This project is an ongoing CIGI initiative that tackles global health governance challenges. Research in this area examines how the current global health governance system is adapting and responding to new types of threats that are proving larger in scope and in scale than in the past. Using a cross-disciplinary approach, work under this project addresses global health issues ranging from climate-induced pandemics to the brain drain of health practitioners and their migration across borders. CIGI is undertaking to strengthen and build capacity across borders and institutions in both developed and developing countries to influence the agendas of international opinion leaders and multilateral institutions as they relate to health governance challenges.

The first initiative under this project ran from November 2005 to May 2007 and focused on the future innovation in global health governance—especially how the current global health governance system adapts to mobilize the contributions of civil society, networks, and a diverse group of systematically significant countries and international institutions on issues like reaching the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), addressing pandemic threats, and improving access to essential medicines and treatments. Following a workshop in 2005 that tackled these issues, this initiative concluded in May 2007 with the release of the edited volume Governing Global Health: Challenge, Response, Innovation by Ashgate.

The second initiative is currently underway and focuses on moving health sovereignty by examining the great upsurge in mobility of health workers as well as population flows and the pathogens they carry. Sporadic patterns of human movements across the globe are contributing to the spread of new and unfamiliar diseases, once kept within sovereign borders. Traditional tools employed by nations and intergovernmental institutions are inadequate in size and capacity to cope with this fast and far-reaching new world of moving people and pathogens. There is an urgent need for innovation in global governance to close the growing gap between the new challenge and the old international public policy framework. CIGI initiated a dialogue around these challenges in the international workshop, Moving Health Sovereignty: Global Challenge, African Perspective in November 2008. An edited volume of key issue-focused papers is set to follow.