Author Archives: Jon Shaffer

General skepticism, overestimation, and growing political divide

The Kaiser Family Foundation has continued their work to track and interpret American’s evolving views and opinions of development assistance for global health and recently released a report summarizing their findings. They have some of the best and clearest analysis of U.S. appropriations for global health. 1 2

Some key points that seem particularly relevant to the global health political field:

  • Americans really don’t know much about development assistance and foreign aid as it relates to global health. Americans believe that we should be the world leader in global affairs, but also that we are doing more than our fair share already.
  • Foreign aid is initially viewed with skepticism, but with a little more information and context, people’s views change favorably.
  • Americans systematically overestimate of the amount spent by the U.S. on foreign aid for global health purposes.
  • There is a growing political rift between Democrats and Republicans about the value of U.S. investments in global health.

Skepticism:

There seems to be misunderstanding of what USG investments are being made for global health purposes and a general skepticism about their effects. People think that we should be serving as a (or the) world leader on global affairs, but then at the same time think that we are already doing our “fair share”.

doubt in value of global health investments

Additionally, people feel like corruption is one of the most important problems with development assistance for health.

corruption biggest problem

Overestimation:

Americans also consistently and wildly overestimate the amount of money committed to global health programs, answering on average that they think at least 31% of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid.

It would be interesting to dig more into why this is the case. Do people have no idea what the federal budget really is? Do they have any sense what constitutes U.S. global health funding? Do people similarly overestimate the amount of funding for other types of programs / elements of the federal budget?

overestimation of US contribution to global health

Political Divide:

Finally, there is a growing partisan divide in the level of importance that democrats and republicans place on USG global health investments. This partisan divide on global health, though while not enormous, has grown by 11 percentage points since 2012.

partisanship in global health spending

To me, everything about this research points to why a community organizing model of movement building for the global right to health is so important. People generally have very little clue what we mean when we talk about U.S. investments in global health and they assume that we spend far more money than we actually do on programs that they assume don’t work very well. This absence of data / narrative / perspective fuels a partisan divide that stems from a fundamental difference of opinion of the role of government.

As I discussed in my recent previous post about opportunities for research in the social movement for the right to health, McAdam’s political process model 3 describes the emergence of social movements through the mobilization of organized grassroots groups, generation of new stories / narratives / evidence / data of possibilities to enable new frames of ‘cognitive liberation’ that can be disseminated by organized groups, and the harnessing of newly emergent political opportunities.

Luckily this report does point to one important political opportunity: Americans believe that investing in programs that advance global health is the right thing to do.

“Although many acknowledge there are domestic interests that could benefit from global health aid, nearly half of Americans (46 percent) say that the most important reason that the U.S. spends money on improving health for people in developing countries is because it’s the right thing to do.”

moral reason for global health spending

This is a significant political opportunity. In the wake of the Ebola epidemic, the emergence of the Sustainable Development Goals (though they note that very few Americans know what the SDGs are) and despite the skepticism and growing partisan gaps, Americans still think that we should invest in global health because it’s the right things to do. This moral imagination is something that must be harnessed.

We need to continue to share the stories of patients, of systems, of transformation, and demonstrate what is truly possible with a commitment to building systems oriented to the most poor and marginalized.

  1.  http://kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/the-u-s-global-health-budget-analysis-of-appropriations-for-fiscal-year-2015/
  2.  http://kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/the-u-s-global-health-budget-analysis-of-the-fiscal-year-2015-budget-request/
  3.  McAdam, Doug. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 40-51.

CH188: Introduction to the right to health

Yesterday we kicked off an exciting new course at Tufts University: Community Health 188 – The Right to Heath: Problems, Perspectives, and Progress. We had the first session of our weekly, three hour, 15 person seminar focusing on an ‘introduction to the right to health’ that I co-led with Prof. Fernando Ona, who is an amazing epidemiologist, social worker, and thinker on social / political movements in health.

I have to say that I was really nervous going in to this course. I’ve never served as a listed instructor for a university course and since this is a new course, it was a bit of an uncharted territory for both Fernando and me.  But, the first class went surprisingly well. The students were excited to be there, had good ideas about global health and the right to health, and they already seemed actively engaged in participating.

In addition to going over the syllabus, getting to know one another with a fun icebreaker, and sharing a bit about our vision for the course, we engaged in two substantial activities: the drawbridge exercise 1 and the core elements of the human rights approach 2.

The drawbridge exercise in particular was a fascinating experience. The scenario essentially provides a skeleton sketch of a society in which all powerful, jealous Baron orders the death of his Baroness wife who he discovers is having an affair. Participants are asked to rank the cast of characters based on who is most culpable for the death of the Baroness. The discussion provided a great template to begin our conversation of human rights: where does power reside? What values templates and cultural values dominate? Who decides?

This led into a great conversation about the core elements of human rights discourse and practice. We discussed what it meant for human rights to be:

  • Universal and inalienable
  • Interdependent and indivisible
  • Equal and nondiscriminatory
  • Both rights and obligations

All of this sets us up well for week 2: “roots of global health and the right to health project”, which will critically unpack the history of the construction of human rights and how this history has particularly affected the emergence of the field of global health delivery. We are really fortunate to have Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee coming to speak for the first half of the seminar to discuss the the roots of neoliberalism as a collection of ideas, the politics of implementing neoliberal policies in resource flows, and the implications of that history on the current global health regime. 3

I’m really looking forward to next week!


Week 1 Class / Reading Notes:

My hopes for the class:
  • That we create a safe space of learning, encounter, and action, that opens our imaginations to new social realities and grounds those imagined ideas in rigorous scholarship and research.
  • That we  make a decent case that the right to health is a useful construction and that we can implement programs that can progressively realize this utopian idea.
  • That we can build facility with the history that has come to construct the modern notion of the right to health and the political forces which have limited progress.
  • That we can come to have a basic understanding of the sociology of social movements, community organizing, and methods of attempting to purposively drive social change.
  • That we can grow our understanding of policy making, advocacy, and action — and start to take action ourselves.
  • That I can learn from this experience — pedagogically, intellectually, spiritually, emotionally.
Follow my reflections here: https://acriticalengagement.com/
Structure of the class:
Part 1: A right to health? Building a common understanding
  • Introduction to the right to health
  • Roots of global health and the right to health project
  • Laws, institutions, and governance in the right to health
Part 2: The Right to Health: Scoping and mapping the problems
  • Key problems in the right to health 1 (structure of the “field” of global health, financing, neoliberalism)
  • Key problems in the right to health 2 (innovations, mental health, NCDs, etc)
  • Key problems in the right to health 3 (gender discrimination)
Part 3: Driving progress: Developing a right to health toolkit
  • Health systems strengthening and the science of global health delivery
  • Policy analysis and policy making 1 (applied policy analysis)
  • Policy analysis and policy making 2 (presentations on policy analysis or policy proposal)
  • Community organizing and social movements 1 (social theory and social movements)
  • Community organizing and social movements 2 (discussion of PIH Engage and ways that we could work together after the course)
  • SDGs, UHC, and the future of the right to health movement
Reading Notes:
 
