Active Society, Politics & Law Public Health & Healthcare

Mainstreaming ethics in policy and research: from capacity to translation

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation World Health Organization, Switzerland
Funding £4.9M
Period Jan 2025 — Jan 2030

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how urgently policymakers need ethical expertise they can actually use, not just academic papers gathering dust. The problem is that ethical thinking rarely makes it from university seminars into real-world policy decisions. When it does, it is dominated by voices from wealthy countries, leaving out perspectives from the Global South. This matters because emerging technologies, climate-driven health threats, and novel research methods raise ethical questions that affect everyone, but the people making those decisions often lack the tools or training to handle them. This project builds three interconnected workstreams. First, an Ethics2Policy Platform will bring together ethicists, policymakers, and journalists to translate ethical analysis into actionable guidance. Second, a collaborative programme will tackle the ethics and governance of emerging technologies and innovation. Third, the annual Global Forum on Bioethics in Research will expand its capacity-strengthening and mentoring networks, particularly for researchers from lower-income countries. If successful, this could shift how ethics functions in global health—from a niche academic exercise to a routine part of how research is designed, funded, and governed. The result would be policies that are not just technically sound but ethically informed by a genuinely global conversation.

View original technical description
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the urgent need for global leadership in supporting and enabling context-sensitive ethical expertise in policy making and research. New and emerging ethical challenges, including the climate threat to health, the growth of emerging technologies and AI, and the implications of novel research methodologies, similarly demand global leadership, not least in promoting epistemic justice in an ethical discourse still dominated by high income country perspectives. Such leadership needs to promote: (1) inclusive debate on ethical issues in the context of contemporary urgent and/or emerging global health challenges; (2) the translation and mainstreaming of ethical thinking into global health research policy and decision-making; and (3) support for capacity strengthening of ethics in global health research, policy and decision-making. To meet these needs, this proposal sets out three interconnected work-packages, each of which will contribute to the three aims: (1) the development of an ‘Ethics2Policy Platform’ to bring together the ethics, policymaking and communications/ journalism communities; (2) a collaborative programme of work on the ethics and governance of emerging technologies and Innovation; and (3) strengthening of capacity and support for global networking and mentoring through the annual Global Forum on Bioethics in Research.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Katherine Littler (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Original classification

Discretionary Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.