scholarly journals Decolonising global health: transnational research partnerships under the spotlight

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 518-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S Lawrence ◽  
Lioba A Hirsch
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Global Health Research ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Research Partnerships ◽  
Health Movement ◽  
Participant Experience ◽  
Core Components

Abstract There are increasing calls to decolonise aspects of science, and global health is no exception. The decolonising global health movement acknowledges that global health research perpetuates existing power imbalances and aims to identify concrete ways in which global health teaching and research can overcome its colonial past and present. Using the context of clinical trials implemented through transnational research partnerships (TRPs) as a case study, this narrative review brings together perspectives from clinical research and social science to lay out specific ways in which TRPs build on and perpetuate colonial power relations. We will explore three core components of TRPs: participant experience, expertise and infrastructure, and authorship. By combining a critical perspective with recently published literature we will recommend specific ways in which TRPs can be decolonised. We conclude by discussing decolonising global health as a potential practice and object of research. By doing this we intend to frame the decolonising global health movement as one that is accessible to everyone and within which we can all play an active role.

Dreaming partnership, enabling inequality: administrative infrastructure in global health science

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 188-208
Author(s):  
Johanna T. Crane
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Health Science ◽  
Global Health Research ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Financial Risks ◽  
Research Partnerships ◽  
International Partnerships ◽  
Fiscal Administration

AbstractThis article examines the fiscal and administrative infrastructures underpinning global health research partnerships between the US and Uganda, and the power dynamics they entail. Science studies scholars and anthropologists have argued for the importance of studying so-called ‘boring things’ – standards, bureaucracies, routinization, codes and databases, for example – as a way to bring to the surface the assumptions and power relations that often lie embedded within them. This article focuses on fiscal administration as an understudied ethnographic object within the anthropology of global health. The first part of the article is a case study of the fiscal administration of a US–Uganda research partnership. The second part describes the institutionalization of some of the administrative norms and practices used by this partnership within the ‘global health enabling systems’ employed by US universities working in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. I analyse a case study and ‘enabling systems’ to show how these administrative strategies create parallel infrastructures that avoid direct partnership with Ugandan public institutions and may facilitate the outsourcing of legal and financial risks inherent in international partnerships to Ugandan collaborators. In this way, these strategies act to disable rather than enable (or build) Ugandan research and institutional capacity, and have profound implications for African institutions as well as for the dream of ‘real partnership’ in global health.

scholarly journals Global health research partnerships in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 1614-1618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce Addo-Atuah ◽  
Batoul Senhaji-Tomza ◽  
Dipan Ray ◽  
Paramita Basu ◽  
Feng-Hua (Ellen) Loh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Sustainable Development Goals ◽  
Global Health Research ◽  
Research Partnerships ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Development Goals

scholarly journals Global health enabling systems

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna T. Crane
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Global Health Research ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Research Partnerships ◽  
Building Capacity ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Administrative Control ◽  
Creative Accounting ◽  
Self Image

This think piece argues for the importance of administrative and bureaucratic labor –‘mundane’ things – in maintaining US-African global health research partnerships and the power relations within them. The daily work of accounting, compliance, and risk management undertaken by global health ‘enabling systems’ created by US universities contrasts with global health’s heroic self-image and conjures up negative imaginaries of intransigent African bureaucracies, crumbling communication infrastructure, and corruption. These negative imaginaries help to authorize forms of US fiscal and administrative control that may contradict global health’s ethic of partnership and its related goal of ‘building capacity’ in low-income partner nations, as well as feed ‘creative accounting’ practices by both partner entities. Critiquing these inequalities may seem risky in an era of ‘America First’ and threatened cuts to global health funding. In fact, advocating for equity in global health partnerships and prioritizing the building of African institutional capacity are only made more urgent by the current political climate.

scholarly journals Aligning Community Engagement With Traditional Authority Structures in Global Health Research: A Case Study From Northern Ghana

