02.07.12
Recent contributions to research on health and foreign policy
A report of the International research initiative ‘Foreign Policy as Part of Global Health Challenges’
NUPI Report | Oslo, NUPI | 36 pages
The research literature on the health-foreign policy nexus is rapidly expanding in volume and in scope. The dominant focus is on health in foreign policy, “global health” and “global health governance”. These are broad themes, and a case can be made that these are not very useful as analytical categories but rather as convenient headings for broader field of research.
>> Summary
For instance, some of the literature on global health defines it in terms of the emergence of a qualitatively new domain with distinct characteristics while others apply the same concept to describe what was previously called “international health.” In the literature on global health governance, links between health and other
foreign policy areas such as trade and security are covered, but there are few studies that do so with in-depth and theoretically informed analyses.
There is also – surprisingly – relatively little work within this emerging field on the links between health and areas such as humanitarian emergencies, public goods, migration, development or human rights.
A large share of the literature aims to convince the readers of the importance of giving health priority. It is not an undue stretch that much of it serves the role of handmaiden to policy. It is often based on relatively superficial engagement with empirical data beyond the already well-known data on key actors and their policies. But there is also a significant number of publications based on in-depth empirical studies, but these have not yet been brought to bear on a critical stance on how health and foreign policy, respectively, may be affected by the former being integrated as part of the latter.
By way of conclusion, we highlight four areas that should offer fruitful and important areas of research that is of relevance also to other, adjacent research.
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