Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to that for compliance with commitments across all issue areas, suggests that
highly organised hard law institutions such as the eU may facilitate the G8's health
compliance task.
Health compliance also varies even more widely by component issue, as follows:
severe acute respiratory syndrome (SarS) +78 percent; aging +67 percent; tb +67
percent, biotechnology +66 percent; bioterrorism +56, Global Fund +56 percent;
diseases (HIv, polio, malaria) +54 percent, drugs/medicine +45 percent; HIv/aIDS
+44 percent; polio +39 percent; training +29 percent; development 0 percent (see
appendix 14-3). this pattern suggests that the G8 does better at compliance when
the health commitment in question addresses an outbreak event, most directly affects
citizens in G8 countries, or involves instruments directly under G8 government and
country control. It also suggests that the G8 acts more easily within a biomedical
model aimed at responding to acute outbreaks of diseases such as SarS than in
a preventive way that embraces underlying healthcare systems, the socioeconomic
determinants of health, and the root causes of underdevelopment as a whole.
Explaining members' Compliance: Agency, Institutionalisation, and Structure
why do the major power members of the G8 comply with their summit health
commitments? Overall, compliance has been the most difficult dimension of G8
recent work in the finance and development field suggests that G8 compliance benefits
from the agency of the G8 leaders themselves at their summit, reinforcing action
from the G8 ministerial institution most functionally focussed on the subject, and the
relative capabilities and vulnerabilities that constitute the structure of the international
system (Kirton 2006b). Is the same true in the field of health, a much newer subject of
G8 concern and one that lacks a G8 ministerial-level institution of its own?
Agency
as agents, G8 leaders, as an expression of their political will, consciously embed within
their commitments particular catalysts that provide more specific guidance about how
delivery should be done (see Appendix 14-4 for a list and definition of catalysts).
An analysis of compliance with 46 G8 finance and development commitments from
1996 to 2005 found that two catalysts—priority placement and timetable—raised
compliance, while no effect came from the others—target, remit mandate, money
mobilised, specified agent, G8 body, and international institution (Kirton 2006a).
To explore the impact of these compliance catalysts in the field of health, several
catalysts were either dropped from the analysis (for lack of variation on the independent
variable) or reconstructed for health-specific computational reasons: timetable was
divided into one year or less and multi-year variants, international organisation was
divided into the wHo (as the most functionally relevant established multilateral