A. Sen: why and how is health a human right?
  • Legal question: there is no legislation
    • Does a right have to be legally defined?
  • Feasibility question: no way of ensuring good health
    • Common confusion about what is/is not a right: cannot stop murder at all moments everywhere
    • It is a demand to take action to positively promote that goal
  • Policy question: why not the right the health care since policy makers can control that
    • Requires multifaceted approach, not just the provision of health care of a set of policies and programs to promote good health
C. Shuftan: A guided tour through key principles and issues of the human rights based framework as applies to health
  • Human rights paradigm contrasts with the basic human needs approach in important ways
  • Big difference between having basic needs met and the protection of fundamental rights
  • “In the basic needs approach, the individual is seen as an object with needs (and needs do not necessarily imply correlative duties or obligations, but promises). In the rights-based framework, the individual is seen as a subject with legitimate entitlements and claims (and rights always imply and are associated with correlative duties and obligations). Therein lies the big difference.”
  • “Most often, a rights-based framework to health is not even on governments’ ‘radar screens’. The United States, for example, has regarded the socio-economic rights of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a wishful “letter to Santa Claus” (Jean Kirkpatrick, former US ambassador to the UN). The US has little sympathy for Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, in contrast to its vociferous and selective support of Civil and Political Rights.”
  • “the process moves the debate from (the flawed approach of) charity/compassion (where there is already fatigue) to the language of rights and duties (accountable to the international community with compliance that can be monitored). [Keep in mind that, as opposed to rights, charity is given mostly when convenient]. (U. Jonsson, 1997)”
  • Adoption of a right to health framework is the beginning of a political movement to develop and implement a non-ethnocentric global, egalitarian, human rights based praxis and ethics.
  • “Is fostering a viable and militant civil society a key to pressure governments into doing what they are supposed to do in the first place after having solemnly signed all those international human rights covenants?”
  • ” The caveat here is that organizations can use (and get away with using) human rights language as non-committal rhetoric just to feel good and ‘move with the tide’.”
—> Interesting form and radical view of the right to health.
—> Nice set of principles and iron-clad rules that can give structure to our thinking and arguments for the right to health.
—> Doesn’t articulate a more specific view of what type of political projects and organizations really would be necessary for this move forward.
S. Gruskin, E. Mills, D. Tarantola: History, principles, and practice of health and human rights
  • Discuss the changing views on human rights in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and propose further development with increased practice, evidence, and action.
  • Considered health and human rights a relatively new approach to thinking about public health — 2007
  • The right to the highest attainable standard of health—often referred to as the right to health —is most prominently connected to the ICESCR.43 It stipulates that:
    • The states parties to the present covenant recognise the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. The steps to be taken by the states parties to the present covenant to achieve the full realisation of this right shall include those necessary for:
    • (a) the provision for the reduction of the stillbirth rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;
    • (b) the improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;
    • (c) the prevention, treatment, and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational, and other diseases;
    • (d) the creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.
  • The idea of health and human rights as a subject of study is fairly new, and we need to recognise the diff erent ways in which advances in health and human rights can be achieved. Human rights feature in many diff erent ways in the health work of international non-governmental organisations, governments, civil society groups, and individuals. These ways can be broadly categorised as advocacy, application of legal standards, and programming (including service delivery).45 Some stakeholders use one approach; others use a combination in their work.
  • A recurring dilemma confronting these organisations is whether sustainable health action should be associated with documentation and denouncements of witnessed human rights violations, as these activities could both limit their ability to provide health services to the populations they serve, and jeopardise the safety of their workers.
  • Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa used the courts to ensure that the government was ordered to provide programmes in public clinics for reduction of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.59 Although these eff orts have resulted in positive changes in the law, advocacy is still needed to move these obligations into practice; thus emphasising how advocacy, and application of the law are interrelated.
25 Questions and Answers on Health and Human Rights — WHO
  • Human rights discourse first popularized and adopted post-WWII
  • Cold War drove a cleavage between civil and political rights and social and economic rights
  • The West argued that civil and political rights had priority and that economic and social rights were mere aspirations. The Eastern bloc argued to the contrary that rights to food, health and education were paramount and civil and political rights secondary. Hence two separate treaties were created in 1966 – the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
  • The right to health: The right to the highest attainable standard of health (referred to as “the right to health”) was first reflected in the WHO Constitution (1946)(20)and reiterated in the 1978 Declaration of Alma Ata and in the World Health Declaration adopted by the World Health Assembly in 1998.(21) It has been firmly endorsed in a wide range of international and regional human rights instruments.(22)
  • The principle of progressive realization  of human rights(41)  imposes an obligation to move as expeditiously and effectively as possible towards that goal. It is therefore relevant to both poorer and wealthier countries, as it acknowledges the constraints due to the limits of available resources but requires all countries to show constant progress in moving towards full realization of rights. Any deliberately retrogressive measures require the most careful consideration and need to be fully justified by reference to the totality of the rights provided for in the human rights treaty concerned and in the context of the full use of the maximum available resources.
  •  Equity means that people’s needs, rather than their social privileges, guide the distribution of opportunities for well-being.(63)  This means eliminating disparities in health and in health’s major determinants that are systematically associated with underlying social disadvantage within a society. Within the human rights discourse, the principle of equity is increasingly serving as an important nonlegal generic policy term aimed at ensuring fairness.
A. Yamin: Beyond Compassion: The Central Role of Accountability in Applying a Human Rights Framework to Health
  • Accountability enables passive beneficiaries into claims holders and identifies states and other actors as duty bearers.
  • Compassion is notoriously unstable — we as humans seeking a society with justice, should seek for more stable justice-oriented structures. Rights give such a structure.
  •  In many countries, networks and broad popular movements for social accountability relating to health issues emerged as a reaction to autocratic governments that had enacted neoliberal sector reforms and privatizations of basic services (for example, water) with virtually no consultation and often largely by executive and ministerial decrees.14  These efforts at social accountability highlight the importance of decision-making processes as well as outcomes, of increasing the voices of marginalized or excluded communities with respect not only to the diagnosis of institutional failures that most directly affect them, but also to the negotiation of social policies and health budgets. However, successful models of social accountability also point to the importance of creating coalitions and networks across class, and between grass-roots movements and NGOs.
  •  The subversive potential   and central value   of human rights lies in placing limits on both public lassitude and private greed through a framework and mechanisms for accountability.
    • We need better tools and models for robust accountability for duty-bearers in protecting the right to health.
WHO / UN – The Right to Health – Fact Sheet
  • RTH comes from the 1946 WHO constitution: “The right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health…”
  • 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
  • This is a great primer on what we mean technically by “the right to health”
  • “The right to health” is not the same as “the right to be healthy.”
  • There are immediate obligations on states, but the right to health must be progressively realized.
    • Obligation to respect
    • Obligation to protect
    • Obligation to fulfill
  • In this sense, “the right to health” contains both “positive” and “negative” components.
J.A. Singh, M. Govender, E Mills: Do human rights matter to health?
  • India and South African examples of how “the right to health” can have substantial value
  1. Judith H. Katz. 1978. White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training. pp. 70 – 72
  2. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights/World Health Organization. The Right to Health, Fact Sheet No. 31., pages 1-39.
  3. Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520282834

Opportunities for research and practice in the social movement for the right to health

The right to health is a contested idea.[i],[ii] Increasingly, people agree that individuals have the right to be free from disproportionate risk of illness and early death.[iii] But, there are wide disagreements about what limits ought to be set around a right to health,[iv],[v] the practical mechanisms to protect the right to health,[vi],[vii],[viii] and what type of social and political strategies should be advanced to dismantle the historically, socially, and politically constructed barriers that limit our progress.[ix],[x],[xi],[xii],[xiii],[xiv] Because the right to health is at the center of a political contest that is historically and socially constructed, we need better theory about the social construction of the field of practice of global health. We also need a deeper understanding of the nature of social movements as sources of reform efforts and the practical organizational models that can grow such movements. This paper seeks to explore a research and organizing agenda that could better elucidate the social processes that underpin social movements and point toward more robust strategies to strengthen the right to health movement. This research and practice agenda should be “historically deep and geographically broad”[xv] and connect a critical study of the sociology of social movements,[xvi],[xvii] organizational theory,[xviii] and the field of practice of international development and global health.[xix],[xx],[xxi]

Social theory is used to contextualize and interpret the complex situations that characterize global health.[xxii],[xxiii] I will briefly share the work of three scholars that are rarely cited by global health practitioners but whose ideas provide a useful toolkit in studying and advancing the social movement for the right to health. I argue that there is a significant opportunity to deploy the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu in critical study of the field of practice of international development and global health, Doug McAdam’s political process model as a way to describe the emergence and growth of social movements, and Marshall Ganz’ community organizing and leadership pedagogy. I will then use these tools to provide a brief analysis of the current moment in the right to health movement and delineate some potential opportunities to strategize about future mobilization. I will also share early experiences in developing a grassroots community organizing strategy through the global health and social justice organization, Partners In Health (PIH). Working to create PIH Engage[xxiv] has helped us to understand how regular, concerned citizens, can work together to demand new modes of solidarity and redistribution from their communities and elected policy makers. Taken together, I hope to renew a discussion about modes of collective action that could continue to dismantle the deeply held double standards that prevent poor and marginalized people from being served by health care delivery systems.

