Ethics-policy advisory ecosystems: how can we draw comparisons?
Marija Antanavičiūte
Effective ethics-policy advisory systems are increasingly important in the context of rapid technological change, declining public trust in science, and shifting geopolitical dynamics. Questions about who becomes an ethics expert and who advises governments on ethical issues, who controls the narrative on major cross-national issues such as regulation and ethics of AI and ethics of future planetary health become particularly important.
The main focus of the recent article Ethics-policy advisory ecosystems: enhancing operative, discursive and adaptive capacities is the comparison between different ethics-policy advisory systems. The article that I co-authored with members of the Ethics & Expertise team, led by Professor Jessica Pykett and published in Contemporary Social Science, develops a novel framework for such comparison. In this blog post I offer an introduction to its key argument and reflect on the wider ethics-to-policy research agenda.
The article uses the notion of an ethics-policy advisory ecosystem to examine how ethics advice is provided to public bodies. These systems comprise national ethics bodies or commissions and many other actors contributing knowledge to policy through ethics expertise. These ecosystems consist of actors, institutions, mechanisms and practices interacting in different ways to provide expert advice, together adding up to what Braun & Kropp (2010) call ‘government ethics regimes’. Such regimes are different from technocratic forms of expertise in their forms of reasoning, value orientation and public communication.
In this paper we argue that advancing our understanding of governance capacities can strengthen scrutiny within ethics-policy advisory ecosystems. We examine how ethics advice is sought and provided at a national level. Based on this examination we propose parameters that help understand how scientific and moral questions interact in policymaking. Observing these dynamics allows us to identify key capacities that shape how advice is produced within different ecosystems.
Ethics advice and expertise
Before we start, it is useful to consider key categories we use in the article. Ethics advice refers to the provision of normative know-how to guide action, while ethics knowledge refers to specific content rooted in moral philosophy. It may draw on formal knowledge but also on lived experience and other forms of expertise.
Ethics advice shares some features with scientific advice. Both rely on epistemic communities (groups that produce and share specialised knowledge) and follow rigorous research standards, including using peer review. On the other hand, ethics knowledge is based on the ‘entanglement of facts and values, diversity of lived experiences and power dynamics’ (Parker, 2026). The key distinction is that ethics advice explicitly addresses normative questions within policy choices, making visible competing values and trade-offs. This contrasts with the appeal to value-free and neutral methods associated with the scientific method.
Overall, there is a lack of empirical evidence on how ethics advice is organised and provided. Existing research on national ethics bodies or commissions has explored their effectiveness (e.g. Köhler et al. 2021), de/politicisation (e.g.Littoz-Monnet, 2021) and deliberative elements (e.g. Bogner, 2019; Stahl et al., 2019). Yet here is little evidence of how advice on ethical issues (for instance, impact of new technologies) informs government decisions. Little is known how it interacts with other types of knowledge, particularly with science and technology studies.
Understanding how these systems operate and what capacities they possess has been a central focus of the Ethics & Expertise research project, on which this article is based.
Analysing national ethics-policy ecosystems
After outlining the history of ethics advisory ecosystems in the paper, we compare three different ecosystems (UK, Germany and Australia) using the ‘Most Similar Systems Design’ case selection method. This method allows us to capture small divergences in advice provision, in actors involved and advice justified across different cases. We also conducted institutional mapping (national maps available for Australia, Germany, and the UK), identifying hundreds of ethics bodies across the three cases. The findings are based on 60 semi-structured interviews, conducted in 2024, with those who previously served on public ethics advisory bodies and public sector professionals who have sought such advice.
We conclude that the UK currently has a dispersed ecosystem of government ethics advice, Germany has a formal centralised one, and Australia is more informally networked. Through this process of understanding three different ethics-policy eco-systems, we have developed a novel analytical framework to advance comparative international research.
Comparative framework for comparing ethics-policy advisory ecosystems
Complex national ethics-policy structures have previously been found to be adhocratic (Pykett et al., 2023; Sommer et al. 2024), informal and transient (Wilson et al., 2024) in their forms of governance, composition, remit, influence, public engagement and decision-making powers. To understand and compare these systems, we created a comparative framework, centred on three capacities: operative, discursive and adaptive. We outline each of these capacities in in the table below.
Table: Framework for comparative analysis of ethics-policy advisory ecosystems (Pykett et al 2026)
In the paper we provide an in-depth analysis of each of the three countries and their characteristics across these three capacities.
The importance of ethics-policy advice infrastructure
We draw three main conclusions from the comparative analysis. First, ethics-policy ecosystems must evolve to address future crises, including political polarisation and the growing power of technology platforms. This requires strengthening both institutional capacity and ethics literacy among policymakers. There are growing efforts to strengthen professional and institutional capacities, for instance, the Rapid Ethics Assessment and Learning Method, the Ethics Communication initiative, and the recently launched Ethics Advisory Mechanism to the European Commission.
Secondly, we highlight the issue of democratising and pluralising ethics expertise. More attention should be paid to how ethics advice is sourced and communicated, particularly in light of the growing public distrust in science.
Lastly, we draw methodological conclusions about using nested cases in comparative analysis of complex ethics-policy advisory systems. We encourage other scientists and researchers to use this framework in their research on ethics advice governance. The framework offers a systemised way to compare how different governance and cultural aspects impact the ethics-policy advisory landscape, and thus shed some light on how to attain successful and impactful ethics advice in times when it is much needed to improve regulation and governance.