Health Diplomacy and Global Health: Latin American perspectives.

We will analyze and comment on the book Health Diplomacy and Global Health: Latin American Perspectives, edited by Paulo Marchiori Buss and Sebastián Tobar and published by Editora Fiocruz. Throughout its 653 pages, the book brings prominent national and foreign authors in the field of Health Diplomacy and Global Health, depicting a decade in which Brazil had great international protagonism in the field of Public Health, especially in South-South cooperation, in an innovative and structuring manner. Furthermore, the chapters present theoretical aspects and basic principles of Global Health as a new field of knowledge, in which the country has been developing and sharing scientific production with a Latin American perspective, focused on the pursuit of equity and health for all peoples of the world.

Health Diplomacy and Global Health: Latin American perspectives / Diplomacia em Saúde e Saúde Global: perspectivas latino-americanas

ABSTRACT We will analyze and comment on the book Health Diplomacy and Global Health: Latin American Perspectives, edited by Paulo Marchiori Buss and Sebastián Tobar and published by Editora Fiocruz. Throughout its 653 pages, the book brings prominent national and foreign authors in the field of Health Diplomacy and Global Health, depicting a decade in which Brazil had great international protagonism in the field of Public Health, especially in South-South cooperation, in an innovative and structuring manner. Furthermore, the chapters present theoretical aspects and basic principles of Global Health as a new field of knowledge, in which the country has been developing and sharing scientific production with a Latin American perspective, focused on the pursuit of equity and health for all peoples of the world.

RESUMO Analisa-se e comenta-se a obra Diplomacia em Saúde e Saúde Global: perspectivas latino-americanas, editada por Paulo Marchiori Buss e Sebastián Tobar, publicado pela Editora Fiocruz. O livro, em 653 páginas, traz contribuições de destacados autores nacionais e estrangeiros no campo da diplomacia em saúde e da saúde global, retratando uma década em que o Brasil teve grande protagonismo internacional no campo da saúde pública, sobretudo na cooperação Sul-Sul, de forma inovadora e estruturante. Ademais, os capítulos apresentam aspectos teóricos e princípios básicos da saúde global como novo campo de conhecimento, no qual o país vem desenvolvendo e compartilhando uma produção científica com uma perspectiva latino-americana, voltada para a busca da equidade e da saúde para todos os povos do mundo.

Adapting public policy theory for public health research: A framework to understand the development of national policies on global health.

National policies on global health appear as one way that actors from health, development and foreign affairs sectors in a country coordinate state action on global health. Next to a burgeoning literature in which international relations and global governance theories are employed to understand global health policy and global health diplomacy at the international level, little is known about policy processes for global health at the national scale. We propose a framework of the policy process to understand how such policies are developed, and we identify challenges for public health researchers integrating conceptual tools from political science. We developed the framework using a two-step process: 1) reviewing literature to establish criteria for selecting a theoretical framework fit for this purpose, and 2) adapting Real-Dato's synthesis framework to integrate a cognitive approach to public policy within a constructivist perspective. Our framework identifies multiple contexts as part of the policy process, focuses on situations where actors work together to make national policy on global health, considers these interactive situations as spaces for observing external influences on policy change and proposes policy design as the output of the process. We suggest that this framework makes three contributions to the conceptualisation of national policy on global health as a research object. First, it emphasizes collective action over decisions of individual policy actors. Second, it conceptualises the policy process as organised interactive spaces for collaboration rather than as stages of a policy cycle. Third, national decision-making spaces are opportunities for transferring ideas and knowledge from different sectors and settings, and represent opportunities to identify international influences on a country's global health policy. We discuss two sets of challenges for public health researchers using interdisciplinary approaches in policy research.