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Abstract

Capacity building in biomedical research ethics review has been a European priority since the early 2000s. Prompted by the increase in data originating in internationally sponsored trials in emerging economies, a range of capacity building initiatives were put in place in the field of ethical review to ensure the protection of human subjects participating in research. Drawing on fieldwork with the Forum for Ethical Review Committees in the Asian and Western Pacific Region, I explore two distinct forms taken by capacity building within that organization to support and train members of ethics review committees. The first, with an emphasis on standards and measurability, takes as its priority international accountability for clinical trial research. The second explores how the organization goes about persuading trainees to see and do ‘ethics’ differently. This distinction between forms of capacity allows me to explore what will count as ‘success’ in research ethics capacity building.

How does one conduct, measure and record a ‘good’ ethical review of biomedical research? To what extent do ethics committees invoke professionalism in researchers and in themselves, and to what extent do they see competence as adherence to a set of standard operating procedures for ethical review? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Forum of Ethics Review Committees of Asia and the Pacific (FERCAP), a capacity‐building NGO that runs ethics committee trainings and reviews in the Asia Pacific region, I develop an analysis of ethical review and its effects. I focus on a ‘second‐order audit’ run by FERCAP, which recognises committees according to a set of standards that are designed to render ‘local’ committees internationally legible. The article adds to a growing comparative literature that expands studies of audit‐like measuring and disciplining activities beyond western contexts and enriches readings of ‘ethics’. I begin and end with a reflection on the ethical effects of a measurement practice that takes ethics itself as its object.

Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society. By Holly Wardlow. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006. ISBN 0-520-24559-8

Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. By Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny (eds.). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-59874-091-2

Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice. By Jeanette Edwards, Penny Harvey and Peter Wade (eds.). Oxford, New York: Berg (ASA Monographs 43), 2007. ISBN 978 184520 500 3

Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations. Melissa Cefkin (ed.), Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2009, ISBN 978-1-84545-598-9 (Hardback) ISBN 978-1-84545-777-8 (Paperback) 262 pp. Hb £50.00 Pb £21.00

Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Charles R. Hale (ed.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, ISBN: 978-0-520-09861-9 (Paperback Only) 417 pp. £24.95

The Anthropology of Organizations. Alberto Corsín Jiménez (ed.), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-7546-2595-7 (hardback only) 600 pp. £165.00

State, Communities and Forests in Contemporary Borneo. Fadzilah Majid Cooke (ed.), Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2006, ISBN 1-9209425-1-3 (Print Version) 208 pp.

The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing Liminalities in a ‘Queer’ Space. Pola Bousiou, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008, 322 pages, Paperback £15.95, ISBN: 978-1-84545-426-5