A Cultural Turn: The Trivialisation of Indigenous Research Ethics in New Zealand Post-2012 Health and Disability Ethics Committe

Recent changes to health ethics oversight in New Zealand has presented a number of challenges for the way in which health and disability ethics committee (HDEC) members handle Treaty of Waitangi responsibilities. Informants suggest that indigenous research ethics has either virtually dropped off the table or taken a “cultural turn” in the sense that the meaning of consultation has been “trivialised”; however, this fate is not indicated uniformly across all HDECs. This paper discusses the new ethics review environment for health oriented research in terms of the containment of indigenous research ethics processes with the present “cultural turn”, meaning that any deliberate focus on the research question or on a project’s possible impact on reducinghealth disparities is rare.