The Social Lives of Global Policies against Malaria: Conceptual Considerations, Past Experiences, and Current Issues.

While a casual observer might easily get the impression that global policies against malaria have unanimous support, there are strongly divergent perspectives on malaria control. Analyzing ethnographic and historical material through a political science lens, I foreground the social negotiation of malaria both as an illness experience of affected populations and as a disease problem defined by experts. Taking the interrelationship between problems, solutions, and solution providers as a point of departure, I reconstruct recurrent tensions and social mechanisms that can account for the tendency to downplay conflicts and to produce technical-biomedical solutions that seem to be irresistible. This helps to overcome the perception that current policies have no alternatives and that aiming directly for malaria eradication is the only form of sustainability in times of resistances when "saving the established technical-biomedical solutions" has become a key concern.

Re-imagining malaria--a platform for reflections to widen horizons in malaria control.

Ongoing political-economic discussions that take stock of social and societal determinants of health present an opportunity for productive dialogue on why current approaches to malaria control and elimination need to be broadened, and how this may be accomplished. They invite us, for example, to look beyond malaria as a disease, to appreciate the experiences of malaria-afflicted populations, to transcend techno-centric approaches, to investigate social conflicts around malaria, to give voice to the communities engaged in bottom-up approaches, and to revisit lessons learned in the past. While contributions from all disciplines are invited to this discussion, social scientists are particularly encouraged to participate. They have struggled in the past to find an appropriate platform within the malaria community that provides them the opportunity to address researchers from other disciplines, malaria practitioners, and policy makers. The Malaria Journal's new thematic series on 're-imagining malaria' offers them this opportunity. The goal of the series is to encourage transdisciplinary thinking, to stimulate discussion, to promote constructive criticism, and to gather overlooked experiences that help to reflect on implicit assumptions. Overall it aims at widening horizons in malaria control.