A Stress-Test for Global Health Multilateralism: The Covid-19 Pandemic as Revealer and Catalyst of Cooperation Challenges

Abstract

AbstractBecause of its multidimensional nature, its global scale and the magnitude of measures taken by government and international organizations, the Covid-19 pandemic severely challenged global health multilateralism in 2020. It acted both as a revealer of long-term trends in global health cooperation and as a catalyst of the changes that it precipitated. This chapter will show that if the Covid-19 pandemic appeared as a crisis with the potential to reorder global health multilateralism, it did so precisely because it occurred in an environment marked by fault lines and an accumulation of incremental change. Through this perspective, it will provide a broad overview of the dynamics of health multilateralism and help identify the challenges created by this specific crisis. We will first briefly analyze the historical dynamics of global health multilateralism that led to a fragmented system of cooperation on both the organizational and the normative levels. We will then focus on the tensions and challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic, which partly explain why it is often perceived as a major crisis. Finally, we will address new developments in global health multilateralism, and how they relate to previous dynamics.