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Human Rights in Global Health Governance
by Benjamin Mason Meier, Hanna Huffstetler and Lawrence O. Gostin Human rights frame global health governance. In codifying a normative foundation for global governance in the aftermath of World War II, states came together under the auspices of an emergent United...
Same, same but different: Reforming the World Health Organization in an age of public scrutiny and global complexity
By Tine Hanrieder and Adam Kamradt-Scott As the World Health Organization (WHO) enters its 70th year of existence, a new director-general assumes the helm of the intergovernmental organization for their next five-year term of office. The election process for the WHO’s...
Provoking Barriers: The 2014 Ebola Outbreak and Unintended Consequences of WHO’s Power to Declare a Public Health Emergency
By Catherine Z. Worsnop One aim of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005 is to discourage the use of overly restrictive barriers because these measures incentivize outbreak concealment and undermine outbreak response...
Accountability, international law, and the World Health Organization: A need for reform?
By Mark Eccleston-Turner and Scarlett McArdle Recently the World Health Organization (henceforward WHO) has received significant criticism for its choice of action, as well as on occasion its inaction, with much of this criticism focusing on the role the Organization...
Successful Governance Reform and Its Consequences: How the Historical Drive for Shorter Meetings and More Time Efficiency Reverberates in Contemporary World Health Assemblies
By Julian Eckl The paper argues the working methods of the World Health Assembly (WHA) have been a recurrent object of reform discussions and that the vision that WHAs should become shorter has been a constant driver for them. It shows also how the vision of shorter...
Commentary: The World Health Organization’s Historic Moment of Peril and Promise: Reimaging a Global Health Agency Fit for Purpose in the 21st Century
By Lawrence O. Gostin The United Nations created the World Health Organization (WHO) as its first specialized agency in 1948. This was a time of enormous promise for the world, coming as it did after the horrors of World War II. What is striking about the post-war...
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Health SDGs and Europe: The Role of Regional Think Tanks
Oriana Ramirez-Rubio and Gonzalo Fanjul The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a new opportunity to propel Europe’s role in the fulfillment of global health aspirations, such as ending preventable diseases and achieving universal health coverage (UHC). However,...
What Approaches Can Schools of Public Health Take to Engage in Global Health? Reflections on the Implications of a Conceptual Synthesis
Donald C Cole, Suzanne Jackson and Lisa Forman Schools of Public Health (SPH) have been integral to public health system development at different jurisdictional levels, including global. With different histories, they have adapted to the shifting landscape of...
Friend or Foe? Citizen Perception of Foreign and Non-State Actor Participation in the Health Sector in Africa
Ashley M. Fox The past decade has been characterized by a dramatic scale-up of development assistance for health, which has raised questions about who is responsible for health, how to hold non-state actors accountable for their activities and whether development...
Is Improving Global Public Health Compatible with Saving the Climate? Exploring the Discourses of Health and Climate Change
Mari Grepstad and Berit Sofie Hembre The climate change discourse holds that burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change. Therefore, emissions must be reduced in order to avoid climate change. Further, it holds that climate change deteriorates global public...