ABSTRACT
At the core of global health governance is a range of intergovernmental organizations, some established to directly address health as part of their core mandate, and others that have come to focus on health as part of a wider effort towards the promotion of international peace, security, and development. The institutionalization of global health has occurred in three waves. The first wave relates to the formation of general rules, norms, and standards developed to govern sanitation and trade-related health concerns and the “golden age” of discovery during the nineteenth century. The second wave marks the consolidation of these norms and standards at the end of the Second World War with the formation of the World Health Organization (WHO) and associated United Nations (UN) specialized agencies working on health provision, as well as the formation of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that concentrated on health as a wider part of development and reconstruction. The third wave of institutionalization refers to the rise of partnerships in the early 2000s. The presence, growth, and origins of different actors overlap within these waves, but for the ease of organization this chapter addresses those actors and institutions prominent in global health in the first and second wave, with the presence of new actors as part of the third wave considered in Chapter 3.
