Research with people—especially that on socially and politically contentious topics—is rife with ethical issues. Social sciences as well as arts and humanities scholars are increasingly reflecting on how to best address these. Many of these debates have focused largely on ethics in practice, leaving questions of procedural ethics to the side. However, procedural ethics are important—they are increasingly required across all areas of research, they are the bedrock of institutional approaches to regulating ethics, and they shape ideas about what constitutes ethical research practice. This talk presents new findings from the Research Ethics Governance dataset (REG), the first globally comprehensive dataset of national level ethics regulations. It shows that while almost all countries have research ethics requirements, they are almost exclusively concerned with biomedical and clinical studies—though the trend in changing to extend regulation to the social sciences and arts and humanities. It then presents country case studies to give shape and depth to the quantitative findings, illustrating how research ethics regulation can produce unanticipated and counterintuitive outcomes when transferred to contexts with different political economies of knowledge production.
Rebecca Tapscott is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. She runs two major research projects, one on rebel to party political transitions (funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s Special Programme on State, Society and Security), and another on the politics of research ethics in the social sciences (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation's Ambizione program). She is the convenor of the Ethics Governance Network, and serves as an Associate Editor at Research Ethics, reviews editor for Civil Wars, and an editorial board member for International Studies Review. Her work has appeared in leading journals across comparative politics, international relations, African studies, and development studies, and she is the author of Arbitrary States: Social control and modern authoritarianism in Museveni's Uganda (OUP 2021), which was a finalist for the African Studies Associations' Bethwell A. Ogot book prize.