Putting the public back into public health.

This paper discusses the question of ‘good governance’ in relation to the current debates about global development and health. It explores the challenge of health governance in the face of interconnected complex developmental transitions. Global health is said to be undergoing its third ‘great transition’, the first two transitions being the clean water and sanitation transition in the nineteenth century, and the vaccine research and mass vaccination programmes in the twentieth. The third, twenty-first century, global health transition is towards health system reform and universal health coverage (Rodin and Ferranti, 2012). However, this momentous shift for global health is just one face of an interconnected, multifaceted ‘Rubik’s cube’ of concurrent developmental transitions.