Introduction In an era of increasing interconnectedness and exchange, global regimes have emerged to govern actor behavior in domains that have come to be seen as transnational, such as trade, climate change, human rights and health. We defi ne global regimes as the formal and informal ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision making procedures’ (Krasner, 1982) that govern the behavior of state and nonstate actors at the global level. Such regimes signal the coming into being of a ‘global’ domain of public policy making – a set of rules that is no longer purely based on Westphalian principles of interaction between sovereign nation-states, but based on networked coalitions between a diverse set of players – governmental and non-governmental, private and public (Ruggie, 2004). The emergence of such regimes raises important questions for global governance. For example, how are global regimes created, amended and enforced? Who shapes and is shaped by them? How do various actors infl uence global rule-making, and what role do health considerations play?