Ties that bind: understanding One Health networks and participation for zoonoses prevention and control in India

Cross-sectoral collaborations as exemplified by the One Health approach, are widely endorsed as pragmatic avenues for addressing zoonotic diseases, but operationalisation remain limited in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs). Complexities and competing interests and agendas of key stakeholders and the underlying politico-administrative context can all shape outcomes of collaborative arrangements. Evidence is building that organised collaborations are complex political initiatives where different objectives; individual and institutional agendas need to be reconciled to incentivise collaborations.

Drawing on a qualitative network analysis of published sources on 'One Health' stakeholders supplemented with 26 multi-scale (national-state-district level) key-informant interviews (including policymakers, disease managers and public health experts), this paper characterises the fragmented and complex characteristics of institutional networks involved in zoonoses prevention and control in India.

Our results highlight how the local socio-political and institutional contexts interact to modulate how and when collaborations occur (or not), the associated contingencies and stakeholder innovations in circumventing existing barriers (e.g. competing interests, distrust between actors, departmental bureaucracy) to cross-sector collaborations and zoonoses management. Aside from principal actors negotiating common ground in some instance, they also capitalised on political/institutional pressure to subtly 'manipulate' their subordinates as a way of fostering collaboration, especially in instances when the institutional and political stakes are high.

Altogether our findings suggest that cross-sectoral collaborations are by-product of political and institutional tinkering as long as individual actors and institutional interests converge and these dynamics must be embraced to embed meaningful and sustainable collaborations in local socio-political and administrative contexts.