The Submissive Relationship of Public Health to Government, Politics, and Economics: How Global Health Diplomacy and Engaged Followership Compromise Humanitarian Relief

Abstract

This paper describes efforts by public health practitioners to address a health crisis caused by economic development policies that are unrestrained by either environmental, public health, or human rights mandates. Economic development projects funded by international funding institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank that reduce poverty when measured in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in the transborder region between Suriname and French Guiana harm minority populations where commercial activities destroy, alter, and remove the resources upon which local communities depend. In this study, the structural causes of a community health crisis affecting Indigenous people in the transborder region between Suriname and French Guiana was addressed by seeking gatekeepers in government who have access to policy-making processes. We found that deeply rooted economic development policies structured social, economic, and political alliances and made them resistant to feedback and reform. We concluded that work must be focused beyond the simple exchange of public health information. Public health practitioners must become politically active to create new policy commitments and new patterns of governance that advance development as well as improve health outcomes. Failure to do so may result in public health practitioners becoming ‘engaged followers’ that are complicit in the inhumanity that springs from their acquiescence to the authority of government officials when their policies are the cause of preventable death, disease, and disability.

Long-Term Economic Sustainability of Humanitarian Logistics—A Multi-Level and Time-Series Data Envelopment Analysis

“…As Doerner, Gutjahr, and van Wassenhove already described in 2011, specifically operations research (OR) interest in humanitarian logistics has picked up since about 15 years ago due to major globally recognized disasters at this time and the awareness of worldwide interconnectedness of risks [ 4 ]. This has been prolonged since then as global interrelations keep growing and are accompanied by increased means of OR methods as well as logistics and operations capabilities [ 5 , 6 , 7 ]. However, in most cases, OR methods especially addressing efficiency are applied at the “fringes” of humanitarian logistics [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ], e.g., the cross-sectors toward civil protection or health care systems.…”