Research Ethics and Integrity during Global Crisis
What ethical research practices are needed in a time-pressured crisis - such as the pandemic we have so recently experienced?
In times of crisis, policy-makers urgently need advice from researchers. Can such advice take ethical values into consideration? PREPARED developed an ethics brief format around fairness, respect, care and honesty and launched a first brief with NATURE coverage in April 2023. The PREPARED team met at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in early June. The livestream event recording is posted below. The report on the meeting as a whole will be posted once it is available.
The meeting started with an animation about the ethics brief, which argues that the African Union should receive a permanent seat at the G20. Prof. Sachin Chaturvedi, Director General RIS, Ministry of External Affairs, India joined live from New Delhi to describe Indian leadership on bringing ethics into policy during their G20 Presidency in 2023.
In the UNESCO Salle XI, the following people contributed from the room.
Katherine Littler, World Health Organization, will explain why overcoming the research evidence-policy gap is essential to promoting world health and that ethical considerations are key to coping with future crises.
Dr. Michael Makanga, Executive Director EDCTP, will explain why the values of fairness, respect, care and honesty are good guiding points by which to assess different policy suggestions.
Leana Snyders, Director of the South African San Council in South Africa will emphasize that focusing on the needs of marginalized populations can reliably give an ethical angle to policy advice.
Dr. Lisa Diependaele from the European Commission will comment on the need for EU-funded projects to have impact and influence policy and the potential of the ethics brief format to contribute to this goal.
The remote discussion was moderated by Dr. Janet Salmons, Research Community Manager for Methodspace, and the UNESCO discussion by Prof. Doris Schroeder, PREPARED Co-ordinator.
Learn more with these relevant resources!
Prof. Doris Schroeder is the lead author of the Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings (2018) which is a mandatory reference document for Horizon Europe and now used in over 50 lower income countries. She is a co-editor on Equitable Research Partnerships: A Global Code of Conduct to Counter Ethics Dumping, which you can downloaded free in PDF or EPub formats. Also see this guest post: “Equitable Research Partnerships instead of Helicopter Research.”