earliest stages of my IDRP process.

My project involved researching lessons uptake within the humanitarian sector and where practitioners source this information from. At the conference, a speaker mentioned the issues associated with learning in the humanitarian field. With so many actors and a small source of funding, there was a lot of competition. Because of this, there is an aversion to sharing ideas and new approaches that an organisation is carrying out, as well as not wanting to portray themselves as organisations that wasted the funding they did receive on failed projects. She called for organisations to report on their failure, arguing that a library of failures would be a great tool for humanitarian organisations as it would help inform organisations, not on what works, but what doesn’t so all can take lessons from that experience. This initially posed a challenge in finding sources of information on lessons and lessons uptake.

This was an important moment for me as it provided me with an insight into how people within the humanitarian field think of lessons and learning. It was also a slightly overwhelming moment as well. If this person is having troubles finding information about learning and lessons, how will I do considering my far limited experience?

This experience motivated me to get creative with my methods of finding literature, looking at related fields and searching different terms in online databases to find the information I would need to write my proposal and lay a foundation for the work I will carry out in my placement.