The World Health Organization and the Struggle to Coordinate Global Health Research

As part of its mandate as the normative authority over Global Health, the World Health Organization is responsible for research to improves health worldwide. Since the 1970s, the organization has sought to find ways to promote scientific collaboration and coordination among actors who fund and do research. It has been hampered in this task by its own institutional weaknesses, fragmentation of the huge medical research field and, since the 1990s, the appearance of major funders like the World Bank and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with far greater resources and different understandings of coordination and research priorities. With each passing decade, research has become increasingly visible and central to global health activity, bringing with it pressure to expand research funding and impose greater order and direction on the Global Health research enterprise. Such pressures come from different directions, including large donors like national research agencies in the US and UK and private philanthropies like the Gates Foundation, who defend donor autonomy, as well as organizations and advocacy groups advocating for legally binding international regulations and public funding of research. Such divisions led from 2012 to 2016 to a failed effort to create an international research funding mechanism independent of the patent system. More recently, they have led to negotiations for a binding Pandemic Treaty, one of whose main goals is equitable access to the products of global health research.