Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
chapter 14
explaining compliance
with G8 Health commitments,
1996-2006
John J. Kirton, Nikolai Roudev, Laura Sunderland, and Catherine Kunz 1
can international institutions induce their members to commit to and comply with
actions to address pressing global problems such as human health? this question
has long been central to scholars and practitioners of international relations who
want to know if international organisations, laws, and regimes affect the actions
of their members and other autonomous states to achieve the ends they want and
that the global community needs. It has become key for newer, informal, broadly
oriented, summit-delivered, plurilateral institutions responding to the proliferating
health challenges of a rapidly globalising world (Kirton and trebilcock 2004).
among these soft law bodies, the G8 club of major market democracies stands at
centre stage. It has made health a significant part of its annual summit agenda since
1996 (Hajnal 1999). It placed health as a priority theme at its St. Petersburg Summit
in July 2006. Yet it has looked for help to long-established, formal, functionally
focussed, ministerially guided, multilateral organisations such as the world Health
Organization (WHO) (Abbott et al. 2000).
Does this attention from the most powerful leaders of the most powerful
countries, assembled in the informal institution they consider their own, make a
desirable difference to the real health of people around the world? this question has
given rise to a wide-ranging debate. on the one side stand those who assert that the
G8 has done too little (Drohan 2005; lewis 2005), done too much of the wrong thing
(labonté and Schrecker 2004; labonté et al. 2004), or failed to deliver the good
promises it has made (Foster 2002, 2003; 'G8 Failed to tackle the toxic Politics of
Drug Making and Selling' 2003). on the other side stand those who argue that the
G8 has already filled some gaps (Price-Smith 2001, 2002), has the potential to do
much more (Savona and oldani 2003), and is already delivering a new generation of
health governance for a globalising world (bayne 2005, 2001, 2000; aginam 2004,
2005; orbinski 2002).
within these competing schools of thought, the role of the established multilateral
organisations of the United Nations system looms large. The first school of critics,
which sees the G8 as a great fundraising failure, considers the G8's proper role
to be narrowly confined to raising massive amounts of new money to pass on,
 
 
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