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, they also represent an international responsibility for Europe to address its own health challenges and inequalities, which are considerable in areas such as noncommunicable diseases and mental health and in health risk factors such as obesity and environmental changes. In the atomized and somewhat messy agenda of the SDGs, think tanks and academic institutions can underpin this process by informing the design of national plans, encouraging implementation and making institutions accountable for their commitments. This paper briefly reviews the work of European policy research institutions (both formal policy-oriented think tanks and assimilated centers within academic institutions) in this field and suggests some avenues for their enhanced involvement in the SDG debate.
Oriana Ramirez-Rubio, MPH is the Policy Analysis Coordinator at ISGlobal
Gonzalo Fanjul, MPA, is the Policy Director at ISGlobal