24 June 2011 - Guided by the key question whether foreign policy serves health or whether health serves foreign policy, Professor Ilona Kickbusch outlined four different ways in which foreign policy and health can interact.

20 June 2011

The Graduate Institute of Insternational and Development Studies (IHEID) has published an Interview with Director of the Global Health Programme at IHEID, Professor Ilona Kickbusch, translated into French. The interview is a discussion on the reform process currently under way at the World Health Organization, and a reflection on the recent discussions at the World Health Assembly last May.

The interview can be found at: http://graduateinstitute.ch/Jahia/site/iheid/cache/bypass/lang/en/institute/news?newsId=114607

04 April 2011

The third paper in the GHE research series provides a discussion on global public goods theory and its relevance for governance for global health in Europe. Many global health challenges bring to mind the concept of public goods, a concept that is well established in economics but has so far been primarily applied to national phenomena. Within the national context we have learned that public goods pose very special provision or governance challenges, so-called collective action problems. Carried over to the global level through increasing openness and interconnectedness of economies and policy fields global public goods pose even more collective-action challenges, not least because the institution of the state (that helps us nationally to overcome collective action-problems) has no equivalent at the international level.