Civil Society Organizations and Global Health Governance

Introduction

The 2007 Wall Summer Institute for Research was held June 25-28, 2007. It will be followed by a weekend closed retreat by separate invitation, to be held October 6-7, 2007. The follow-up weekend invitational retreat will be tied to the publication of a number of the papers that emerge from the June workshop.

The June workshop took place in Vancouver, at the UBC facilities of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. The follow-up weekend invitational retreat will be held at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Importance

The thematic question of the 2007 Summer Institute is: "What difference does the advent of civil society mean to global health governance?"

The central topics of focus are:

• The diverse nature of the civil society organizations that shape global health governance.
• The ways in which the characteristics and strategies of civil society organizations and public–private partnerships influence global health conditions.
• The implications of existing and possible health governance arrangements for global health conditions and international political relations.

A variety of civil society organizations influence global governance. They include humanitarian (e.g., Médecins Sans Frontières), foundations (e.g, the Gates Foundation), commercial (e.g., pharmaceutical firms), and knowledge-based organizations (e.g., international bodies of medical scientists, often promoted by international organizations). Most civil society organizations participate in a range of public/private partnerships and coalitions. In fact, the organizations participating in global health governance are best characterized by their diversity of memberships and resources. Moreover, it is the size of the economic resources of the different public and private donors, and their capacity to exert moral suasion, that define the nature of decision-making systems in this field.

For the purposes of this workshop, we will use the LSE project on civil society: “Civil society refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the boundaries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex, blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated by organisations such as registered charities, development non-governmental organisations, community groups, women's organisations, faith-based organisations, professional associations, trades unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups.” International Governmental Organizations -- the World Bank, the WHO, etc -- are typically not conceptualized as "civil society" per se -- they are creatures of states. Finally, the market is the market -- clearly distinct from civil society. It is the interaction of CSOs as defined above with markets, states and their national and international institutions, around global health governance that is the focus of this workshop.

Goals

There is in this intensive setting with international key players an excellent opportunity to analyze critical and controversial phenomena that have to date not been analyzed and, importantly, to advance thinking and dialogue in this area in order to improve global health outcomes.

Aspects of WSIR 2007 will be included in the Institute’s planned journal, the Wall Review of Advanced Research. A full-scale printed or electronic publication is also being contemplated as a product of the summer workshop.

Convened by Dianne Newell, Professor and Director, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, and co-directed by Janice Stein, FRSC, OC, Director, Munk Centre for International Studies and Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto, and Mark W. Zacher, FRSC, 2006 Peter Wall Distinguished Scholar in Residence and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of British Columbia.