BACKGROUND With the exception of key 'proven successes' in global health, the current regime of global health governance can be understood as transnational and national actors pursuing their own interests under a rational actor model of international cooperation, which fails to provide sufficient justification for an obligation to assist in meeting the health needs of others. An ethical commitm...

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...

Ilona Kickbusch’s thought provoking editorial is criticized in this commentary, partly because she fails to refer to previous critical work on the global conditions and policies that sustain inequality, poverty, poor health and damage to the biosphere and, as a result, she misreads global power and elides consideration of the fundamental historical structures of political and material power tha...

The global health agenda has been dominating the current global health policy debate. Furthermore, it has compelled countries to embrace strategies for tackling health inequalities in a wide range of public health areas. The article by Robert and colleagues highlights that although globalization has increased opportunities to share and spread ideas, there is still great asymmetry of power accor...

There were once again high expectations that a major global health event - the Ebola virus outbreak of 2014-2015 - would trigger meaningfully World Health Organization (WHO) reform and strengthen global health governance (GHG). Rather than a “turning point,” however, the global community has gone back to business as usual. This has occurred against a backdrop of worldwide political turmoil, cha...

Gorik Ooms recently made a strong case for considering the centrality of normative premises to analyzing and understanding the underappreciated importance of the nexus of politics, power and process in global health. This critical commentary raises serious questions for the practice and study of global health and global health governance. First and foremost, this commentary underlines the impor...

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...

Addressing the increasingly globalised determinants of many important problems affecting human health is a complex task requiring collective action. We suggest that part of the solution to addressing intractable global health issues indeed lies with the role of new legal instruments in the form of globally binding treaties, as described in the recent article of Nikogosian and Kickbusch. However...