Expertise in global health and global health ethics.

Abstract

This commentary discusses how professionalisation and expertise is both a positive, constructive project as well as an exclusionary one. The discussion suggests that global health, rather than being a new sub-field of science catalysed by new discoveries, is better understood as being part of the economic and scientific expansionism of the few richest G7 countries. It is argued that global health expertise, aside from scientific expertise, also involves expertise in being a driver of the expansionism. It also points to ethical expansionism and signs of epistemic domination of global health ethics by scholars from 2-3 countries. The collection of contributions in this first Black and Brown in Bioethics topic collection is described as being an effort to resist the exclusionary and expansionist aspects of global health expertise, while also exhorting to do better at saving lives with better ethics.