The Mosquito Multiple: malaria and market-based initiatives

This chapter focuses on attempts to introduce a market to stimulate competition and generate creativity in the field of malaria vaccines. The chapter draws on a qualitative research project engaging 34 organisations in the malaria field. It is argued that those involved in attempts to produce a malaria vaccine market continually work to manage a tension between apparent ontological singularity in market framing (that the nature of things are settled and well known) and multiplicity in market experimentation (in which the nature of things appears to become messy, unsettled, subject to new questions and assessment). Entities involved in such ontological tension include, but are not limited to: mosquitoes, doctors, the sick, malaria parasites, costs, values, efficacy rates and partnerships. In the research this tension is noted by economists, scientists and policy makers. However, in place of any counter expectation that such tension should lead to critique or even abandonment of the market as a focus for managing malaria, the Market (broadly construed) continues to be heralded as the means to solve the problem of malaria. Retaining the integrity of the Market depends on upholding (and where necessary adjusting) a set of Market principles from which any particular market intervention can be judged. The failure of a market intervention is thus understood as