Introduction: The International Political Economy of Global Health Governance

In this chapter we seek to provide an overarching theoretical and conceptual framework for the analysis of global health and contemporary global health governance by means of an international political economy (IPE) approach. The chapter, and indeed this volume, is the first major attempt to generate an IPE of global health governance, wherein explanations of contemporary crises in global health and the contested space of global health policies are explicitly rooted in IPE. We seek to offer a corrective to what is a striking poverty of IPE approaches to this fundamental area of globality and human life, an absence which has persisted despite the almost routine linkage of new disease patterns and resource scarcity in healthcare with key features of globalisation (Fidler, 2001 and 2004; Lee et al., 2002). Works on global health governance regularly footnote the centrality of economic globalisation, including how such factors as increased volumes of international trade, investment and finance are having direct and indirect effects on human health, not least in the more rapid transmission of infectious diseases resulting from trade flows and spatial compression. Similarly, and in political terms, scholars and health policy communities are increasingly sensitive to the fact that global health governance is also changing (and has arguably changed from a system of ‘international’ health governance) because of the increasing influence of a range of International Organisations (IOs) and economic actors with little or no previous health remit (Brown et al., 2006).