Conventional research ethics focus on avoidance of harm to individual participants through measures to ensure informed consent. In long-term ethnographic research projects involving multiple actors, however, a wider concept of harm is needed. We apply the criminological concept of social harm, which focuses on harm produced through and affecting wider social relations, to a research project that we undertook in Malawi. Through this, we show how structural economic inequalities shape the consequences of research for the differently positioned parties involved. Specifically, we focus on dilemmas around transferring resources within three social fields: our relations with a Malawian ethics committee; our interventions in a rural community; and our efforts to engage the policy community. Each of these involved multiple and differently placed individuals within broader, multi-scalar structural relations and reveals the inadequacies of conventional codes of ethics.

Social and humanitarian cash transfers in sub‐Saharan Africa are increasingly used to support a wide range of vulnerable populations with long‐term support or immediate relief. Designing and implementing cash transfers typically involves a range of transnational actors and government stakeholders who continuously exert power which in turn affects state–citizen relations. The data informing this article come from 109 key informant interviews with (inter)national‐level stakeholders involved in three social cash transfers and two humanitarian cash transfers in Lesotho and Malawi. This article argues that donor‐designed targeting approaches in Lesotho and Malawi create space for new state–citizen relations, but that these are relatively shallow and reconfigured once technical capacity allows for targeting approaches that rely less on communities. It contributes to the literature on the role of transnational actors in social protection by showing that their role is significant when it comes to creating new redistributive relations, even if transnational actors are unable to convince host governments to take full fiscal responsibility for their initiatives due to differing views on who deserves what kind of support.