Bourdieu and theory in the right to health movement

Pierre Bourdieu, a giant of 20th century sociology, built a theory of social action based on field research ranging from kinship relationships in isolated villages in Algeria to the social processes of production, circulation, and consumption of art and literature in 19th century France. His work sought to bring “reflexive”[xxv] sociological methods into building a whole understanding of social action: to “uncover the most profoundly buried structures of the various social worlds which constitute the social universe, as well as the ‘mechanisms’ which tend to ensure their reproduction and their transformation.”[xxvi] If the movement for the right to health is a process of social transformation, Bourdieu gives us a way to understand the ‘buried’ mechanisms that could be useful in hastening that transformation. Particularly useful to this understanding, Bourdieu describes three fundamental ideas that govern social action: field, habitus, and capital.

The field of social action is produced and reproduced by individuals and organizations that do not exist in a vacuum. Individuals and organizations exist in relationship to one another as they work in pursuit of shared aims, develop shared taken-for-granteds, grow shared interpretations, and come into competition for scarce resources. Loïc Wacquant offers a succinct definition: “a field is a patterned system of objective forces (much in the manner of a magnetic field), a relational configuration endowed with a specific gravity which it imposes on all objects and agents which enter it… Simultaneously, [it is] a space of conflict and competition, the analogy here being with a battlefield, in which participants vie to establish monopoly over the species of capital effective in it.”[xxvii] This social jostling and competition between actors in the field set up the terrain of a social game that is played out by social actors vying for dominance.

The habitus can be understood as an individual’s patterns of thoughts, behaviors, tastes, and actions acquired by their experienced participation in the social field of action. Bourdieu describes it as: “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history—the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product.”[xxviii] Wacquant expands, “Cumulative exposure to certain social conditions instills in individuals an ensemble of durable and transposable dispositions that internalize the necessities of the extant social environment, inscribing inside the organism the patterned inertia and constraints of external reality… habitus is creative, inventive, but within the limits of its structures”.[xxix] The field of practice tends to produce individuals who have experienced and internalized the rules of the game as their habitus. Those individuals tend to then act in a way that reproduces the socially constructed field of practice, which, in turn, reinforces the internalized habitus of those in the field.

Finally, Bourdieu conceptualizes capital as multifaceted forms of field-specific power: economic, social, and symbolic. Economic capital is immediately transformable into money, but social capital (social relationships, friendships, partnerships), symbolic capital (prestige, clout), cultural capital (credentials, awards), and other forms of field-specific capital aren’t immediately transformable into financial resources. Non-economic forms of capital can be used to dominate fields of practice that organize society. Bourdieu compares each field to a market in which individuals and collective actors compete for the accumulation of the various forms of capital. In a field of practice, an agent with more capital will be successful over those actors with less capital.[xxx]

Again, Wacquant summarizes: “together, habitus and field designate bundles of relations. A field consists of a set of objective, historical relations between positions anchored in certain forms of power (or capital), while habitus consists of a set of historical relations ‘deposited’ within individual bodies in the form of mental and corporeal schemata of perception, appreciation, and action.”[xxxi] For us to build better theory and strategy for the right to health movement, we will need an effort to better construct an understanding of the field of practice of global heath within the broader field of international development and humanitarian relief.

Monika Krause has an important and penetrating analysis of the field of humanitarian reason and international development.[xxxii] In it, she takes a “Bourdieusian” approach to the description of the field of practice of humanitarian organizations. Organizations in this field, no matter how large, must make decisions about what to do, who to serve, and how best to serve them, in order to make their missions manageable. She describes this field as a set of relationships between large, international NGOs. These NGOs inhabit a shared social space and logic of practice that is governed by the pursuit and production of ideal “good projects”—those that can produce short term, quantifiable effects and serve groups that are relatively easy to assist. Krause argues that, “humanitarian relief is a form of production, transforming some things into other things. Agencies produce relief in the form of relief projects. As the unit of production is the project, managers seek to ‘do good projects.’ The pursuit of the good project develops a logic of its own that shapes the allocation of resources but also the types of activities that we are likely to see—and the type of activities we are not likely to see.”[xxxiii] The logic governing the production of the “good project” is driven by the habitus of “desk officers,” who are responsible for making these decisions and in doing so, practice a process of triage in response to resource constraints. International development financing and bilateral foreign aid programs create a global market of easily comparable “good projects” that are driven by principles of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, sustainability, and short term intervention: principles of neoliberalism.

These principles are generally incompatible with the goal of enabling governments, over the long term, to protect the right to health. The logic of “the good project” serves the practical function of transforming the role of the public sector through competitive contracting to for-profit and nonprofit private actors. The emergence of a global scale of comparison for relief projects drives the “projectification” of the field of global health and international development.[xxxiv]

If we accept Krause’s analysis of the current field of practice of humanitarian relief—one that drives the structured production and financing of narrowly defined good projects—organizations with a different logic might be able to mount an insurgent response. For instance, organizations with the explicit purpose to accompany ministries of health and governments to be effective in delivering on commitments to protect the right to health for their citizens could band together to demand new policies and financing mechanisms that are well suited to those ends.

This understanding may shed light on the ways that the history of neoliberal ideology is reproduced throughout financing, policy, and the organizational practices of international NGOs. It could also provide new insights for the network of organizations and individuals who strive for a different reality: one where the access to high-quality health care services is not a function of one’s ability to pay for them. To build this new reality, we need a social movement. But, first we must understand how social movements come about; especially how they emerge, expand, and decline.

McAdam and the emergence of social movements

Doug McAdam’s political process model is a very useful framework for analyzing social movements. It identifies three sets of factors that are considered to be crucial for the emergence and development of social movements. First, organizational strength—the degree to which an aggrieved population is organized, formally or informally—is an essential component to the successful emergence of a social movement. Second, the collective assessment of political opportunities and chances of success is necessary to build momentum within grassroots organization. Finally, a degree of political alignment between the locally organized insurgent groups and the broader political and socioeconomic environment is necessary to be able to exploit spaces of opportunity for the social movement to expand. These three factors could be thought of as “degree of organizational readiness”, the level of “insurgent consciousness”, and finally the “structure of political opportunities.”[xxxv]

This model for conceptualizing social movement emergence can be visualized like the diagram below. Broad socioeconomic processes create the space (or remove space) and develop expanding (or contracting) political opportunities for insurgent groups to advance their movement. Yet, relying on an overly deterministic and structural set of factors to explain social movement emergence is insufficient to describe the range of movements and insurgency we see in the world. These structural factors enable a certain “structural potential” for political action, but they do not guarantee it. The final factor necessary for the emergence of social movements is the notion of “cognitive liberation”—the capacity for a group to transform their understanding, name their situation as unjust, and have the capacity to imagine an alternative reality that could be transformed together.[xxxvi] This cognitive liberation is a function of leadership, narrative, teamwork, and action.

