Paulo M. Buss, Luiz Augusto C. Galvão, Sebastian Tobar and Luiz Eduardo Fonseca

The Latin American health sector has had difficulty embracing and integrating global agendas defined at high-level meetings, such as Rio 92, Agenda 21, the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The health sector has preferred to define and follow its own mandates and agendas and, to a certain extent, to ignore the agreements and commitments reached by world leaders and embraced by other sectors, such as the economic, diplomatic and environmental sectors. This attitude towards global calls for action offers the advantage of being able to operate more freely, but at the same time, it can isolate the health sector and prevent it from benefiting from intersectoral coordination and access to valuable and highly needed resources. The THINK_SDGs initiative is a call to change and, at the same time, aims to commit and engage think tanks and academic institutions to promote and actively participate in the strategizing and implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This can be a unique opportunity to turn health into one of the top sectors in the global governance process for sustainable development, and to prevent the Latin American health sector from merely reporting the results and assisting the governance process provided by other actors who are not naturally part of the public health community.

Paulo M. Buss, MD, MPH, is a full time professor at the FIOCRUZ National School of Public Health, and Director of the FIOCRUZ Center for International Relations in Health, a WHO/PAHO Collaborating Centre for Global Health and South–South Cooperation

Luiz Augusto C. Galvão, MD, MPH, DSC, is a researcher at the FIOCRUZ National School of Public Health, and an assistant at the FIOCRUZ Center for International Relations in Health, a WHO/PAHO Collaborating Centre for Global Health and South–South Cooperation

Sebastian Tobar, MPH, is a technical advisor at the FIOCRUZ Center for International Relations in Health, a WHO/PAHO Collaborating Centre for Global Health and South–South Cooperation

Luiz Eduardo Fonseca, MD, DPH, is a technical advisor at the FIOCRUZ Center for International Relations in Health, a WHO/PAHO Collaborating Centre for Global Health and South–South Cooperation