Drawing on an in-depth analysis of eight global health networks, a recent essay in this journal argued that global health networks face four challenges to their effectiveness: problem definition, positioning, coalition-building, and governance. While sharing the argument of the essay concerned, in this commentary, we argue that these analytical concepts can be used to explicate a concept that h...

This paper critically examines and explains the increasingly influential idea of ‘global governance’. After outlining the evolving intentional order and the new actors that are prominent part of contemporary governance structures, I assess the implication of these developments for the state.

in his perspective “navigating between stealth advocacy and unconscious dogmatism: the challenge of researching the norms, politics and power of global health,” ooms argues that actions taken in the field of global health are dependent not only on available resources, but on the normative premise that guides how these resources are spent. this comment sets out how the application of a predomina...

Global Governance has become a buzzword in the social sciences in general and in International Relations (IR) in particular. Many different phenomena, from the influence of civil society on international decision-making processes to the role of intergovernmental organisations and transnational corporations in world politics, are invoked as examples of global governance. However, upon closer ins...

Global health networks—webs of individuals and organizations linked by a shared concern for a particular condition—have proliferated over the past quarter century. In a recent editorial in this journal, I presented evidence that their effectiveness in addressing four challenges—problem definition, positioning, coalitionbuilding and governance—shapes their ability to influence policy. The editor...

1 Author’s Note: I would like publicly to thank the students in my fall 2006 graduate seminar on “Globalization and Democratic Theory” at Indiana University (Bloomington) for a series of lively discussions on Habermas’s writings on globalization. As they will see, they “won” the argument, since many of their astute critical observations and insights inspired my remarks here. Global Governance w...

Politics play a central part in determining health and development outcomes as Gorik Ooms highlights in his recent commentary. As health becomes more global and more politicized the need grows to better understand the inherently political processes at all levels of governance, such as ideological positions, ideas, value judgments, and power. I agree that global health research should strengthen...

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BACKGROUND Global constitutionalism is a way of looking at the world, at global rules and how they are made, as if there was a global constitution, empowering global institutions to act as a global government, setting rules which bind all states and people. ANALYSIS This essay employs global constitutionalism to examine how and why global health governance, as currently structured, has strugg...