Figure 1: Political process model for social movement emergence (McAdam, 1982)

Figure 1: Political process model for social movement emergence (McAdam, 1982)

Bourdieu’s notions of field and capital and McAdam’s political process model were brought together in an analysis of the reform process that produced a major shift in global multi-drug tuberculosis (MDRTB) treatment policy in the late 1990’s.[xxxvii] Victor Roy, in his Cambridge University master’s thesis, builds an understanding of the field of social action that led to the WHO’s focus on Directly Observed Therapy Short Course (DOTS)[xxxviii] as the single and only means of tuberculosis (TB) treatment from the 1970’s through the early 1990’s. This treatment regimen categorically excluded attempts to treat people with drug-resistant disease. Roy links this understanding of the field of global TB policy making to reform efforts made by Partners In Health and the organization’s strategy to demonstrate that MDRTB could be treated and cured effectively in poor settings like the slums of Lima, Peru. Leaders of PIH were able to mobilize field-specific scientific and cultural capital that became significant enough to alter the “cognitive cues” of those in the field. Together, they created a new “frame” of cognitive liberation that enabled potential allies and others to understand that the field was increasingly vulnerable to potential change.[xxxix]

The case of reform in MDRTB treatment policy is not, in the full sense, a “social movement”. Although, Roy’s analysis does demonstrate the significant opportunity to utilize the joint tools of Bourdieu and McAdam in studying reform efforts in global health policy, it is important to understand the shortcomings. The global tuberculosis epidemic has not abated and TB recently became the largest infectious disease killer in the world.[xl] Higher prices for key MDRTB drugs, lack of new pooled donor financing mechanisms, and perpetually weak health systems all present significant barriers to making progress in ending TB.[xli] Why has this reform effort been unsuccessful or, at least, incomplete?

Turning back to Bourdieu and McAdam we could understand the gap in terms of the types of capital that were chosen and available to PIH to mobilize their reform effort. The PIH team was able to enter the field of global TB policy making primarily due to their ability to mobilize the symbolic and scientific capital available because of their position within Harvard Medical School. The limited capital available to PIH structured and limited its strategy to focus primarily on technical policy changes—shifting DOTS protocol to DOTS-plus[xlii] and the development of the Green Light Committee at the WHO[xliii]—rather than a more broad-based political strategy. In Bourdieusian terms, the limitation could be understood as a lack of access to political capital that would be necessary to mobilize democratic pressure for larger redistributive financing mechanisms. Similarly, using McAdam’s political process model we would interpret this as a gap in local organizational strength of the reform movement. The PIH experience with TB stands in contrast to the AIDS treatment movement during which large numbers of activist groups were involved in grassroots political mobilization to exert local-level political pressure on key policy makers responsible for U.S. government global AIDS policy-making and funding.[xliv] These two historical examples and the theoretical tools of Bourdieu and McAdam are useful to understand the current moment in the movement for the right to health. But, if strong, local grassroots organizations are an important source of field-specific capital for global health reform, it is important to consider how they are built throughout social movements.

Marshall Ganz, organizing, and social movement leadership

Doug McAdam’s political process model gives us an elegant means of describing the emergence and growth of social movements, but it does not give concrete tools or specific practical guidance for individuals and organizations seeking to advance a particular struggle. Marshall Ganz’ work to build a practical and theoretically deep pedagogy of community organizing gives such a framework. Ganz’ organizing pedagogy enables individuals and organizations to identify, cultivate, and grow the capacities of leaders to advance collective action. Central to Ganz’ view of organizing is a deep notion of social movement leadership:

Leading in social movements requires learning to manage the core tensions at the heart of what theologian Walter Brueggemann calls the “prophetic imagination”: a combination of criticality (experience of the worlds pain) with hope (experience of the worlds possibility), avoiding being numbed by despair or deluded by optimism. A deep desire for change must be coupled with the capacity to make change. Structures must be created that create the space within which growth, creativity, and action can flourish, without slipping into the chaos of structurelessness, and leaders must be recruited, trained, and developed on a scale required to build the relationships, sustain the motivation, do the strategizing, and carry out the action required to achieve success.[xlv]

Successful social movement leadership is not something innate in individuals, it is something that can be learned and purposefully cultivated. Ganz has developed a robust practice of community organizing training[xlvi] that closely links a set of iteratively developed leadership practices. Relationships that are purpose-based and rooted in shared values, built on commitments, and grown from an exchange of resources and interests must be formed. New stories about the potential for a shared future that links values, emotion, and action into a “story of self,” a “story of us,” and a “story of now” must be told. Social movement leaders must develop creative strategies to successfully challenge those with more power by harnessing opportunities that arise due to environmental or context changes. Organizations must create purposeful structure amongst membership and organize time into campaigns for real action that grows power over time. Finally, teams must be developed that enable “snowflake-like” leadership structures and are capable of collaboratively deliberating, making decisions, and holding members accountable.[xlvii]

Moving from theoretical to organizationally pragmatic, Pierre Bourdieu, Doug McAdam, and Marshall Ganz give us an extremely useful set of ideas that should be more systematically deployed by scholars of and practitioners within the movement for the right to health. Bourdieu gives us a way to imagine the field of global health as a collection of actors working to expand their economic, social, and symbolic capital to control the “rules of the game”. The social movement for the right to health is a reform effort that seeks to shift the field away from neoliberal-dominated practice towards the aim of expanding state-protected rights. McAdam gives us a more specific way to view the social movement for the right to health. Using the political process model, we can analyze the structure of political opportunities that characterize the current moment for the right to health movement, the strength of local, grassroots organizations, and opportunities for “cognitive liberation” to imagine new realities of health care delivery in settings of poverty. Finally, Ganz gives a pragmatic model of local community organizing leadership training that civil society, grassroots community groups, and health care delivery oriented NGOs could adopt to grow the local capacities of actors in the struggle for the right to health.

The current moment: the urgent need for a revitalized movement

In certain circles, the current narrative around political opportunities for the right to health movement is pessimistic. In 2012, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation asked if we were nearing the “end of the golden age of global health”.[xlviii] Decrying the weakening of bipartisan leadership in global health and a precipitous decline in the number of direct action activist organizations focused on expanding global AIDS funding,[xlix] it may appear that the movement that spurred the creation of the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria (The Global Fund) and the corresponding “delivery decade”[l] may be waning. However, four trends ought to give us hope.

First, the rise of universal health coverage (UHC) as a key global goal in the unanimously adopted UN Sustainable Development Goals[li] presents an important opportunity to create more political space for the right to health agenda. While this is an opportunity to demand access to quality health services far more broadly, it is also a contested concept that the right to health movement will need to make claims and build consensus around.[lii] A clear definition of UHC is necessary if we are to avoid the pitfalls of “Health for All” in 1987’s Alma-Ata Declaration which had high level leadership, but lacked sufficient political and budgetary space to realize its aims. It is clear that political will and engagement with civil society will be necessary to promote a rights-based approach and to institutionalize accountability to meet the needs of disadvantaged people.[liii]

A second important expanding political opportunity is the election of Dr. Jim Yong Kim as the president of the World Bank Group in 2012.[liv] Dr. Kim is a long-time right to health activist and his book Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor[lv] is a compilation of essays detailing how neoliberal policies deployed by the World Bank have harmed the health of poor and marginalized people and hampered states’ capacity to protect the right to health of their citizens. We should see his appointment as an opportunity to deploy this powerful position to imagine and actually create new financing mechanisms for the expansion of rights-based UHC in low-income countries.

Third, we are in an open U.S. presidential election in which candidates on both sides of the aisle must actively campaign. This presents a significant opportunity for right to health activists to engage with them on the campaign trail at small and mid-sized events in early-primary states. Commitments matter during campaigns (presidential campaigns in particular) when candidates are forced to take specific stances on issues and make pledges to quantifiable targets.[lvi] We have an opportunity to birddog[lvii], a tactic pioneered by AIDS activists, to gain commitments from politicians, many of whom have been significantly supportive of global health efforts in the past.

Finally, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa decimated already beleaguered health systems and killed more than eleven thousand people.[lviii] This has driven significant new discussion by policy makers on the role of U.S government development assistance in strengthening health systems in low-income countries.[lix] This framing—Ebola as a failure of already weak health systems—creates a powerful window for activists in the right to health movement to advance calls for new legislation that could enable new investments in health systems strengthening in poor countries.

