The Rise of Global Health: The Evolution of Effective Collective Action

Chronicles the expanding global effort to confront public health challenges.

Since the year 2000, unprecedented resources have been committed to the complex challenge of developing global public health solutions by national governments, multilateral organizations, and civil society groups. This vast global movement is one of the most remarkable political phenomena of twenty-first-century international relations-but is it working? In The Rise of Global Health, Joshua K. Leon argues against the conventional wisdom, which argues that collective action on development issues-including controversial increases in foreign aid-is too inherently inefficient to succeed. Leon shows that public action on a global level can successfully pursue health equality. Often at the behest of grassroots activists, these disparate groups of actors are cooperating more than ever with the aim of improving our human potential through better health. Though operating at cross purposes with unequal trade agreements and other factors within the global economy harming the Global South, we learn something surprising about global health governance-it is evolving in ways more efficient than we think.

Joshua K. Leon is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona College.