BRAC University James P Grant School of Public Health, Dhaka, Dhaka District, Bangladesh.
Federation of Urban and Rural Poor, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
BMJ Glob Health. 2020 May;5(5). doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2019-002253.
Safeguarding is rapidly rising up the international development agenda, yet literature on safeguarding in related research is limited. This paper shares processes and practice relating to safeguarding within an international research consortium (the ARISE hub, known as ARISE). ARISE aims to enhance accountability and improve the health and well-being of marginalised people living and working in informal urban spaces in low-income and middle-income countries (Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Sierra Leone). Our manuscript is divided into three key sections. We start by discussing the importance of safeguarding in global health research and consider how thinking about vulnerability as a relational concept (shaped by unequal power relations and structural violence) can help locate fluid and context specific safeguarding risks within broader social systems. We then discuss the different steps undertaken in ARISE to develop a shared approach to safeguarding: sharing institutional guidelines and practice; facilitating a participatory process to agree a working definition of safeguarding and joint understandings of vulnerabilities, risks and mitigation strategies and share experiences; developing action plans for safeguarding. This is followed by reflection on our key learnings including how safeguarding, ethics and health and safety concerns overlap; the challenges of referral and support for safeguarding concerns within frequently underserved informal urban spaces; and the importance of reflective practice and critical thinking about power, judgement and positionality and the ownership of the global narrative surrounding safeguarding. We finish by situating our learning within debates on decolonising science and argue for the importance of an iterative, ongoing learning journey that is critical, reflective and inclusive of vulnerable people.
保障措施正在迅速成为国际发展议程的重点，但与相关研究中的保障措施相关的文献有限。本文介绍了一个国际研究联盟（ARISE 中心，也称为 ARISE）内部与保障措施有关的流程和实践。ARISE 的目标是增强问责制，改善生活和工作在低收入和中等收入国家（孟加拉国、印度、肯尼亚和塞拉利昂）非正式城市空间的边缘化人群的健康和福祉。我们的手稿分为三个关键部分。我们首先讨论了全球健康研究中保障措施的重要性，并考虑了如何将脆弱性视为一个关系概念（由不平等的权力关系和结构性暴力塑造），以便在更广泛的社会系统中定位流动和具体背景的保障措施风险。然后，我们讨论了在 ARISE 中采取的不同步骤，以制定一种共同的保障措施方法：分享机构准则和实践；促进参与性过程，就保障措施的工作定义以及脆弱性、风险和缓解策略的共同理解达成一致，并分享经验；制定保障措施行动计划。接下来是对我们的主要经验教训的反思，包括保障措施、伦理和健康与安全问题之间的重叠；在经常服务不足的非正式城市空间中处理保障措施问题的转介和支持方面的挑战；以及关于权力、判断和定位以及围绕保障措施的全球叙事的所有权的反思性实践和批判性思维的重要性。最后，我们将我们的学习置于关于科学非殖民化的辩论中，并认为重要的是要进行迭代、持续的学习之旅，这种学习具有批判性、反思性，并将脆弱人群包括在内。
