With the spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) quickly found itself caught between calls to resolve the crisis and accusations of having delayed an efficient pandemic response in the interest of certain member states. While expectations were high for the WHO to deliver on its mandate as guardian of global health, countries with self-interested agendas undermined the WHO‘s role by providing insufficient funding and engaging in forum shopping.

How can the WHO rise to the enormous challenge of  promoting good health and well-being globally in spite of these impediments? What role do other actors of the global health architecture play, and how do they interact with the WHO? And what impact do private-public-initiatives or other less formal institutions like the G20 have on the future of global health governance?

We had the chance to discuss these and other questions with Prof. Dr. Anna Holzscheiter, Chair of Political Science with a focus on international politics at TU Dresden and the head of the research group 'Governance for Global Health' at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB).

In our ‘Research Feature’, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn introduces his state-of-the-art work on the usefulness of blockchain technology for climate finance and for improving the input and output legitimacy of climate governance. He tries to map the possibilities and limits of techno-centric climate governance by asking: Can new emerging blockchain experiments actually enable outputs that reduce greenhouse gas emission? Follow this link to find his latest paper!

For additional information on the episode, visit our website. We look forward to your feedback or questions on Twitter: @GCR_21 ! Use the hashtag #cooperadiopodcast Or send us an e-mail: cooperadio@gcr21.uni-due.de.

Our guests of this episode are also on Twitter: @AHolzscheiter and @MalcolmCV

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction, 

03:45 - Interview with Anna Holzscheiter,

35:18 - Research Feature

Further reading: 

Laura Pantzerhielm, Anna Holzscheiter, Thurid Bahr (2019): Governing effectively in a complex world? How metagovernance norms and changing repertoires of knowledge shape international organization discourses on institutional order in global health,Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Further Reading by Anna and her research group 'Governance for Global Health': Publications GOGH

Jan Aart Scholte, Soetkin Verhaegen, Jonas Tallberg (2021): Elite attitudes and the future of global governance, International Affairs, Vol. 97, Issue 3, May 2021, Pages 861–886.