Global Health Governance
[Accessed 12 July 2014]
http://blogs.shu.edu/ghg/category/complete-issues/summer-2013/

Analyzing Leadership in Global Health Governance
– June 16, 2014
Sophie Harman and Simon Rushton
Rhetoric around the need for more and better leadership is ubiquitous in contemporary global health governance, yet there has been little articulation of what type of leadership is required, who might play leadership roles, and in what fora leadership might be exercised. Global health governance has widely been seen as a policy space characterised by a multiplicity of (often competing) actors with no overall authority. Nonetheless, major accomplishments exist, and in some cases there are impressive levels of collective action to address particular health problems. We argue that leadership provides an important lens for understanding how goals are met in global health governance. Drawing on the existing literature on global health governance and leadership and agency in international relations, we set out in this paper a framework for analysing leadership in global health governance. Crucially, we argue, such a framework must be specific enough to be operationalised in terms of a program of research and at the same time broad enough to capture a wide variety of different sources, sites and forms of leadership – including the roles played by ‘hidden leaders’ who are seldom acknowledged in mainstream analyses of global health politics.

Institutional Readiness in Practice of Pandemic Response to an Emerging Infectious Disease
– June 16, 2014
Asif B. Farooq and Shannon E. Majowicz
This paper argues that emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) remain a threat-focused security issue as the relative success of recent international responses do not fully reflect our current readiness for EID outbreaks. Existing pandemic response plans have been tested only for either virulent or highly transmissible diseases. Therefore, global health institutions have not yet been tested for the worst-case scenario: a disease with high virulence and transmissibility. We categorize EIDs into four quartiles according to their virulence and transmissibility, identify five relevant factors, and use recent EID outbreaks to develop inferences for response capacity to a possible outbreak of highly virulent and transmissible EIDs. We conclude there may be significant shortcomings in the existing pandemic response capacity to EIDs, which could lead to a public health crisis.