scholarly journals Beware the Kindleberger Trap in Global Health Governance

Author(s):  
Jin Jiyong

The Covid-19 pandemic is both a public health crisis and a stress test for global health governance. Effective health governance hinges on the provision of global public goods for health. Generally, the hegemon underwrites the operation and stability of the global public health architecture by ensuring the sustained supply of global public goods for health. But when the hegemon is unable or unwilling to shoulder this responsibility, global health governance may run the risk of falling into a Kindleberger Trap. The leadership vacuum that is opening up amid the coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the process. At present, China should adopt a three-pronged approach to promote bilateral health cooperation with leading countries like the United States, strengthen regional institution-building with ASEAN, South Korea, Japan, and Belt and Road countries, and improve the performance, credibility, and integrity of global organizations like the WHO and G-20. The Kindleberger Trap in global health governance can be overcome by adapting regional health coordination to make it more agile and effective.

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lance Gable

As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, threats to global public health continue to proliferate. New and novel risks to health have emerged consistently over the past 30 years. Moreover, our shrinking world now allows health threats to spread more quickly than ever before. Given these realities, efforts to protect and improve global health must be expansive, flexible, and able to take into account the variety of circumstances that may imperil good health. These efforts also must consider the multiple levels and varying contexts in which laws, policies, and other factors govern global health and affect health outcomes.


Author(s):  
Mary Robinson

Institutions matter for the advancement of human rights in global health. Given the dramatic development of human rights under international law and the parallel proliferation of global institutions for public health, there arises an imperative to understand the implementation of human rights through global health governance. This volume examines the evolving relationship between human rights, global governance, and public health, studying an expansive set of health challenges through a multi-sectoral array of global organizations. To analyze the structural determinants of rights-based governance, the organizations in this volume include those international bureaucracies that implement human rights in ways that influence public health in a globalizing world. Bringing together leading health and human rights scholars and practitioners from academia, non-governmental organizations, and the United Nations system, this volume explores: (1) the foundations of human rights as a normative framework for global health governance, (2) the mandate of the World Health Organization to pursue a human rights-based approach to health, (3) the role of inter-governmental organizations across a range of health-related human rights, (4) the influence of rights-based economic governance on public health, and (5) the focus on global health among institutions of human rights governance. Contributing chapters map the distinct human rights activities within a specific institution of global governance for health. Through the comparative institutional analysis in this volume, the contributing authors examine institutional efforts to operationalize human rights in organizational policies, programs, and practices and assess institutional factors that facilitate or inhibit human rights mainstreaming for global health advancement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-331
Author(s):  
Judith Bueno de Mesquita ◽  
Anuj Kapilashrami ◽  
Benjamin Mason Meier

AbstractWhile human rights law has evolved to provide guidance to governments in realizing human rights in public health emergencies, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the foundations of human rights in global health governance. Public health responses to the pandemic have undermined international human rights obligations to realize (1) the rights to health and life, (2) human rights that underlie public health, and (3) international assistance and cooperation. As governments prepare for revisions of global health law, new opportunities are presented to harmonize global health law and human rights law, strengthening rights-based governance to respond to future threats.


Author(s):  
Matthew Sparke

This chapter examines how the politics of global health have been shaped by globalisation. This means evaluating its effects on both the material level of political-economic integration and on the ideational level of political-cultural discourse. The former is conventionally tied through a focus on trade and travel to global public health security, and the latter is often associated with global humanitarian care. Going beyond this dualistic divide, however, this chapter argues that globalisation has spun a connective thread running through both regimes. This connective thread is the pro-market neo-liberal governance that sutures globalisation’s integrative and ideational dynamics with powerful binding implications for health. Due to these ties that bind, processes of neo-liberalisation deeply influence global health, creating global health vulnerabilities and problems through structural violence while also shaping and steering the delivery of global health responses. Global health governance remains influenced by other international and postcolonial health regimes that continue to inspire alternatives to the global expansion of neo-liberal norms. However, the same market forces that have made globalisation a synonym for processes of neo-liberalisation have also now become the dominant transnational influence shaping the ‘global’ in global health politics.


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