Ethics in Caribbean Evaluation: Why we need a door, not just a document
The rationale for establishing Caribbean-based independent IRBs for evaluation and community-based social research
At the Caribbean Evaluation Space 2026 conference (#CEvalSpace2026) hosted by the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), a systemic blind spot emerged. While session after session centered on "ethics" as a competency, a framework, principles, guidance, and certification, the conversation consistently faltered at a critical structural barrier: oversight. For the independent Caribbean evaluator, ethical practice is a deep-seated professional vow, but formal ethical approval—the kind major commissioners sometimes demand—functions as an institutional gate they are rarely permitted to pass.
This oversight paradox transforms ethical requirements, originally designed to protect the vulnerable, into a tool of institutional exclusion. For those of us operating outside the ivory tower, no formal "door" currently exists, leaving the burden of ethical decision-making solely on the practitioner and the community.
The Plenary Exchange
From the floor of the Day Three plenary on evaluation leadership, I said that ethical guidance had been a recurring theme for me across the conference and then framed the specific difficulty: “There is no formal structure outside of the universities for any kind of IRB oversight. So, if you’re not academically affiliated, then there’s no body. Government agencies in Jamaica do have some level of ethical oversight, but it is tied to their own facilities — the education ministry for schools, health for health facilities. Much of the evaluation work I do is community-based and sits outside all of it.”
I ended on the point that matters most to me: “Of course I am as ethical as I can be, but sometimes it is good to have that objective perspective” — the judgement of someone not involved in executing the evaluation.
One panelist took the question up directly, and did so generously. She framed the wider task as moving the region from events toward infrastructure — formal and informal mechanisms that keep momentum between conferences — and named Caribbean Evaluators International (CEI) as a structure already in place that could be engaged to develop regional standards.
She proposed that the region convene on ethical principles and, in a second suggestion, that governments embed a section on ethical principles within national M&E policy, aligned with what the universities already apply. Both are good proposals, and I readily support both.
The more interesting point, though, is what happened between my question and the answer. I asked where the oversight body was. The answer was a code. Another speaker in the same session had already moved in the same direction, arguing that ethical guidance should be settled collectively by multiple stakeholders rather than top-down, alongside shared standards, values, principles and safeguards. The moderator, summarising, recorded my intervention as being about the importance of ethical aspects of evaluation. At no point did I perceive that this substitution was deliberate or intentionally evasive. It is simply what comes to mind when the word ethics is spoken. That in and of itself is why this conversation is so important.
Values vs. Decisions: Why a Code Isn’t Enough
In our regional discourse, we have developed a robust vocabulary around conduct but have remained silent about oversight. The two are functionally different. A code states values; a committee is a decision-making mechanism. This substitution is not a minor semantic error. When we rely solely on a practitioner’s personal "moral suasion" rather than objective, third-party review, we place the weight of potentially complex ethical arbitration on the person least positioned to be objective, the one executing the contract. History has already taught us that that is insufficient.
A code tells me what good conduct looks like. Review tells me whether this protocol, with these participants, in this community, meets that standard—and it tells me before I enter the field.
The distinction is not academic. Where terms of reference require ethical approval and every route to approval runs through an institution I do not belong to, the requirement stops being a safeguard and starts operating as an eligibility screen. The lead evaluator role defaults to international teams with access to review boards abroad, in which case a foreign entity arbitrates ethical conduct in our context, or to consultants with a university affiliation. We filter out independent Caribbean practitioners before assessing quality. Adopting a regional code in and of itself would not change that.
The same register, everywhere else
I had noted this pattern across the conference. In one of the earlier emerging evaluators' sessions, ethics arrived as a competency — a speaker listed “the usual professional ethical conduct” among the capabilities of an evaluation leader — and then as “the overriding framework that all evaluation professionals need to adhere to” in the moderator’s five-domain competency framework. The session closed with a panelist offering, as one takeaway, that people-centred practice means being careful not to do harm and upholding professional integrity and ethical principles.