With these factors taken into consideration, the structure of political opportunities seems robust. But, what about the “structural potential” of locally organized constituencies and grassroots organizations? Globally, there is a growing network of global health delivery organizations working with a rights-based approach that seek to link delivery of services to accompaniment of the public sector and the generation of new knowledge.[lx],[lxi],[lxii],[lxiii],[lxiv] Additionally, a large network of student driven global health organizations[lxv],[lxvi],[lxvii],[lxviii],[lxix],[lxx],[lxxi] is moving forward and expanding global health academic programs at universities across the U.S.[lxxii],[lxxiii]

Figure 2: Growth of academic global health programs in the U.S. (majors, minors, study abroad programs, centers, and other formal programs dedicated to global health studies)

Figure 2: Growth of academic global health programs in the U.S. (majors, minors, study abroad programs, centers, and other formal programs dedicated to global health studies)

Although many of these student driven global health organizations are primarily service and education oriented, students are increasingly engaged in politics and activism.[lxxiv] Other global health activist networks are also working hard to advance justice-based policies in health.[lxxv],[lxxvi] All told, there seems to be growing “structural potential” in the right to health movement. There are more rights-based delivery organizations, more scholarship and university engagement in global health, and more potential global health justice activists than ever before. This structure can potentially be mobilized and directed toward the immense challenges faced by the right to health movement.

Figure 3: Political process model adapted to model the current moment in the right to health movement

Figure 3: Political process model adapted to model the current moment in the right to health movement

Cognitive liberation—imagining new realities that are not immediately available to our socially constructed notion of reality, our habitus—is necessary to translate this structural potential into action and momentum for the right to health. From demonstrating an effective model for curing MDRTB in Lima, Peru[lxxvii],[lxxviii] to demonstrating that HIV treatment could be scaled in places of extreme poverty like central Haiti,[lxxix] PIH has worked to prove the possible in global health. Roy demonstrates how this proof, which is developed via the accrual of scientific capital, can catalyze policy reforms by altering the balance of power within a field of global health practice. These beacons of hope should serve as an antidote to despair in the midst of a culture that is socialized for scarcity.[lxxx] The future to the right to health movement is dependent on recasting the global health equity narrative towards one of possibility, growing new grassroots organizations that have the capacity to do political work, and creating the policy space for novel financing mechanisms.

PIH Engage: An organizing model in practice

PIH Engage was launched in 2011 with the goal of harnessing the goodwill and enthusiasm for the right to health mission of Partners In Health that has grown during its 25 years of work fighting for global health equity. We are attempting to deploy Marshall Ganz’ model of community organizing—identifying and recruiting volunteer leaders, building community around that leadership, and generating power from that community—as a way to enable regular, concerned citizens, to work together to demand new modes of solidarity and redistribution from their communities and elected policy makers. So far, we have organized more than 90 teams of volunteer community organizers across the U.S. to engage their local communities, organize campaigns that raise funds for health care delivery efforts, and take on direct advocacy campaigns to create new policy space for rights-based financing mechanisms.

By the end of this year, we hope to have raised more than one million dollars from grassroots supporters, gained real commitments from political actors, from U.S. senators and representatives, as well as held demonstrations on dozens of college campuses and cities across the U.S., and moved forward a major new piece of health systems strengthening legislation. This work has a long way to go before it could be characterized as a social movement. And, even if successful, this effort will only be one small component of a much larger trans-national effort. But I believe that our experience so far shows that it has been a worthwhile investment. Hopefully PIH Engage can serve as a model for other rights-based healthcare delivery and advocacy organizations to strategize on how they could grow networks of organizers dedicated to advancing right to health campaigns in their local communities.

There is an opportunity to more systematically build theory and practice in the study of the right to health movement. Pierre Bourdieu gives us a theoretical framework with which to analyze the socially constructed field of practice that mediates and constrains the way organizations and individuals in the right to health struggle engage in the world. Doug McAdam gives us a model of social movement emergence and tools to analyze the structure of political opportunities, organizational strength, and narrative-driven cognitive liberation that can help direct strategic action. Finally, Marshall Ganz gives a concrete community organizing training and organizational framework that can be deployed by organizations to build a more powerful base of grassroots activists. If we take these linked frameworks as useful, we can see our collective work as growing the types of field-specific capital necessary to reorient the “rules of the game”, especially the way in which global health delivery gets financed. This field-specific capital could be grown through a wide variety of tactics: growing fundraising capacity, building the evidence base for effective rights-based delivery efforts, creating new narratives of possibility and beacons of hope, mobilizing the grassroots around this narrative of possibility, and developing grass-tops and grassroots political power capable of implementing new policy and financing mechanisms.

This essay is not meant as a comprehensive analysis of the right to health movement or a full review of the scholarship of social movements, community organizing, and their application to the right to health movement. It is however an attempt to sketch out an opportunity for expanded research and practice directed towards building a better understanding and more robust strategy for the practical effort of advancing a successful right to health movement.

Works Cited:

[i] Barlow, Phillip. “Health Care Is Not a Human Right.” British Medical Journal, 1999, 321.

[ii] Farmer P. Pathologies of power: rethinking health and human rights. American Journal of Public Health. 1999;89(10):1486-1496.

[iii] Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), G.A. Res. 217A (III) (1948), Art. xxv. Available at http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html.

[iv] Kingston, Lindsey N, Elizabeth F Cohen, and Christopher P Morley. “Debate: Limitations on Universality: The ‘right to Health’ and the Necessity of Legal Nationality.” BMC International Health and Human Rights: 11.

[v] Boggio, Andrea, Matteo Zignol, Emesto Jaramillo, Paul Nunn, Geneviève Pinet, and Mario Raviglione. “Limitations on Human Rights: Are They Justifiable to Reduce the Burden of TB in the Era of MDR- and XDR-TB?”Health and Human Rights, 2008, 121.

[vi] Kim, Jim Yong, Paul Farmer, and Michael E Porter. “Redefining Global Health-care Delivery.” The Lancet, 2013, 1060-069.

[vii] Frenk, Julio. “The Global Health System: Strengthening National Health Systems as the Next Step for Global Progress.” PLoS Medicine 7, no. 1 (2010).

[viii] Binagwaho, Agnes, Cameron T. Nutt, Vincent Mutabazi, Corine Karema, Sabin Nsanzimana, Michel Gasana, Peter C. Drobac, Michael L. Rich, Parfait Uwaliraye, Jean Nyemazi, Michael R. Murphy, Claire M. Wagner, Andrew Makaka, Hinda Ruton, Gita N. Mody, Danielle R. Zurovcik, Jonathan A. Niconchuk, Cathy Mugeni, Fidele Ngabo, Jean De Dieu Ngirabega, Anita Asiimwe, and Paul E. Farmer. “Shared Learning in an Interconnected World: Innovations to Advance Global Health Equity.” Globalization and Health Global Health, 2013.

[ix] Gostin, Lawrence O. “A Framework Convention on Global Health.” JAMA, 2012.

[x] Forman, Lisa, Gorik Ooms, Audrey Chapman, Eric Friedman, Attiya Waris, Everaldo Lamprea, and Moses Mulumba. “What Could a Strengthened Right to Health Bring to the Post-2015 Health Development Agenda?: Interrogating the Role of the Minimum Core Concept in Advancing Essential Global Health Needs.” BMC International Health and Human Rights, 2013.

[xi] Gamson, Josh. “Silence, Death, and the Invisible Enemy: AIDS Activism and Social Movement “Newness”” Social Problems: 351-67.

[xii] Kapstein, Ethan B., and Joshua W. Busby. Kapstein, Ethan B., and Joshua W. Busby. AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations.

[xiii] Keshavjee, Salmaan. Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

[xiv] Epstein, Steven. Impure Science AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

[xv] Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

[xvi] McAdam, Doug. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

[xvii] Ganz, Marshall. “Leading Change Leadership, Organization, and Social Movements.” Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice: An HBS Centennial Colloquium on Advancing Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business, 2010.

[xviii] Davis, Gerald F. Social Movements and Organization Theory. New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

[xix] Krause, Monika. The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason. The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

[xx] Viterna, Jocelyn, and Cassandra Robertson. “New Directions for the Sociology of Development.” Annual Review of Sociology, 2015.

