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About the meeting topic

Global health research partnerships are a dominant strategy for advancing scientific knowledge, technological innovation and improving health outcomes worldwide. Successful navigation of such relationships is a highly complex endeavour, owing significantly to interpersonal, institutional, national and international factors. Research partnerships occur through various kinds of formal and informal collaborative arrangements which are often particularly influenced by asymmetries in power and differences in epistemologies, context, and scientific culture. Partnership-based global health research can involve relationships between many kinds of stakeholders – academic institutions, health research funders, pharmaceutical companies, branches of national governments, and non-governmental organizations, amongst many others. Regardless of partnership type, disparities – financial, material, infrastructural, epistemic, and the like – are not only a downstream effect of systemic inequities that influence partnerships but also shape partnership inputs, processes, and outputs that further sustain and perpetuate these inequities. With increasing recognition of these asymmetries in global health research partnerships,  a multitude of guidelines, principles, and recommendations have been developed to promote and protect fairer and more equitable partnership practices.

This year, the Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR) will focus on ethical challenges pertaining to research partnerships with ‘equity’ and ‘power’ as essential considerations that may relate to further constructs like ‘resilience’. For this discussion, global health research partnership equity is loosely understood as an ideal state in which certain imbalances in power between research partners are deliberately addressed through efforts to prioritize fair and mutually beneficial sharing of the inputs, processes, outputs, and impacts of research endeavours. This typically requires concerted attention to identifying and prioritizing potential equity-promoting actions proportionate to needs, defining and pursuing implementation strategies, and agreeing upon processes for measuring or monitoring progress. A central goal of this GFBR meeting is to shift the discussion beyond identifying inequities or injustices in research partnership practices, to creating solutions that are ethically justified, pragmatically operationalisable, and which may radically reimagine how we define and approach research partnerships as a global community.

Please read the background paper for full details on the meeting topic.