Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to Hanoi. In china SarS created a broader move to openness, extending into the
national security sphere when a submarine accident came.
Institutionally, SarS drove China to become the first overall strategic partner
of aSean. the Global Health Security action Group (GHSaG) was created
to address many health security issues, with a membership broader than the G7.
the G8 and its outreach Five partners, if not its one-off health ministers meeting,
provided permanent expanded governance in the health field. The first conference of
the Parties to the Fctc in 2006 decided to develop two additional protocols.
as Kamradt-Scott suggests in the case of SarS and collin and lee in that of
the Fctc, the mere precedents can serve as tipping points for transformative change
across a broader domain. the leadership role of the wHo, the involvement of civil
society, the inspiration for national regulation on smoking across europe even
without formal ratification shows such proliferation. aIDS, tobacco, and the health
diplomacy processes have generated greater concern with nutrition, obesity, and
health services more generally. Innovations in several cases have driven a common
effort to construct and put in central place new concepts, linked to meta norms and
fields well beyond health, such as health diplomacy. As bennett argues, the shock of
SarS produced a learning culture in canada.
New Sovereignty
Does this move to innovativeness mean that global health governance is now moving
beyond its Westphalian confines already almost half a millennium old into a 21st-
century post-westphalian system of globalised health governance? the challenge
of disease, in the form of the recurrent plagues afflicting europe during the 16th
and 17th centuries, was an important force in creating the new political order of
sovereign national states and thus the westphalian international system that has
dominated political life for the four centuries since (north and thomas 1973; Jones
1981). could today's new health challenges also transform the old order into a new
form of global governance that is anti-westphalian at its core? the evidence in this
volume suggests that the world is clearly moving in this direction. It is eroding the
westphalian pillars of states as the dominant actors, international institutions as a
site for inter-state competition and sovereignty as the defining principle. Yet this
transformation is still in a very early stage. the shape of the new order is unclear,
contested, and uncertain. International and transnational multi-actor, multi-level
networks have yet to become autonomous, legitimate, and authoritative centres of
global governance on their own. and no single concept exists to replace the powerful
attachment to the static, territorial, exclusive sovereignty of old. A new era defined
by global rather than national sovereignty and security in health has yet to arrive.
Still, states are no longer always the dominant actors, as they are now joined as
important innovators in key cases by sub-national actors below, transnational actors
across their boundaries, and international actors above. In all cases a multiplicity of
actors has been involved in shaping responses. Many arose as innovators or catalysts
for innovation by others. within states, civil society and often the media stand out
