What is it about?
This paper looks at the real-world ethical challenges that arise when researchers from wealthier “Global North” countries work with partners and communities in lower-income “Global South” countries. Rather than seeing research ethics as just getting approval from ethics boards, the authors show that researchers must manage many overlapping relationships—with funders, institutions, governments, colleagues, and local communities—each shaped by different laws, values, and expectations. The paper introduces a simple visual framework, the Network of Ethical Relationships, to help researchers recognize these connections, anticipate conflicts, and make fairer, more respectful decisions. By focusing on dialogue, flexibility, and mutual understanding, the model helps promote more ethical, equitable, and effective global health research partnerships.
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Why is it important?
What makes this study unique is that it moves beyond viewing research ethics as a checklist exercise focused only on ethics board approval. Instead, it shows—using real experiences from 14 international research teams—that ethical challenges in global North–South health research are fundamentally relational. The study’s key contribution is the Network of Ethical Relationships model, which captures how researchers must constantly navigate competing expectations from funders, institutions, ethics boards, governments, colleagues, and communities, all operating under different legal, cultural, and moral frameworks. This shift in perspective matters because it explains why ethical conflicts persist even when researchers “follow the rules.” By offering a practical, relationship-based way of thinking about ethics, the study gives researchers, ethics committees, and funders a tool to improve dialogue, reduce power imbalances, and design fairer partnerships. As a result, the findings can directly influence how global health research is planned, reviewed, funded, and taught—making the paper relevant not only to ethicists, but also to researchers, administrators, and policymakers working in international and community-based health research.
Perspectives
From a personal perspective, the most important contribution of this paper is its clear demonstration that ethical challenges in North–South health research are not simply procedural problems to be solved by stricter rules or additional ethics forms. Instead, they are relational challenges that emerge from the complex web of interactions among researchers, communities, ethics boards, funders, and institutions operating in very different social, legal, and cultural contexts. By framing ethics as something that must be actively navigated within relationships, rather than passively complied with, this study offers a more honest reflection of how global health research actually unfolds in practice. What makes this approach especially valuable is its practicality. The Network of Ethical Relationships model helps researchers anticipate ethical tensions before they escalate, recognize power imbalances, and engage in meaningful dialogue with partners in both the Global North and South. In doing so, it shifts the focus from rule enforcement to mutual respect, accountability, and shared responsibility. This relational paradigm ultimately provides a more ethical way to conduct international research—one that is better aligned with equity, trust, and the lived realities of those most affected by global health research.
Dr. Martin S Forde
St. George's University, Grenada
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Network of Ethical Relationships model for global North–South population health research, Global Public Health, January 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/17441692.2016.1276948.
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