Opinion on the Global Policy journal’s website: global health governance in the age of COVID-19

At the beginning of last year, the Global Policy journal published a research article on ‘Gridlock, Innovation and Resilience in Global Health Governance‘, that I had co-authored with Ilona Kickbusch, Michaela Told, Kyle McNally and the late David Held. One of the arguments of the study was that our era of growing health risks and socio-economic insecurities could easily lead to a crisis that would threaten to upend decades of progress in global health.

Today, the same journal hosts an opinion piece in which Ilona Kickbusch and myself reflect on the ‘legacy’ of that research in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our key takes are the following:

  • the international response to COVID-19 highlights a number of negative dynamics that were already present in the global health system, from rising geopolitical rivalries to the risk of excessive fragmentation in governance instruments;
  • at the same time, COVID-19 is a window of opportunity to break open existing bottlenecks and strengthen multilateralism in global health and beyond.

You can read the opinion piece at this link.

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