[xxi] Roy, Victor. “The Politics of Reform in Global Health Policy: The Case of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, 1991-2001.” Dissertation for University of Cambridge, 2010.

[xxii] Kleinman, Arthur. “Four Social Theories for Global Health.” The Lancet, 2010, 1518-519.

[xxiii] Farmer, Paul. “Unpacking Global Health: Theory and Critique.” In Reimagining Global Health an Introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

[xxiv] “PIH Engage.” PIH Engage. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://engage.pih.org/.

[xxv] Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loi Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 36-46.

[xxvi] Ibid., 7.

[xxvii] Ibid., 17.

[xxviii] Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. 56.

[xxix] Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loi Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 13-19.

[xxx] Ibid., 18.

[xxxi] Ibid., 16.

[xxxii] Krause, Monika. The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason. The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

[xxxiii] Ibid., 37

[xxxiv] Biehl, Joao. “Therapeutic Clientship: Belonging in Unganda’s Projectified Landscape of AIDS Care.” In When People Come First Critical Studies in Global Health. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

[xxxv] McAdam, Doug. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 40-51.

[xxxvi] Ibid., 35.

[xxxvii] Roy, Victor. “The Politics of Reform in Global Health Policy: The Case of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, 1991-2001.” Dissertation for University of Cambridge, 2010.

[xxxviii] World Health Organization (1998). Basis for the development of an evidence based case management strategy for MDR-TB within WHO’s DOTS strategy. Geneva: WHO, accessed at “World Health Organization & Library Information Networks for Knowledge Database (WHOLIS).” Web. March-May 2010.

[xxxix] Roy, Victor. “The Politics of Reform in Global Health Policy: The Case of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, 1991-2001.” Dissertation for University of Cambridge, 2010.

[xl] World Health Organization (2015). World Tuberculosis Report (20th Edition). Retrieved from: http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/191102/1/9789241565059_eng.pdf?ua=1

[xli] Hwang, Thomas J., and Salmaan Keshavjee. “Global Financing and Long-Term Technical Assistance for Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis: Scaling Up Access to Treatment.” PLoS Medicine 11.9 (2014): e1001738. PMC. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.

[xlii] Farmer, Paul. “DOTS and DOTS-Plus. Not the Only Answer.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: 165-84.

[xliii] Gupta, Rajesh, Alexander Irwin, Mario Raviglione, and Jim Kim. “Scaling-up Treatment for HIV/AIDS: Lessons Learned from Multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis.” The Lancet 363 (2004): 320-24.

[xliv] “The Troubled Path to HIV/AIDS Universal Treatment Access: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?” In Global HIV/AIDS Politics, Policy and Activism: Persistent Challenges and Emerging Issues, edited by Raymond A. Smith, by Patricia Siplon. Praeger, 2013.

[xlv] Ganz, Marshall. “Leading Change Leadership, Organization, and Social Movements.” Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice: An HBS Centennial Colloquium on Advancing Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business, 2010.

[xlvi] Ganz, Marshall. Marshall Ganz Teaching Comments. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://marshallganz.com/teachings/.

[xlvii] Ganz, Marshall. “Leading Change Leadership, Organization, and Social Movements.” Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice: An HBS Centennial Colloquium on Advancing Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business, 2010.

[xlviii] Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “Financing Global Health 2012: The End of the Golden Age?” Seattle, WA: IHME, 2012.

[xlix] Morrison, J. Stephen. “The End of the Golden Era of Global Health?” Editorial. Center for Strategic and International Studies. Web. <http://csis.org/files/publication/120417_gf_morrison.pdf>.

[l] Farmer, Paul E. “Chronic Infectious Disease and the Future of Health Care Delivery.” New England Journal of Medicine, 2013, 2424-436.

[li] “Goal 3.8 in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.” Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. Accessed December 6, 2015. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics.

[lii] O’Connell, Thomas, Kumanan Rasanathan, and Mickey Chopra. “What Does Universal Health Coverage Mean?” The Lancet: 277-79.

[liii] Ibid.

[liv] Garrett, Laurie. “Dr. Kim and the World Bank’s Health Role.” Council on Foreign Relations. April 13, 2012. Accessed December 6, 2015. <http://www.cfr.org/international-organizations-and-alliances/dr-kim-world-banks-health-role/p27952>.

[lv] Kim, Jim Yong. Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. Monroe, ME.: Common Courage Press, 2000.

[lvi] Nelson, Libby. “Campaign Promises Matter.” Vox. November 27, 2015. Accessed December 9, 2015. http://www.vox.com/2015/11/27/9801800/politicians-keep-campaign-promises.

[lvii] Davis, Paul. “Five Questions For: ‘Take the Money Out’ Activist Paul Davis about Disrupting a National Journal Event.” Interview by David Ferguson. Raw Story 6 Sept. 2012. Accessed October 30, 2015. <http://www.rawstory.com/2012/09/five-questions-for-take-the-money-out-activist-paul-davis-about-disrupting-a-national-journal-event/>.

[lviii] “2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa – Case Counts.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. December 4, 2015. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/case-counts.html.

[lix] “United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.” Hearing. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/the-ebola-epidemic-the-keys-to-success-for-the-international-response.

[lx] “We Have Everything We Need to End Child Mortality Now.” Muso. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://www.projectmuso.org/.

[lxi] “Hope Through Health.” Hope Through Health Home Page. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://hthglobal.org/.

[lxii] “Home | Possible.” Possible Health. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://possiblehealth.org/.

[lxiii] “Home Page.” Last Mile Health. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://lastmilehealth.org/.

[lxiv] “PIVOT Health.” PIVOT Home. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://pivotworks.org/.

[lxv] “GlobeMed | Developing 21st Century Leaders for Global Health.” GlobeMed. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://globemed.org/.

[lxvi] “Global Health Corps Home.” Global Health Corps. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://ghcorps.org/.

[lxvii] “Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) Home.” Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC). Accessed December 6, 2015. http://www.studentglobalaidscampaign.org/.

[lxviii] “Universities Allied for Essential Medicines.” Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://uaem.org/.

[lxix] “Help @end_7 End 7 Diseases and Lessen Suffering for over ½ a Billion Kids in the Developing World.” END 7 Home. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://www.end7.org/.

[lxx] “Join PIH Engage.” PIH Engage. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://engage.pih.org/.

[lxxi] “Home – Timmy Global Health.” Timmy Global Health. Accessed December 6, 2015. https://timmyglobalhealth.org/.

[lxxii] Merson, Michael H. “University Engagement in Global Health.” New England Journal of Medicine: May 1, 2014. 1676-678.

[lxxiii] Matheson, Alastair I., Judd L. Walson, James Pfeiffer, and King Holmes. Sustainability and Growth of University Global Health Programs. Rep. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2014.

[lxxiv] Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. “Colleges Are Producing New Style of AIDS Activist.” The New York Times. November 30, 2010.

[lxxv] “Health Global Access Project (Health GAP).” Health Global Access Project (Health GAP). Accessed December 6, 2015. http://www.healthgap.org/.

[lxxvi] “RESULTS | Homepage.” RESULTS. Accessed December 6, 2015. http://www.results.org/.

[lxxvii] Shin, Sonya, Jennifer Furin, Jaime Bayona, Kedar Mate, Jim Yong Kim, and Paul Farmer. “Community-based Treatment of Multidrug-resistant Tuberculosis in Lima, Peru: 7 Years of Experience.” Social Science & Medicine, 2004, 1529-539.

[lxxviii] Roy, Victor. “The Politics of Reform in Global Health Policy: The Case of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, 1991-2001.” Dissertation for University of Cambridge, 2010.

[lxxix] Farmer, P, Léandre, F, Mukherjee, J, Gupta, R, Tarter, L, Kim, J Y. “Community-based treatment of advanced HIV disease: introducing DOT-HAART (directly observed therapy with highly active antiretroviral therapy)” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 2001, Vol.79(12), pp.1145-51

[lxxx] Farmer, Paul. “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology, 2003, 305-25.

