From ACCESS Guiding Principles to Travel Guidance: reflecting on tensions in travel choices

The ACCESS Guiding Principles team (Stewart Barr, Kate Burningham, Sarah Golding, Steve Guilbert and Sarah Hartley) compiled and published our Guiding Principles in March 2023. We’ve recently developed our own ACCESS Travel Guidance document as an extension to these. In this blog, we outline the context for developing this guidance.

Our Guiding Principles focus on promoting

• environmental sustainability,
• equality, diversity & inclusion (EDI), and
• knowledge co-production in social science research practice.

Moreover, they advocate an integrated approach, seeking to recognise the commonalities and tensions that may exist between these three individual principles.

The team has spent the last 15 months promoting the Guiding Principles and gauging reaction to them. Indeed, we’re aware that many individuals and organisations have been working on these issues for some time, and publishing the Guiding Principles has sparked useful conversations about how to change the ways we work, and the challenges we face. We’ve collected insights from the ACCESS Annual Assembly, Summer School, Leadership College and Flex Fund, and will be reflecting on these insights in a forthcoming academic paper.

One recurrent issue that has emerged in our work (both within ACCESS and at our universities) is that of travel, particularly the tension that many researchers and practitioners face in deciding whether to fly or use land-based transport. The issue is the subject of considerable academic commentary and debate about the ethics of flying for research and education (see, for example, Kristian Bjørkdahl et al.’s 2022 edited volume of Academic Flying and the Means of Communication). It has featured prominently in discussions of travel more generally, with the well-known Flygskam (or ‘flight shame’) movement emerging from Sweden as a reaction to the environmental impact of air travel. Indeed, we know that choosing to travel by train rather than plane can have considerable carbon savings, generally estimated to be between 80 and 90 per cent for short-haul flights (seat61.com).

The starkness of the carbon impact of flying might imply that there should be a simple ‘no fly’ approach to how we travel for our research and education. Yet such a position would have unintended but profound implications for the inclusiveness and equity of how we do research, and as such represents a key tension in our Guiding Principles. To work through these kinds of tensions, we’ve written in detail about this using our own travel decisions to a conference as an example (coming soon). Working through these issues is complex and requires care, respect and empathy as we listen to and respond to each other. As we’ve emphasised with the Guiding Principles, rather than enforcing a single ‘rule’, the way we travel needs to be contextualised and will ultimately be an individual judgement about balancing environmental sustainability, EDI and knowledge co-production considerations.

To recognise this important tension and to support those within our network in their decision making, we’ve developed some additional Travel Guidance that, whilst remaining within the spirit of the Guiding Principles, sets out a process for travel decision making. This retains the autonomy of individuals to make their own decisions, based on the following principles:

• In line with the environmental sustainability elements of our Guiding Principles, ACCESS has a preference for flight-free travel and we encourage those travelling to/from ACCESS Network events (or on behalf of ACCESS to events elsewhere) to use land-based public transport (i.e. rail, bus and tram) and ferry travel (where applicable) wherever possible.
• However, in line with the EDI elements of our Guiding Principles, we recognise that this preference is not always the most appropriate option for everyone and understand that individual circumstances may mean that these preferred modes of transport may not be feasible.
• Indeed, in line with the knowledge co-production elements of our Guiding Principles, we recognise the value of having a diversity of participants fully able to contribute to our activities in person, which might sometimes mean that travel (by land, sea or air) is the appropriate choice to support meaningful co-production, even when hybrid engagement might be an alternative option.

ACCESS Travel Guidance can be found here. The Conference Travel Decisions Blog will be available to read next month.