2011 ◽  
Vol 101 (10) ◽  
pp. 1857-1867 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulina O. Tindana ◽  
Linda Rozmovits ◽  
Renaud F. Boulanger ◽  
Sunita V. S. Bandewar ◽  
Raymond A. Aborigo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Community Engagement ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Northern Ghana ◽  
Global Health Research ◽  
Traditional Authority ◽  
Authority Structures

scholarly journals OC 8360 GLOBAL HEALTH RESEARCH AND ITS ROLE IN IMPROVING HEALTH AND HEALTH EQUITY IN AFRICA

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (Suppl 3) ◽  
pp. A3.3-A4
Author(s):  
Nchangwi Syntia Munung ◽  
Jantina De Vries ◽  
Bridget F Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Health Equity ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
High Income ◽  
Global Health Research ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Research Partnerships ◽  
Capacity Strengthening ◽  
Improve Health

BackgroundHealth research has the potential to generate knowledge that may be used to improve health and health equity. This has led to calls for African governments to dedicate at least 2% of their national budgets to heath research, but such resource allocations have never been achieved. Rather, most of health research in Africa continues to be funded by high-income countries (HICs) and involves collaborative partnerships between researchers in high-income countries and those in Africa. These research partnerships have many benefits, but they also raise ethical issues related to justice and fairness in global health research.MethodsThe ‘Research for Health Justice Framework’ makes recommendations on how global health research partnerships may foster the ideals of justice through their selection of research populations and questions, research capacity strengthening, delivery of ancillary care and the provision of post-trial benefits. We applied these criteria to collaborative genomics research consortia in Africa (an example of global health research in Africa).ResultsThe results show that the lack of national health research priorities in most African countries hinders the intention of global health actors to use global health research as a means of promoting global health equity. Furthermore, capacity building efforts need to be more coordinated and monitored. The responsibility for this lies with several actors.ConclusionThe potential for global health research to improve the health capability of countries in Africa will require that attention is paid to research that improves the health of people in Africa and that global health research partnerships identify, first and foremost, what kind of capacity strengthening is required and who is responsible for this activity. African governments and research institutions can play a role to help global health research improve health and health equity in Africa, in ways that are sustainable.

scholarly journals Tales of treatment and new perspectives for global health research on antimicrobial resistance

2020 ◽  
pp. medhum-2020-011894
Author(s):  
Marco J Haenssgen ◽  
Nutcha Charoenboon ◽  
Patthanan Thavethanutthanawin ◽  
Kanokporn Wibunjak
Keyword(s):  
Antimicrobial Resistance ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Knowledge Generation ◽  
Global Health Research ◽  
Extensive Evaluation

Global health champions modernism and biomedical knowledge but tends to neglect knowledge, beliefs and identities of rural communities in low-income and middle-income countries. The topic of antimicrobial resistance represents these common challenges, wherein the growing emphasis on public engagement offers a yet underdeveloped opportunity to generate perspectives and forms of knowledge that are not typically incorporated into research and policy. The medical humanities as an interdisciplinary approach to illness and health behaviour play a central role in cultivating this potential—in particular, through the field’s emphasis on phenomenological and intersubjective approaches to knowledge generation and its interest in dialogue between medicine, the humanities and the broader public.We present a case study of public engagement that incorporates three medical humanities methods: participatory co-production, photographic storytelling and dialogue between researchers and the public. Situated in the context of northern Thailand, we explore subcases on co-production workshops with villagers, tales of treatment shared by traditional healers and dialogue surrounding artistic display in an international photo exhibition. Our starting assumption for the case study analysis was that co-produced local inputs can (and should) broaden the understanding of the sociocultural context of antimicrobial resistance.Our case study illustrates the potential of medical humanities methods in public engagement to foreground cultural knowledge, personal experience and ‘lay’ sensemaking surrounding health systems and healing (including medicine use). Among others, the engagement activities enabled us to formulate and test locally grounded hypotheses, gain new insights into the social configuration of treatment seeking and reflect on the relationship between traditional healing and modern medicine in the context of antimicrobial resistance. We conclude that medical-humanities-informed forms of public engagement should become a standard component of global health research, but they require extensive evaluation to assess benefits and risks comprehensively.

scholarly journals Advancing equitable global health research partnerships in Africa

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. e000868 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yap Boum II ◽  
Bridget F Burns ◽  
Mark Siedner ◽  
Yvonne Mburu ◽  
Elizabeth Bukusi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Global Health Research ◽  
Research Partnerships
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document