Questionnaire for ethical guidelines for Global South related research and partnerships

Have your say on the challenges and good practices for building global academic partnerships!

UniPID, supported by a international steering group*, has been developing guidelines to complement the existing Finnish national guidelines on research integrity, with the aim to provide the academic community with a conceptual framework and practical tools for creating responsible and equitable approaches to their academic work in and collaboration with the Global South.

The first step of the guidelines work is meant to provide ready-to-hand good practices for preventing and mitigating concrete ethical issues within north-south academic partnerships. For this purpose, UniPID has created a questionnaire, which seeks to verify the gaps identified in the existing Finnish guidelines and gather good practices for addressing and mitigating ethical issues specific to academic north-south collaboration conducted in the context of the Global South. The identification of gaps and the design of this questionnaire are based on the growing need to consider the complex global and local historic, cultural, political, and economic contexts and power relations framing global academic collaborations.

As the guidelines are to complement the existing national guidelines by the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity (TENK), aimed to guide specifically the Finnish Academic community, also this questionnaire targets specifically the academic community based in Finland, as well as their partners in the Global South. Additionally, other academic community with experience from academic north-south/south-north collaboration can respond the questionnaire.

The identification of gaps and the design of this questionnaire are based on the growing need to consider the complex global and local historic, cultural, political, and economic contexts and power relations framing global academic collaborations. More information on this initiative and other work related to fair and responsible global academic partnerships is available on the UniPID website (www.unipid.fi).

Questionnaire link: https://link.webropolsurveys.com/S/A881D9893F7892AB

The questionnaire is made up of 8 sections, with closed and open ended questions. The requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) related to the processing of personal data have been taken into account in the development of the questionnaire. The data retrieved will be used for research related purposes. In addition, all the responses to this questionnaire will be archived and anonymized.

We kindly ask you to fill in the questionnaire by 8 November 2022. We also invite you to forward it to your relevant partners. The more answers we get, the better we can map out these challenges and highlight ready-at-hand good practices for this purpose.

The results of this questionnaire will be shared on UniPID's website and communication channels and further disseminated as needed. If you would like to follow up on the results of this questionnaire, please do not hesitate to contact Kelly Brito, kelly.brito(at)helsinki.fi.

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*The Steering Group is composed of Finnish and international regional organizations relevant to research ethics, research integrity, and global academic partnerships, including the following: Academy of Finland, African Research Integrity Network (ARIN), Asia Pacific Research Integrity Network (APRI), Latin-American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), Council of Finnish Academies, Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI), Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK), Finnish Society for Development research (FSDR), Finnish University Partnership for International Development (UniPID), Rectors’ Council of Finnish Universities (Unifi), Southern African Nordic Centre (SANORD), University of Helsinki’s Ethical Committee for Human Sciences.