ABSTRACT
Central to the governance of global health and the institutional mechanisms organized within it are the conceptual approaches that direct how certain health issues are addressed, defined, and prioritized. Approaches to health governance have changed rapidly over the last fifty years. Typically biomedical models of health interventions have dominated the terrain of how we understand global health and how it is approached and practiced. However, the increasingly globalized nature of health has required a wider recognition of the socio-economic determinants of poor health and the need to balance biomedical approaches with that of human rights and wider participation in delivering health services beyond medical practitioners. Global health has come to constitute a development concern, a barometer of global inequality, and a security threat. Each of these framings of health has had an impact on global health policy: how it is addressed, how specific issues come on to the global agenda, levels of public and private sector involvement, and how institutions have positioned health and disease in global and local spaces. This chapter builds on the shift from international to global health
outlined in the Introduction. In so doing it considers the following approaches to global health governance: inequity and health as a public good, the right to health, multisectoralism, health as a security concern, and health as biopolitics. It outlines what is meant by each of these approaches, how they correspond to policy and practice, and what they mean for global health governance.
