Global governance describes intergovernmental and multi-stakeholder engagement in setting health policies and promoting accountability and transparency at a supranational level. Some of the institutions involved are health specific (e.g., the World Health Organization, UNAIDS and UNICEF), others have multiple agendas (e.g., World Bank), while others have non-health agendas that nonetheless affect health outcomes within and between countries (e.g., the World Trade Organization, International Labour Organization, International Monetary Fund, and United Nations Development Program, to name a few). Several have treaty-making authority with direct or indirect global health implications. The re-emergence of powerful global philanthropies and the rise of global public-private partnerships pose governance challenges. Government engagement in global health governance is shaped by their foreign policy preferences. How health is placed and framed within countries’ foreign policies has become of topic of global health research often described as ‘global health diplomacy.’ Geopolitics, in turn, captures diplomatic or forceful efforts to influence or exercise power at international scales (global and regional) that embody a country’s economic or political ambitions.
Papers submitted under this section will examine both global governance opportunities and risks through studies of the creation of and health impacts of governance structures and their power politics and conflicts of interest; regulatory regimes or framework conventions; voluntary corporate social responsibility initiatives; and/or progressive taxation policies or agreements. Papers will also explore governments’ health and foreign policy positions, processes of intergovernmental negotiations, coherence (or incoherence) between differing foreign policy goals, how different global health actors work to place health higher as both a domestic and foreign policy priority, and the relationship between countries’ geopolitical interests and their health foreign policy framing.