Critical review of the protection and promotion of globalised health
Globalisation is transforming patterns of health and disease around the world, and also how decisions on health are being made. As a result, health communities in different countries need to cooperate more closely and cope with a broader range of issues than ever before. The concept of GHG, now widely used in research, policy and practice, is concerned with how to collectively protect and promote health in an increasingly globalised world. However, progress on GHG has been slow. To address this issue, the EU-funded GHG (The transformation of global health governance: Competing worldviews and crises) project sought to better understand and explain the stagnation concerning GHG. Project partners performed a comparative analysis that combined various perspectives and health issues. They addressed infectious disease as a key issue in GHG, and incorporated non-communicable disease and non-disease-based health issues to expand the analysis in order to cover GHG more fully. Team members delivered a number of important findings. There is no single underlying logic behind calls for GHG, but rather several competing visions and frames each with their own logic and chosen policy routes. The framing of health issues in terms of human rights, security, economics, international development and evidence-based medicine are especially significant. Different frames have greater levels of policy leverage across various health issues, and for some issues a dominant frame can be identified. No frame is dominant across all GHG, and competing frames and visions help to explain the lack of progress. Framing enables health issues to move into other policy areas, which can boost the chances of success in policy and governance. GHG significantly advanced the state of the art in GHG. In doing so, it laid the groundwork for a more critical approach to GHG and sparked an informed debate about its desired nature.
Keywords
Health, globalisation, global health governance, disease