More Than One Way To Be Global: Globalisation of Research and the Contest of Ideas

Abstract

Pratt and Hyder’s (2016) article highlights the importance of achieving a new global health ethics that balances an appreciation of global interdependence against the need for ongoing protection of local interests. While Pratt and Hyder offer a promising framework for working towards these goals through the governance of global health research consortia, their framework is silent on the process of globalization itself—i.e. on the ways in which global networks form. This lacuna is significant because globalization is not a single process. Rather, globalization is a heterogeneous set of patterns occurring within a world that is best understood as an unstable complex system (Benatar et al. 2005). Also, globalisation does not, in reality, lead to uniformity, but rather to reconfigurations of labor and human resources, technological capabilities, capital and finances, information and information technology, as well as ideologies and epistemologies (Appadurai 1990). In the context of biomedical research, globalization fundamentally reconfigures the ways in which health and illness are defined, evidence is generated, and interventions are prioritized. Importantly for bioethics, the processes of globalization are largely driven by those who have the most social, political, scientific and/or economic capital. In the research context, this means that globalization affords translocal networks of researchers the opportunity to adopt or partner with institutions in countries with the most favorable ethical, regulatory and practical benefits that enhance their global competitiveness. While this no doubt facilitates research, it also allows countries that are already dominant in the field to drive the research agenda and financial feasibility of research consortia. It also allows universalistic perspectives to be imposed upon countries that lack the power to resist. In Nepal, for example well-meaning international research partnerships have enabled universalistic biomedical perspectives of psychiatric problems to supersede locally informed conceptualizations of wellbeing in ways that have displaced local buffers against mental illness, obscured the marginalization of vulnerable communities, and perpetuated structural inequalities