EDITORS’ INTRODUCTIONS 2.2
and its General Assembly in New York, where all the world’s needs can be addressed. The UN Charter in 1945, although focused on peace and security, included health as an integral part. Article 13 empowers the General Assembly to “initiate studies and make recommendations for the purpose of … promoting international co-operation in the economic, social, cultural, educational, and health fields”. In 1996, the UN created UNAIDS to draw on the resources and actions of 11 UN system organisations, covering refugees, children, food security, population, drugs and crime, gender equality, science, education, culture, development and, of course, the WHO, for an integrated response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. However, after 1945, UN summits started only in 1990. Since then, its summit-level high level meetings have proliferated, including those devoted to health. In September 2023 it had four – on PPPR, universal health coverage, tuberculosis and the SDGs, whose third goal is on health. However, while these UN health summits add value, the leaders of most UN members and especially those of the major powers seldom attend. And members’ compliance with their UN commitments is often very low. REGIONAL INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRATION This underscores the importance of advances at the regional level. Here the European Union, long a leader, has created the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development and taken other measures to integrate health and the economy and foster a ‘well-being society’ for all. In February 2022 the African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government made the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention an autonomous health body, to confront Africa’s broad array of infectious disease outbreak events and its rising burden of non-communicable diseases. Africa CDC is now proposing a New Deal to implement a ‘New Public Health Order’, fully integrated with the AU’s Agenda 2063 and the SDGs. COUNTRY-LEVEL CONTRIBUTIONS At the country level, institutional integration is advancing too. The US State Department has created the Bureau of Global Health, to assemble the assets of the whole department and make global
health security a key feature of US national security policy. The bureau also integrates the major resources of the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief and seeks partnerships with other countries and international institutions. Lebanon’s Ministry of Health is implementing its comprehensive five-year National Health Strategy: Vision 2030 to integrate responses to immediate and longer-term challenges. Its Sustainable Energy Strategy for the Healthcare Sector seeks to transform the production and use of green energy, in ways that support the SDGs and the decisions of successive UN climate change conferences. REMAINING CHALLENGES Yet there is still much to do. The first major challenge is to mobilise much more public and private finance for health and its supporting social determinants. The second is to strengthen the badly overburdened global health workforce in all its components. The third is to share technology and build manufacturing and innovation capacity throughout the developing world. And the fourth is to fully integrate health in all its dimensions into the response to climate change, which is now an existential threat for all. ▪
JOHN KIRTON John Kirton is the director of the Global Governance Program, which includes the Global Health Diplomacy Program, the G20 Research Group, the G7 Research Group and the BRICS Research Group, all based at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, where he is a professor emeritus of political science. He is co-author, most recently, of Reconfiguring the Global Governance of Climate Change , and co-editor of a series of G7 and G20 summit publications including G7 Japan: The 2023 Hiroshima Summit and G20 India: The 2023 New Delhi Summit . X-TWITTER @jjkirton
www.ghdp.utoronto.ca www.g7g20.utoronto.ca www.brics.utoronto.ca
19
HEALTH: A POLITICAL CHOICE Health: A Political Choice – From Fragmentation to Integration
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online