Introduction

The African Union, Africa’s supra-national level, carries little weight and barely impacts the major public policies governing public action in Africa. The wave of public policy studies first appeared in the United States and then Europe before landing in Africa and the rest of the world. The overall disparities should not be forgotten as public action against AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is internationalised or trans-nationalised. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book proposes an analysis of AIDS public policy in Africa, influenced by international organisations and applied at the level of African States. Public policy per se is not treated as a paradigm through which national public policies are mechanically deduced from international guidelines or prescriptions. The context of access to AIDS drugs posed, with rare acuity, the issue of State regulation of public action, and especially of the specific structural and conjunctural variables of each State.