Table 3 Ethical capacities

Foresight

Foresight entails an active engagement to identify possible outcomes, anticipate contingencies, and be diligent in planning (Kurasawa 2007; Moynier 1875). Robust and ongoing planning is a necessary condition of ethical project closures, including modelling different closure scenarios and anticipating how they might unfold. It also involves learning from previous closure experiences.

Attentiveness

Attentiveness entails openness to and recognition of the needs and concerns of others who are involved in or affected by a project closure. It requires critical self-awareness and engaging with the “social fabric of action” by “taking stock of relationships, background expectations, and the ways in which critical response would come across” in closing projects (Springer 2013).

Responsiveness

All project contexts are distinctive and dynamic. Responsiveness entails orienting and re-orienting oneself to anomalies, challenges, and changes, especially in relation to vulnerability. It requires “a temporally continuous thread of attention” (Springer 2013) to local context and flexibility and creativity to adapt closure in consequence.