Clarifying Relational Ethics: A Comprehensive, Validated Set of Principles for University-Community Partnerships

University-community partnerships (UCPs) are often positioned as a departure from the extractive, paternalistic practices that have long characterized higher education’s engagement with communities outside the university. While the field increasingly invokes language of relational ethics—reciprocity, mutual respect, and shared authority—it has yet to fully define these principles or offer comprehensive frameworks for assessing whether partnerships uphold them. Without a clearly articulated and validated set of relational principles, the field lacks the tools to critically assess or strengthen the ethical foundations of its practice.This study addresses that gap through an iterative, mixed qualitative design that combined a systematic scoping review of publications on UCP relationships with qualitative content analysis and participatory validation. I extracted and inductively coded text segments to identify principles from literature and facilitated reflective storytelling sessions with community and academic partners to ground, refine, and operationalize them. This process resulted in a set of thirteen relational principles that offer a comprehensive and field-informed framework for the assessment of UCPs.
The resulting principles are shared power and decision-making, aligned purpose and approach, accessing and sharing resources, reflective practice, critical awareness / justice orientation, accountability, trust, respect, mutuality/reciprocity, communication, commitment, flexibility, and interpersonal qualities.
In addition to identifying and defining these principles, this study analyzes key insights and tensions between scholarly discourse and practitioner experience. While some principles are inconsistently conceptualized or applied, practitioner insights reveal where theory falls short and what is needed to uphold relational ethics in practice.
The dissertation concludes with broader implications and a call to action for academic partners, institutions, and community collaborators to meaningfully integrate these principles into both the rhetoric and practice of UCPs. Only through sustained attention to relational ethics can partnerships fulfill their transformative potential and move beyond the legacies from which they seek to depart.