The Politics Of Global Health Governance

Diseases do not recognize national borders, and as we are gradually learning, failure to govern health effectively at a global level profoundly affects us all. This book is about how global health governance has evolved to become stronger, more complex, and more important than ever before in history.

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.

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.

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.

Protecting and promoting health is inherently a political endeavor that requires a sophisticated understanding of the distribution and use of power. Yet while the global nature of health is widely recognized, its political nature is less well understood. In recent decades, the interdisciplinary field of global health politics has emerged to demonstrate the interconnections of health and core political topics, including foreign and security policy, trade, economics, and development. Today a growing body of scholarship examines how the global health landscape has both shaped and been shaped by political actors and structures. The Oxford Handbook of Global Health Politics provides an authoritative overview and assessment of research on this important and complicated subject. The volume is motivated by two arguments. First, health is not simply a technical subject, requiring evidence-based solutions to real-world problems, but an arena of political contestation where norms, values, and interests also compete and collide. Second, globalization has fundamentally changed the nature of health politics in terms of the ideas, interests, and institutions involved. The volume comprises more than 30 chapters by leading experts in global health and politics. Each chaper provides an overview of the state of the art on a given theoretical perspective, major actor, or global health issue. The Handbook offers both an excellent introduction to scholars new to the field and also an invaluable teaching and research resource for experts seeking to understand global health politics and its future directions.

In the light of scares about potential pandemics such as swine fever and avian flu, the issue of global health and its governance is of increasing concern to scholars and practitioners of medicine, public health, social work, and international politics alike. Providing a concise and informative introduction to how global health is governed, this book: Explores the various ways in which we understand global health governance Explains the "nuts and bolts" of the traditional institutions of global health governance, highlights key frameworks and treaties and their relative successes and failings Examines the actors in global health governance, their purpose, influence and impact Offers an in depth analysis of the effectiveness of global health interventions, focusing particularly on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Highlighting the wide variety of actors, issues and approaches involved, this work shows the complex nature of global health governance, forcing the reader to examine who or what really governs global health, to what outcome, and for whom.

Eminent scholars investigate the sharp contrast between the acute and multi-dimensional scale of the challenges to global health governance and the contradictory and ineffective responses to them. They draw on a wide range of disciplines to uncover the critical political economy dynamics in the contemporary governance of global health.

This book maps the emergence of health in global development discourse and governance since 1990. It argues that health norms have emerged, diffused, and subsequently become internalised through the various direct and indirect negotiation processes that created the global development goals. Covid-19, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS are prime illustrations of the fact that health is supremely political. Governments – whether they are local, national, international, or multilateral – make decisions about their policy responses, coordinate their response, and channel the necessary resources. Such decisions are informed by local and global conditions as well as sets of values, norms, and standards that determine policy and interventions. As states and regions become more interconnected, the politics of health are increasingly relevant to the sustainable future envisioned by global governance. This book explains how considerations of global health have come to inform and infuse the United Nations development agenda. It identifies processes, actors, institutions, and interactions in global health by analysing two related case studies: the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals. Providing an overview of, and insights about, the context of global development thinking and practice, the subtleties of global health, and global health governance, this book is an innovative contribution to the literature. It is suitable for students and scholars of global health, development studies, and international relations.