Global Health Justice and Governance
Jennifer Prah Ruger
Abstract
Critical and dangerous threats imperil global health. Serious health disparities, hazardous contagions that can circle our globalized planet in hours, a bewildering confusion of health actors and systems all combine in a kaleidoscopically fragmented, incoherent, and unjust global health enterprise. While a growing body of work in global justice and international relations explores moral issues and global governance, very little of it has linked principles of global health justice to governance to create a theory of global health. But the dangers confronting the world make a theoretical framewo ... More
Critical and dangerous threats imperil global health. Serious health disparities, hazardous contagions that can circle our globalized planet in hours, a bewildering confusion of health actors and systems all combine in a kaleidoscopically fragmented, incoherent, and unjust global health enterprise. While a growing body of work in global justice and international relations explores moral issues and global governance, very little of it has linked principles of global health justice to governance to create a theory of global health. But the dangers confronting the world make a theoretical framework essential, to enable analysis of the current system and to ground proposals to reform it and align it with moral values. This book presents a global justice theory—provincial globalism (PG)—and links it with the theory of shared health governance (SHG) to offer an alternative to the prevailing modus operandi, which has manifestly failed to serve global health. The PG/SHG framework advances health capability, and specifically the capability to avoid premature death and preventable morbidity, as the proper goal of health systems and policy. This framework sees human flourishing as global society’s end goal and proposes an ethical demand for health equity as the criterion for evaluating global health policy and law. It examines the current actors in global health, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and proposes assigning responsibilities to actors at all levels according to their functions and capabilities.
Keywords:
global health justice,
provincial globalism,
shared health governance,
health capability,
human flourishing,
global health
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199694631 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199694631.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jennifer Prah Ruger, author
Amaryta Sen Professor of Health Equity, Economics, and Policy; Associate Dean for Global Studies; Faculty Chair of the Centre for High Impact Philanthropy, University of Pennsylvania
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