Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights

Global Prescriptions is a critical yet optimistic analysis of the role of transnational women's groups in setting the agendas for women's health in international and national settings. The book reviews a decade of women's participation in UN conferences, transnational networks, national advocacy efforts and sexual and reproductive health provision, assessing both their strengths and weaknesses. It critiques the Cairo, Beijing and Copenhagen conference documents and World Bank, WHO and health sector reform policies. It also offers case studies of national-level reform and advocacy efforts and appraises the controversy concerning TRIPS, trade, and essential AIDS drugs. That controversy, Petchesky argues, starkly illuminates the 'collision course' of transnational corporate and global trade agendas with the struggle for gender, racial and regional equity and the human right to health.

The author takes into account the formidable political and ideological forces confronting global justice movements and also offers a sobering reassessment of transnational women's NGOs themselves and such problems as 'NGOization', fragmentation and donor-dependency. Petchesky argues that the power of women's transnational coalitions is only as great as their organic connection with grassroots social movements.

Gita Sen is Adjunct Professor of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health, and was until recently Professor of Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. She has been for many years a feminist analyst, activist and advocate on the political economy of globalization, and on sexual and reproductive health and rights. She is a member of DAWN's Executive Committee.

Marina Durano was a member of DAWN's Executive Committee from 2008 to 2011, working on gender issues in financing for development, including the examination of gender issues in international trade policies. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Women's Development Research Centre (KANITA) of the Universiti Sains Malaysia, and is now an Assistant Professor at the Asian Center at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Manchester.