Table 2

Ethical responsibilities to promote epistemic justice

LayerActorPossible responsibility
Knowledge-producerFunders of global health ethics
  • Allocate funding to ethics scholars from the centre and periphery who are diverse in their geographical, social and epistemic locations

  • Allocate funding to institutions in the centre and the periphery without disproportionately allocating funding to ‘powerhouse’ institutions from the centre

  • Allocate funding to support the development of strong and sustainable bioethics departments in global South Institutions

Bioethics education programmes
  • Enrol students from the centre and periphery who are diverse in their geographical, social and epistemic locations

Journals that publish global health ethics
  • Have a substantial number of editors and reviewers who are based in the periphery

  • Ensure journal content and publishing in them is accessible (eg, financially and language-wise) to ethics scholars from the periphery

  • Publish ethics scholars who are diverse in their geographical, social and epistemic locations

  • Ensure that peer-review comments where people are asked to explain their work in relation to dominant theories or cultural contexts are filtered out in the editorial process

Research institutions with ethics scholars
  • Hire ethics scholars from the centre and periphery who are diverse in their geographical, social and epistemic locations

  • Create safe spaces where experiences of epistemic injustice can be shared in ways that are safe, supported and transformative

Global health ethics scholars
  • Actively build research teams that span the centre and periphery and are diverse in their geographical, social and epistemic locations

  • Create spaces where the perspectives and experiences of scholars in the periphery (geographically or epistemically) can be recognised, heard and included in deliberations

  • Build collaborative partnerships with individuals in periphery locations (geographically and epistemically) that provide opportunities for meaningful coleadership

Knowledge-appliedFunders of global health ethics
  • Create funding opportunities that support intercultural dialogues at the foundation and project levels of global health ethics

  • Create funding opportunities to apply knowledge from the global South

Bioethics education programmes
  • Create opportunities for intercultural dialogue among students

  • Ensure there is required content (eg, an entire subject or several subjects) studying philosophical and ethical traditions from the global South

  • Ensure that curriculum content introduces students to different epistemologies and ways of being that impact on a consideration of ethics in global health.

Journals that publish global health ethics
  • Publish content from scholars with Southern epistemic perspectives equally as those who do not—or at least as much as possible considering potential limitations in the number of papers being submitted

Research institutions with ethics scholars
  • Reward ethics scholars for conducting research from Southern epistemic locations equally as those who do not (eg, by promotion and performance review criteria)

Global health ethics scholars
  • Reflexively interrogate one’s own practice in regards to what epistemologies, theories, concepts and methods are used and be intellectually curious about theories and epistemologies from the global South

  • Conduct or collaborate on ethics research that applies knowledge from the global South

  • Contribute to methodological innovation that reflects Southern epistemic locations

Knowledge-solicitedFunders of global health ethics
  • Create funding opportunities for empirical ethics research that solicits knowledge from the global South

Bioethics education programmes
  • Include training in empirical methods and in conducting research with socially marginalised populations in the global North and global South

Journals that publish global health ethics
  • Publish content that reports empirical ethics studies that solicited voices from the global South, especially studies that include the perspectives of those considered marginalised

Research institutions with ethics scholars
  • Reward ethics scholars for soliciting voices from the global South in their empirical work (eg, by promotion and performance review criteria)

Global health ethics scholars
  • Conduct or collaborate on empirical ethics research that solicits knowledge from the global South