Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
that allowed the body to use its residual and emerging constitutional authority and
credibility to attack the disease directly at its source.
Innovation
the shortcomings in response have been accompanied by a cornucopia of innovations
and have inspired even more, coming with growing frequency and force. these
innovations extend from revisions of individual instruments in the existing repertoire,
through novel additions, to far-reaching changes across the system as a whole (see
appendix 16-4).
Actors
Across all five cases, innovation has come from virtually all of the many actors
involved in global health governance.
Individuals alone act as empowered epistemic and policy entrepreneurs (rosenau
1990). as collin and lee show in the case of tobacco, academic lawyers such as
allyn taylor and advocates such as ruth roemer can ultimately have a decisive
global effect. Individuals are also important through the foundations they endow and
the many global health initiatives they mount. where the rockefeller Foundation
once stood as a somewhat lonely if decisively important actor, now bill clinton, bill
and Melinda Gates, and others are influential on HIv/aIDS and many other fronts.
they have been joined by individual celebrities from many professions who lend
their name and fame to the cause of mobilising attention and resources to combat the
challenge of communicable and non-communicable disease (cooper 2007).
Private sector firms and associations are important innovators, if at times
reluctant ones. as cohen-Kohler and lisa Forman describe, pharmaceutical firms
that have now gone global are central in developing and providing affordable access
to the medicines needed for HIv/aIDS. as collin and lee detail, the private sector
was similarly central in the case of tobacco. More broadly, it has a lead role in the
creation of voluntary standards and programmes for corporate social responsibility.
Yet as they have gone global, they have encountered an increasing number of other
actors, with the result that innovation is inhibited, increased, or directed in new ways.
Moreover, as collin and lee indicate in the case of tobacco, even the great global
firms within an industry have differing corporate strategies and philosophies, and are
at times divided, in ways that allow innovation to surge through. Yet in the end they
remain driven by the demands of the market, as the virtual absence of research and
development (r&D) on drugs for tropical diseases suggests.
civil society is another actor. It is central in the case of polio and important to the
outcomes on HIv/aIDS. It assumes many forms, from global service organisations
such as rotary International to local community associations that can decisively
combat disease, as the fight against avian influenza in asia shows. rotary has raised
more than US$135 million since 2002 for polio, indicating how powerful civil
