Global Health and Foreign Policy

Feldbaum, Harley; Lee, Kelley; Michaud, Joshua

Spurred by the passage of the IHRs and the FCTC and the increasing political relevance of global health, a number of global health practitioners have advocated for and enacted policies seeking to apply diplomacy in the service of global health aims. The Oslo Ministerial Declaration, advanced by the ministers of foreign affairs of Brazil, France, Indonesia, Norway, Senegal, South Africa, and Thailand in 2006, declares that ''health as a foreign policy issue needs a stronger strategic focus on the international agenda'' and that these countries have agreed ''to make health a point of departure and a defining lens that each of our countries will use to examine key elements of foreign policy and development strategies'' (95, p. 1373; 96) . Supporting this effort, the Director General of the WHO writes that ''we need to embed the use of the health lens in foreign policy while we have this chance'' but warns that this relationship requires ''careful management for mutual benefit'' (97, p. 498 ). The United Kingdom and Switzerland have enacted national strategies attempting to establish ''policy coherence'' between their global health and foreign policies (3, p. 971). A number of middle-income countries, including Brazil (98), Thailand (99) , and Indonesia (86), also highlight global health in their diplomacy. Finally, Kaufmann and Feldbaum (100) note how diplomacy can be an essential tool for resolving global health crises of political origins, such as the 2003-2004 Nigerian boycott of poliomyelitis vaccine.