Relaunching for 2016

It’s been a very long time (more than two years!) since I’ve spent time writing / working on this website, and I’ve decided that this is as good of a time as any to start to do some more writing and reflection. Specifically, there are a couple of new opportunities that I’m excited to engage in a bit of a broader dialogue around.

First, I’ll be co-teaching a class this spring (starts Thursday!) at Tufts University titled “The Right to Health: Problems, Perspectives, and Progress”. Take a look at the syllabus here. I’m looking forward to sharing my experience from the course and trying to process what I learn along the way. I’m certain that I’ll learn as much, and probably much more, than the students.

Second, I’ll be working as a research assistant with the upcoming Lancet Commission on Reframing NCDs and Injuries for the Poorest Billion. Through the history and advocacy working group, we hope to:

  1. Clearly define a social theoretical framework through which to analyze and interpret the history and current position of the NCDI poverty field
  2. Develop a historical perspective on the construction of the NCDs as a field of strategic action
  3. Situate the NCDI poverty field in the current mix of competing global health priorities, frames, and initiatives
  4. Shape the strategy for the Commission’s key messages and audiences

And finally, of course, I’ll continue to work alongside the PIH Engage team as it continues to grow and build the capacity for grassroots advocacy and fundraising within Partners In Health.

So, I’ve got lots of moving pieces and exciting endeavors and I hope that this can be a useful forum to continue to push forward my own thinking on global health, social movements, and social theory.

Grassroots advocacy: Congressional meetings and calling for more resources

Through PIH | Engage, we’ve been excited to dive head-first into working with our community organizing teams across the country to begin to have meetings with Representatives and Senators, calling on them to increase the resources available for nutrition and maternal and child program funding through USAID. Collectively, along with our partners at RESULTS, we are calling Congress to appropriate $200 million for Nutrition and $800 million for Maternal and Child Health in the FY15 federal budget. These are only modest increases from last year and are backed by a coalition of NGO’s working on health and development.

Some more background on the asks and why it matters: 2014 03 14 Advocacy Leave Behind vF

In order to contribute to this campaign and build power around these asks, we devised a three phase process:

  1. We worked through email campaigns and social media to promote an online letter-writing action. View the online tool and take the action here: http://act.pih.org/page/speakout/secure-funds
  2. We’ve worked to train our network of PIH | Engage teams across the country to schedule and participate in direct in-person meetings with their Representatives and Senators, asking them to urge their colleagues on the Foreign Operations Committee to allocate the requested funds to nutrition and MCH.
  3. We will be working this May to get Letters to the Editor published in newspapers across the country that discuss the importance of this funding to save the lives of moms and babies around the world.

Our training consisted of a large number of personal coaching calls with Sheena and the Community Coordinators as well as a series of three webinars hosted on a great platform called BigMarker.

Take a look at our webinars below:

Webinar #1: Campaign Overview

Webinar #2: Understanding the Talking Points

Webinar #3: Practicing Face to Face Meetings

In all, this campaign has been successful already – both in terms of the outputs we’ve been able to produce and in terms of learning how to do this grassroots advocacy ever more effectively. So far, we have:

  • Written a total of 6,300+ unique letters to U.S. House Representatives and Senators
  • Hosted three training webinars with more than 75 people attending / watching in total
  • Had 2 meetings with Representatives so far; have 10 meetings scheduled for the coming weeks

By the end of the campaign, I hope that we can:

  • Write 10,000+ letters
  • Participate in 15 direct in-person meetings with legislators
  • Have 15 letters to the editor published in newspapers

Again, this is all modest and pretty basic stuff when it comes to advocacy. Our hope though is that we can start to build a base of individuals and teams, aligned with PIH’s mission to advance the right to health, who are also competent and motivated to engage in direct advocacy and the political process. This base can hopefully continue to grow in the coming years, providing a powerful platform that can argue for far greater resources invested in public health systems globally.

Evolution of Global Health Education – High School Edition

Working with the PIH | Engage National Team, our research focuses on the existence and possible advancement of global health curricula at the high school level.  The methodology of our research – the final project of which will be a case study – is interview-based. We have been exploring the ways in which three current high school teachers are incorporating global health issues into their curricula. The aim of our project is to create a picture of the models and structures behind each teacher’s global health curriculum, in order to explain the development, implementation, and advancement of their curriculum within their respective schools.  The valuable knowledge these teachers have shared with us will hopefully serve to inspire and empower fellow high school teachers interested in global health, and open the discussion on the broader expansion of these curricula.

The three public high school teachers interviewed for this case study project include: Jeffrey Shea, a Social Studies teacher at Belmont High School in Massachusetts, teaching a “Global Leadership” elective course to 11th and 12th grader students; Matthew Cone, also a Social Studies teacher, teaching two elective courses titled “Global Issues” to 10th through 12th grade students at Carrboro High School in North Carolina; and Bradley Lewis, an Advanced Placement Statistics teacher who teaches mostly 11th and 12th grade students at Bainbridge High School in Washington.

Thus far, we’ve conducted first-round qualitative interviews with each teacher, focusing on the teachers’ process of curriculum development and implementation, as well as the content of the curriculum itself.  The responses we received from each informant far exceeded our initial expectations, and fueled our excitement and passion for this project.

One teacher provides insight on how to incorporate global health issues into a rigid Advanced Placement curriculum… Another talks about the his global health unit, during which he brings his entire class on a field trip to Partners In Health… And the other describes the way in which his course has empowered and inspired his students, particularly minority students, who previously had self-ascribed low expectations. Most notably, however, is the fact that all three teachers stated how this topic meets their students’ passion for learning about injustice, and desire to learn about the world: giving us great hope regarding the potential for change underlying the expansion of global health curricula at the high school level.

The fact that none of the teachers teach an entire class dedicated solely to global health reflects the interdisciplinary nature of global health, and therefore its ability to be easily integrated into a broader curriculum. We believe the foundational knowledge that a global health high school curriculum could provide to students would inspire and prepare a new generation of young leaders to take on major issues facing our modern world.

We believe in the power of collective movement building, and think that high school students are often an underestimated, underutilized group filled with passionate individuals yearning to make a difference in the world. For this reason, we hope this research has the potential to inspire other high school teachers to educate a new contingent of movement builders: young leaders with the potential to advance the goal of establishing health as a human right.

We are still in the midst of interviewing and gathering our research data. But, we are excited to share our results and some ideas for the future of expanding global health education and critical discussion amongst high schoolers in the U.S.

—–

Post was written by Kristine Quiroz and Victoria Oliva.

Kristine is a Junior at Harvard University studying Anthropology and Global Health and Health policy. Born and raised in Southern California, Kristine enjoys going to the beach, hiking, and film/video editing. She is excited about her work thus far with Partners in Health, and hopes to continue doing global health work into the future.

Victoria is a junior at Tufts University majoring in Community Health and Anthropology. She is from Amherst, Massachusetts and enjoys photography, traveling, and playing piano.  She is really excited to be interning with Partners In Health this semester and plans to pursue a study of global health in the future. 

PIH | Engage: Forward Progress

It’s only been about 2 months since my last post about PIH | Engage, but our progress on the spring campaign seems exponential. Early in 2014, teams across the country sat down at community “retreats” to lay out a gameplan for the spring, setting ambitious yet realistic goals and devising the timeline, roles, and sets of work necessary to make their ideas a reality. We’re approaching a crucial moment for PIH | Engage: in just a few months, the yearlong campaign will wrap up and we’ll head into a summer of reflection, re-grouping, and rebuilding for next year. The question for these retreats was: how will communities meaningfully demonstrate the significant power they’ve built through months of organizing and hard work? 

The power that we’ve built:

PIH | Engage teams have built up to this moment through many small campaign successes. Just in terms of people power, the movement has grown to more than 430 members! A personal fundraising push around the holidays resulted in more than $26,000 in December alone, and events across the country have brought our total beyond $52,000 to date.

