ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Georgia Whitta, Roannie Ng Shiu and Sir Collin Tukuitonga outline the effectiveness of existing mechanisms of cooperation to address health security issues including COVID-19, non-communicable diseases and preventable infectious diseases. They observe that health security cooperation in the region is longstanding, having been explicitly established by the 1995 Healthy Islands Yanuca Declaration (reinforced in 2015). Cooperation – largely although not exclusively through the Pacific Community – has focused on food security, health workforce development, and cooperation in the health security space, and has developed into partnerships at the local, regional, and global levels. Looking forward, they note that, while there is interest in funding work to build climate-resilient health systems and to improve health security in the region, there is less partner interest in ongoing issues such as NCDs, highlighting how health security responses can be influenced by the interests of partners.
