The multiple meanings of global health governance: a call for conceptual clarity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The term global health governance (GHG) is now widely used, with over one thousand works published in the scholarly literature, almost all since 2002. Amid this rapid growth there is considerable variation in how the term is defined and applied, generating confusion as to the boundaries of the subject, the perceived problems in practice, and the goals to be achieved through institutional reform. METHODOLOGY: This paper is based on the results of a separate scoping study of peer reviewed GHG research from 1990 onwards which undertook keyword searches of public health and social science databases. Additional works, notably books, book chapters and scholarly articles, not currently indexed, were identified through Web of Science citation searches. After removing duplicates, book reviews, commentaries and editorials, we reviewed the remaining 250 scholarly works in terms of how the concept of GHG is applied. More specifically, we identify what is claimed as constituting GHG, how it is problematised, the institutional features of GHG, and what forms and functions are deemed ideal. RESULTS: After examining the broader notion of global governance and increasingly ubiquitous term "global health", the paper identifies three ontological variations in GHG scholarship - the scope of institutional arrangements, strengths and weaknesses of existing institutions, and the ideal form and function of GHG. This has produced three common, yet distinct, meanings of GHG that have emerged - globalisation and health governance, global governance and health, and governance for global health. CONCLUSIONS: There is a need to clarify ontological and definitional distinctions in GHG scholarship and practice, and be critically reflexive of their normative underpinnings. This will enable greater precision in describing existing institutional arrangements, as well as serve as a prerequisite for a fuller debate about the desired nature of GHG.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.119 | 0.092 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.191 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.042 | 0.083 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.035 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".