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How do research ethics committees work in other parts of the world? What works well, what are the challenges such committees face and how are they different from the ethics committees in the EU?

To find out more, we spoke to experts on the work of research ethics committees outside the EU. We also looked at the results of a public survey and two case studies (one from Africa and one from China) to broaden the EU focus of the irecs project and get a more global perspective.

This broadening perspective is necessary for the work of irecs as it recognises the global impact of the core technologies discussed within the project: AI in healthcare, extended reality, genome editing, and biobanking. Ethical challenges don’t stop at borders, so it’s important to have a better understanding of these new technologies and their potential ethical impact beyond Europe.

In our study, the first step was to analyse the results of a public survey we conducted comparing European and non-European perspectives. This showed that traditional ethics reviews are more common in Europe, while post-approval monitoring is more common outside Europe. Respondents from outside the EU identified a lack of training, guidelines, and technical knowledge as significant barriers, with funding shortages particularly affecting Africa. Despite these differences, both groups think the ethics review processes are generally satisfactory but face challenges in expertise and keeping up with the pace of technological development.

In the second step, we conducted in-depth interviews with experts from experts outside the EU to explore gaps in ethics review processes. The majority of experts agreed that better guidelines detailing emerging technologies are needed, but there is an even pressing need for more training for ethical reviewers and more expertise in general. Another challenging aspect that emerged is the lack of suitable funding and a lack of appreciation for the work of research ethics committees in general. This calls for a change in research culture, so that researchers see ethics as an intrinsic part of their work. The interviewees also called out the strong Western approach to ethics reviews globally, which often overlooks other promising ethical concepts. With the North-South divide in mind, if such concepts or other local norms are overlooked, it could end up alienating researchers from the local communities affected by the research.

As this last point is particularly interesting, we also looked at case studies of Africa and China in more detail. Ethics in Africa are shaped by the concept of Ubuntu, which puts the collective community at the heart of things. This differs from European ethics guidelines which are more focused on the individual. In Chine, the country’s rapid development in research ethics is hindered by a lack of knowledge among researchers and the difficulty of integrating national values like harmony into ethics guidelines.

Concluding highlights of the study are the disparities in ethics values embedded in different cultures. Research in Europe, China, Africa and other parts of the world shows that cultural values directly affect how people perceive and make decisions about ethics. This is crucial for understanding ethics review processes in countries, for example in global research collaborations, where diverse cultures, norms, and decision-making processes come into play. In addition, our study has resulted in a set of recommendations to enhance interdisciplinarity, provide capacity building for resource-poor committees, and develop research on global values. These steps aim to create a more inclusive and effective global ethics framework for emerging technologies.

In the context of irecs, the results and recommendations detailed in the study show the positive impact of the learning materials developed within the project. Not only does irecs address the serious need for the members of research ethics committees to have a deeper knowledge and expertise on new technologies and their ethical challenges, but it is also a tool for fostering a research culture were early-career researchers and students are more aware of the ethical issues surrounding emerging technologies. This could be seen as an investment in a future research culture that takes its own ethical impact more seriously.

All the insights gathered from the interviews, survey and both case studies are presented in depth in a recently published and publicly available report available here.

Authors:

Claudia Brändle and Maria Maia, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)