Global Health and the Gates Foundation — In Perspective

McCoy, David; McGoey, Linsey

doi:10.1057/9780230299474_7

Cited by 42 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…This fragmentation, many argue, results from the increased agenda-setting power of private foundations, notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has undermined the ability of publicly mandated institutions like the World Health Organization and recipient governments to promote integrated health policies, threatening democratic global health governance (Cueto 2004; Brown et al 2006; McCoy and McGoey 2011; Birn 2014). Moreover, ethnographic studies have demonstrated that private foundations’ success in shaping health policy in line with their convictions has often been achieved by limiting their focus to ‘safe issues’ and marginalizing other perspectives, as in the case of malaria (Eckl 2014), or by appropriating broader policy agendas, as in the case of GAVI’s health system strengthening investment (Storeng 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Lives in the balance”: The politics of integration in the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health: Table 1.

Storeng

Béhague

2016

Health Policy Plan.

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A decade ago, the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) was established to combat the growing fragmentation of global health action into uncoordinated, issue-specific efforts. Inspired by dominant global public-private partnerships for health, the PMNCH brought together previously competing advocacy coalitions for safe motherhood and child survival and attracted support from major donors, foundations and professional bodies. Today, its founders highlight its achievements in generating priority for ‘MNCH’, encouraging integrated health systems thinking and demonstrating the value of collaboration in global health endeavours. Against this dominant discourse on the success of the PMNCH, this article shows that rhetoric in support of partnership and integration often masks continued structural drivers and political dynamics that bias the global health field towards vertical goals. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the Safe Motherhood Initiative’s evolution into the PMNCH as a response to the competitive forces shaping the current global health field. Despite many successes, the PMNCH has struggled to resolve historically entrenched programmatic and ideological divisions between the maternal and child health advocacy coalitions. For the Safe Motherhood Initiative, the cost of operating within an extremely competitive policy arena has involved a partial renouncement of ambitions to broader social transformations in favour of narrower, but feasible and ‘sellable’ interventions. A widespread perception that maternal health remains subordinated to child health even within the Partnership has elicited self-protective responses from the safe motherhood contingent. Ironically, however, such responses may accentuate the kind of fragmentation to global health governance, financing and policy solutions that the Partnership was intended to challenge. The article contributes to the emerging critical ethnographic literature on global health initiatives by highlighting how integration may only be possible with a more radical conceptualization of global health governance.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Lives in the balance”: The politics of integration in the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health: Table 1.

Storeng

Béhague

2016

Health Policy Plan.

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“…16 They present themselves as being able to apply new and innovative methods to addressing global health concerns, but their efforts often carry an implicit mistrust and contempt for government and the public sector. 17 They can be a tool for generating collective action on global health issues, but the processes for incorporating and overseeing philanthropic foundations largely remains ad hoc and underspecified. 18 The role of philanthropic foundations in global governance, and specifically global health governance, remains relatively underdeveloped.…”

Section: Global Governance and Philanthropic Foundationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rockefeller and Gates Foundations in Global Health Governance

Youde¹

2013

Global Society

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“…Another related criticism of the BMGF is its preference for technological, rather than social solutions [73,74]. Storeng quotes a vaccine expert she interviewed as stating "I think it is Mr Gates himself who sort of believes that the world can be cured by technology" [67].…”

Section: The Bmgf's Focus On Technology Especially Vaccinesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philanthrocapitalism: Promoting Global Health but Failing Planetary Health

Butler

2019

Challenges

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Focusing on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) as a case study, this paper explores the relationship between philanthrocapitalism, economic history, and global and planetary health. The Wellcome Trust is also briefly discussed, chiefly in the context of planetary health. The paper argues that in the last 45 years there has been an increased preference for market-based approaches, often called neoliberalism, particularly in the U.S. and its allies. This has generated greater inequality in many high-income settings and weakened the norm of taxation. This has provided a setting in which philanthrocapitalism has flourished, including the BMGF. The latter has in turn become an important actor for global health, partially balancing the adverse consequences of neoliberalism. Planetary health is here defined as the interaction between global health and global environmental change, including to the climate and other elements of the Earth System. Although the Wellcome Trust has recently made funds available for ecological health research, it continues to invest in fossil fuels. The Gates Foundation provide no or minimal grants for ecological or planetary health but appear to have recently substantially divested from fossil fuels, for unclear reasons. The paper concludes that these large philanthrocapitalist organizations partly compensate for the decline in attention to global health driven by market-preferring solutions, but remain insufficiently proactive in the face of the great dangers associated with declining planetary health.

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Global Health and the Gates Foundation — In Perspective

Cited by 42 publications

References 0 publications

“Lives in the balance”: The politics of integration in the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health: Table 1.

“Lives in the balance”: The politics of integration in the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health: Table 1.

The Rockefeller and Gates Foundations in Global Health Governance

Philanthrocapitalism: Promoting Global Health but Failing Planetary Health

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