Africa And Global Health Governance

A timely inquiry into how domestic politics and global health governance interact in Africa. Global health campaigns, development aid programs, and disaster relief groups have been criticized for falling into colonialist patterns, running roughshod over the local structure and authority of the countries in which they work. Far from powerless, however, African states play complex roles in health policy design and implementation. In Africa and Global Health Governance, Amy S. Patterson focuses on AIDS, the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak, and noncommunicable diseases to demonstrate why and how African states accept, challenge, or remain ambivalent toward global health policies, structures, and norms. Employing in-depth analysis of media reports and global health data, Patterson also relies on interviews and focus-group discussions to give voice to the various agents operating within African health care systems, including donor representatives, state officials, NGOs, community-based groups, health activists, and patients. Showing the variety within broader patterns, this clearly written book demonstrates that Africa's role in global health governance is dynamic and not without agency. Patterson shows how, for example, African leaders engage with international groups, attempting to maintain their own leadership while securing the aid their people need. Her findings will benefit health and development practitioners, scholars, and students of global health governance and African politics.

Poverty and inequality are among the most significant determinants of health. Increased inequality gaps associated with globalization have serious implications for global health. Global changes in political economy shape global health influencing who bears the burden from epidemics, unhealthy environments and lack of access to health care.

This book argues that the rise of institutions and organizations dedicated to global health-global health governance-has emerged, grown, and proven itself resilient over the past generation because international society has come to understand addressing global health as part of a larger sense of moral responsibility and obligation.

Today’s era of intense globalization has unleashed dynamic movements of people, pathogens, and pests that overwhelm the static territorial jurisdictions on which the governance provided by sovereign states and their formal intergovernmental institutions is based. This world of movement calls for new ideas and institutions to govern people’s health, above all in Africa, where the movements and health challenges are the most acute. This book insightfully explores these challenges in ways that put the perspectives of Africans themselves at centre stage. It begins with the long central and still compelling African health challenge of combating the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. It then examines the global governance responses by the major multilateral organizations of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and the newer informal flexible democratically oriented ones of the Group of Eight. It also addresses the compounding health challenge created by climate change to assess both its intensifying impact on Africa and how all international institutions have largely failed to link climate and health in their governance response. It concludes with several recommendations about the innovative ideas and institutions that offer a way to closing the great global governance gaps and thus improving Africans’ health and that of citizens beyond.

By analysing the roles and problems faced by international regimes as major players in global health governance, this book looks into the root causes of the often insufficient supply of global public goods for health and of the deficiencies in current global health governance. Combining several different methods of analysis and methodologies, this book sketches out the landscape of international public health governance involving a range of international actors. These include the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the Biological Weapons Convention and international human rights regimes. Through a novel theoretical framework that synthesises the theory of securitisation, public goods and international regimes, the author then focuses on factors that have resulted in observed deficiencies in global health governance. Based on these examinations, the book also tries to explore feasible approaches for institutional refinement and innovations for greater effectiveness in global health governance. The book will appeal to academics and policy makers interested in global health, international relations and international law.

This volume addresses the ideational and policy-oriented challenges of Africa’s health governance due to voluntary and involuntary cross-border migration of people and diseases in a growing 'mobile Africa'. The collected set of specialized contributions in this volume examines how national and regional policy innovation can address the competing conception of sovereignty in dealing with Africa’s emerging healthcare problems in a fast-paced, interconnect world.

This book addresses conflicts and institutional changes of global health governance in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

Since the 2014 Ebola outbreak many public- and private-sector leaders have seen a need for improved management of global public health emergencies. The effects of the Ebola epidemic go well beyond the three hardest-hit countries and beyond the health sector. Education, child protection, commerce, transportation, and human rights have all suffered. The consequences and lethality of Ebola have increased interest in coordinated global response to infectious threats, many of which could disrupt global health and commerce far more than the recent outbreak. In order to explore the potential for improving international management and response to outbreaks the National Academy of Medicine agreed to manage an international, independent, evidence-based, authoritative, multistakeholder expert commission. As part of this effort, the Institute of Medicine convened four workshops in summer of 2015 to inform the commission report. The presentations and discussions from the Governance for Global Health Workshop are summarized in this report.