In the Community of Practice town hall, it seemed even more substantive. Someone observed that the discipline, unlike accountancy, has intentionally not moved towards certification or licensing; named the guidance that already exists in the American Evaluation Association (AEA) principles, the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Monitoring, Evaluation and Systematization (ReLAC) standards and CDB’s own programme evaluation guidelines; and then named the enforcement problem exactly, noting that with no way to police a professional code, what remains is moral suasion. The recommendations that followed were to read more, stay current, take specialised courses, not take on more than you can handle, and complete Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) certification every five years. Evaluators repeatedly noted that they must enter a space that helps them understand the standards, ethics, values, and methodologies. I fully agree, but we cannot stop there.
Competency, framework, principles, guidance, certification, commitment - every one of those is something an individual practitioner does. None of them is a decision about a particular evaluation made by anyone other than the person conducting it. That is not a criticism of any speaker — each contribution was sound on its own terms. It describes a field that has a vocabulary for conduct and none for oversight.
Risk is not a function of budget or scope
Afterwards, two suggestions were put to me privately: firstly, that small projects do not need review (presumably based on a cost-benefit assumption of available resources to provide ethical oversight and relative risk of small projects), and secondly, that they felt the region lacked capacity to build a private IRB mechanism of its own.
I disagree on both counts. First, risk is not a function of budget. Thirty participants in one community carry a higher re-identification risk than three thousand nationally, because age, district and programme participation may identify a person even when the name is stripped. Evaluation, even for small contexts, reaches precisely the people ethics frameworks were written to protect. Therefore, smallness supports a proportionate, expedited review track, which research ethics has always provided. It is not an argument for none.
The Caribbean does not lack capacity
The infrastructure for independent review bodies already exists.
Committees exist. Every University of the West Indies (UWI) campus operates a Research Ethics Committee under a University-level Committee on Research Ethics. Jamaica alone has four functioning committees.
They are networked. The Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) established its own committee in 2014 and, in 2016, convened Caribbean Network of Research Ethics Committees (CANREC) — a regional network of twenty-one Caribbean research ethics committees for health.
Training is routine. UWI runs a credit-bearing graduate research ethics course, and CITI certification is already required of every named investigator before a UWI campus Research Ethics Committee accepts an application. The proposed remedy is a prerequisite the system already enforces.
Reviewers have been produced for a decade. From 2014 to 2024, the Caribbean Research Ethics Education Initiative, funded by the NIH Fogarty International Center, delivered graduate-level research ethics education to seventy-two trainees from seventeen countries and then built a master’s degree in bioethics and research ethics. Its stated aims include preparing fellows to lead research ethics committees.
One qualification, which I also learned in corridor conversations afterwards. Two UWI campuses do invite researchers who are not staff or students to write to the Office of Research for submission instructions. Therefore, I must acknowledge that a route of a kind seems to exist that I did not know of before. But it is discretionary, campus-specific, and specifically for the St. Augustine campus; it is framed around external researchers using the university itself as a research site.
Building the Door: From Events to Infrastructure
The region has committees, a network already connecting some of them, trained reviewers, and a pipeline still producing them. What it lacks is a route that a private commissioned evaluator without institutional affiliation can find, follow, and cite. That is a governance and access problem, not a capacity one.
The first panelist was right that the task was to move from events toward infrastructure. A Caribbean code of ethical principles is worth having and is a good first step; I hope the region takes up the charge to adapt one for ourselves. But a code is a document, and what an unaffiliated practitioner needs is a door.
*Session quotations are drawn from personal notes of CEvalSpace 2026 sessions and have been lightly cleaned for readability without alteration of meaning. Other sources: The UWI Policy on Research Ethics and campus Research Ethics Committees (Mona, Cave Hill, St Augustine, Five Islands, Global Campus); UWI graduate research ethics course ETHI6000; CITI Program requirements as published by UWI campuses. CARPHA, Caribbean Network of Research Ethics Committees (CANREC), established 2016. Caribbean Research Ethics Education Initiative, NIH Fogarty International Center Award R25TW009731 (2014–2024), Windward Islands Research and Education Foundation, with Clarkson University, St George’s University and Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro.
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