New Community Members

Dollars Raised

 

Our winter advocacy push focused on generating media around the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria replenishment conference. The Global Fund is an international financing institution that has brought unprecedented resources to fight these epidemics, and through submitting letters to the editor to our local newspapers, PIH | Engage called on the U.S. to pledge $5 billion to the Global Fund over the next three years.  At least 8 letters were published! In addition to these campaign victories, communities hosted many awareness-raising events, panels, film screenings, and social gatherings.

The community on Bainbridge Island, Washington hosted a “Soup Night” at a local bookstore with PIH guest speaker Jon Lascher.The community on Bainbridge Island, Washington hosted a “Soup Night” at a local bookstore with PIH guest speaker Jon Lascher.

The Washington D. C. group held a World Cancer Day happy hour.The Washington D. C. group held a World Cancer Day happy hour.

The team in Madison, Wisconsin bonded at their community retreat.The team in Madison, Wisconsin bonded at their community retreat.

Where we’re headed:

Now, the question is how PIH | Engage can display this power in a final campaign push. First, teams aim to host culminating fundraising events that rally entire communities around the vision of Partners In Health. Not only can these events raise substantial funds, they can engage a broad audience about the work of PIH and PIH | Engage. One idea that many communities have taken on: “Strides for Solidarity” walkathons where people walk in solidarity with community health workers, who often travel many miles over rough terrain to reach vulnerable patients. Community health workers are the cornerstone of the health care systems PIH works to build – we employ more than 8,000 CHWs across our sites. By the end of this year’s campaign, I’m confident that PIH | Engage will host more than 10 Strides for Solidarity walkathons.

Communities are also working to push forward an exciting advocacy campaign. As I write this, Congress is debating funding levels for next year’s federal budget, including key foreign aid programs that could bring millions to global health interventions. Congress gives less than 1% of the budget to humanitarian aid – we need to tell them to do better. PIH | Engage will engage with our legislators through in-person meetings, letters, phone calls, and emails and urge them to make global health a priority in next year’s budget. Specifically, we’re asking them to increase funding levels to $800 million for global maternal and child health, and $200 million for nutrition programs.

By the end of June, PIH | Engage organizers will have held dozens of meetings with Congressmen to discuss these issues. And, as you’re reading this, I hope you’ll join us! We’ve created an easy tool that helps you write a letter to your Senators and Representative in Congress in just 2 minutes:

www.pih.org/speak-out

Tell Congress

Sign this call to action now and share with your friends and family!

It’s taken a lot of work to get here, and I can already think of dozens of ways I’d like to change the campaign, our training, and our recruitment for next year. But thinking back to our launch in September, it’s incredible to have seen individual Community Coordinators grow into passionate, dedicated teams ready to host walkathons and meet with Congress! I can’t wait to see what we accomplish by the end of this campaign.

By Sheena Wood

Sheena works as the Community Organizing Assistant at Partners In Health. A recent graduate from Brown University, she enjoys reading about community organizing and global health, traveling, and eating dark chocolate. 

Back on the blog

So, I’m now realizing that it is quite challenging to maintain a blog that has some substance while also working a much more than full time job…

Yep, I’ve fallen off the wagon a bit. No excuses. I’m hopeful however, that I’ll be able to get some good content from a variety of sources up over the next couple of weeks. Some things that we’ll be discussing:

  1. The book “When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health”. I’m finishing up a deep dive into this fantastic book and hope to share a bit of a review and thoughts about how it connects to right to health movement building.
  2. NCDs. I’m hoping to have a couple of good friends write some posts that will survey how non-communicable diseases are expanding both epidemiologically and rhetorically in the field of global health and will look at a particular example in Peru for how NCD care can be wrapped up into primary care delivery.
  3. Updates from the PIH | Engage Campaign. We’ve made some good progress on both the fundraising and advocacy fronts and have learned a lot about how this collective movement building work can be done better. We’re excited by what all of this means for our plans for next year.
  4. More analysis on the ‘university engagement in global health research’. We are excited to merge an understanding of the growth of formal academic programs as well as extracurricular student organizations – both national and unaffiliated.

So, stay tuned for what I hope to be an interesting and productive conversation!

 

Global Health: Case Studies from a Biosocial Perspective

Butaro

Harvard’s EdX just launched it’s online global health course taught by Paul Farmer, Arthur Kleinman, Salmaan Keshavjee, and Anne Becker.

Anyone can register for free and participate here!

About the course:

“This introductory course is an interdisciplinary view of global health. It aims to frame global health’s collection of problems and actions within a particular biosocial perspective. It develops a toolkit of analytical approaches and uses them to examine historical and contemporary global health initiatives with careful attention to a critical sociology of knowledge. The teaching team, four physician-anthropologists, draws on experiences working in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Americas, to investigate what the field of global health may include, how global health problems are defined and constructed, and how global health interventions play out in expected and unexpected ways. The course seeks to inspire and teach the following principles:

A global awareness. This course aims to enable students to recognize the role of distinctive traditions, governments, and histories in shaping health and wellbeing. In addition, rather than framing a faceless mass of poor populations as the subject of global health initiatives, the course uses ethnographies and case studies to situate global health problems in relation to the lives of individuals, families, and communities.

A grounding in social and historical analysis. The course demonstrates the value of social theory and historical analysis in understanding health and illness at individual and societal levels.

An ethical engagement. Throughout the course, students will be asked to critically evaluate the ethical frameworks that have underpinned historical and contemporary engagement in global health. Students will be pushed to consider the moral questions of inequality and suffering as well as to critically evaluate various ethical frameworks that motivate and structure attempts to redress these inequities

A sense of inspiration and possibility. While the overwhelming challenges of global health could, all too easily, engender cynicism, passivity, and helplessness, students learn that no matter how complex the field of global health and no matter how steep the challenges, it is possible to design, implement, and foster programs and policies that make enormous positive change in the lives of the world’s poorest and suffering people.”

Medical-legal partnerships and the right to health

Just finished reading the fantastic  article by Elizabeth Tobin Tyler on how we might start to conceptualize and advance a strategy for health as a human right in the United States. It made me realize just how weak our (in the U.S.) legal precedent and political appetite is for positive social and economic rights, including the right to health. The paper reinforced for me the history that the commitment to social and economic rights is, actually, deeply American, but was derailed by the politics of east-west / capitalist-communist posturing of the Cold War. It also gave me some hope that we may be able to begin to move away from a futile top-down, overly litigious, court-driven means of advancing the health as a human right agenda.

The idea advanced in this paper is centered around the potential power of linking health practitioners, lawyers, and community organizers: politicizing health care delivery and baking rights-based advocacy right in to the process of providing services:

“A systemic health and human rights strategy should be built upon interdisciplinary partnerships among health care providers, public health practitioners, lawyers, and community organizers. It should be founded on three principles: bearing witness to human rights violations within the community context; tracking systemic failures through data collection and monitoring; and broad-based legal strategies which include both individual and policy advocacy in a given community.”

Medical-legal partnerships are one way that this type of community-level partnership has been built between these different professional disciplines.

“The medical-legal partnership (MLP) movement in the US exemplifies a community-based health and human rights strategy that implements a legal advocacy and social accountability approach by connecting lawyers, health care providers, and public health practitioners. The MLP model, first established in a safety-net hospital pediatrics department in 1993, now exists in over 500 legal and medical institutions in the US. The model is also being adopted in both Australia and Canada.”

Clearly, MLPs should play a role in a rights-based advocacy strategy in the U.S. But, I wonder how this type of patient-provider-level accountability and advocacy could be used to politicize the act of global health delivery in low income countries? If the goal is to enable MOHs and governments to take on the responsibility for protecting the right to health of their citizens, don’t those citizens need mechanisms to hold those governments accountable for delivering on that duty?

It seems like a movement for the right to health requires both the “supply side” — creating the policy and financing space through foreign aid and “accompaniment” — and the “demand side” — legal recourse for those receiving substandard care or none at all.

Definitely some interesting stuff when considering a country like the U.S., which should have dealt with these issues long ago. But, for nations interested in building the systems of social protection and healthcare delivery to protect citizens’ right to health, ideas such as MLPs should be built in.