Ethics-policy advisory ecosystems: enhancing operative, discursive and adaptive capacities

The organisational practices, status and role of policy-focussed ethics advisory committees are significant in relation to scientific advances, societal transformations and crisis situations. Existing research has explored the effectiveness, de/politicisation and deliberative aspects of national ethics bodies, but their role in wider ecosystems of policy advice is neglected. It is sometimes argued that ethics committees have little impact on practices on the ground, but this is empirically untested. Our key concern is to examine the governance cultures and practices of ethics advice and ethics expertise in specific relation to policymaking. Qualitative interviews with 60 ethics advisors and civil servants in Australia, Germany and the UK are analysed to identify critical factors which shape the operative, discursive and adaptive capacity of ethics-policy advisory ecosystems. Based on our findings, we present a novel framework to inform future comparative analysis of national ethics-policy advisory ecosystems. We argue that a focus on governance capacities would help to enhance how governments use ethics committees and ethics expertise within the wider science/technology/policy nexus. We show how social science and humanities scholarship is responding to new demands to navigate the normative and descriptive with regards to its engagement with ethics advice.