Diplomacy Program
Laura-Lee Boodram, Shane Kirton and Lisa Indar: A Public Health Perspective on Climate Change and Small Island Developing States: The Caribbean Region, full-length version prepared for publication in Financing a Just Transition: Transforming Funding, Tackling Climate Change, edited by John Kirton and Ella Kokotsis, November 2024
This year's publications are available! Health: A Political Choice – Building Resilience and Trust, just published, and also, published in April, Health: A Political Choice – Advancing Indigenous People's Rights and Well-being
Health: A Political Choice – From Fragmentation to Integration, edited by Ilona Kickbusch and John Kirton, with bonus content
Health: A Political Choice – Investing in Health For All, edited by Ilona Kickbusch and John Kirton, 2022 (contents here)
Health: A Political Choice – Solidarity, Science, Solutions, edited by Ilona Kickbusch and John Kirton, 2021 (contents here)
Building Brain Health at the G20 Health Ministers Meeting, Vladimir Hachinski, Antonio Federico and John Kirton, September 4, 2021
Lauren Millar: "G7 Global Fund Commitments, Compliance and Financial Contributions, 2001–2021, April 16, 2021
Lauren Millar, "Can International Law Improve Compliance with G7 and G20 Health Commitments?, July 21, 2020
Health: A Political Choice – Act Now, Together, edited by Ilona Kickbusch and John Kirton, 2020 (contents here)
Video: Ilona Kickbusch, James Orbinski and Peter Singer, with Danielle Bochove, on "Does COVID-19 Make the Case for the WHO," from the Empire Club of Canada, April 24, 2020
Health Is a Political Choice, a publication coedited by John Kirton and Ilona Kickbusch, with the support of the World Health Organization (contents here)
Watch Madeline Koch on preparing compliance reports, at the House of Commons in London, July 18, 2018
Watch John Kirton on demonstrating good governance, at the House of Commons in London, July 18, 2018
Kirton, John J., Andy Knight and C. James Hospedales. "Implementing Global Summit Commitments on Health.", April 2, 2018
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Mission
The Global Health Diplomacy Program aims to determine how actors at all levels can conduct more effective, comprehensive and coherent diplomacy to innovate in the global governance of the inherently internationalized health risks brought by globalization. Directed by John Kirton, based at Trinity College at the University of Toronto, the program focuses on the role of intergovernmental and transnational institutions and networks and the role of state and non-state actors in their creation and governance.
Projects
Strengthening Summit Diplomacy for Global Health
This project explores how global intergovernmental summits can advance global health and related objectives in critical areas. Its purpose is to identify how and why such summits can be made to work for global health in domestic political management, deliberation, direction setting, decision making, delivery and development, especially in ways that comprehensively and coherently combine health with close-related cognates of the environment, nutrition, food and agriculture, and finance, economics and business. Its particular concern is how leaders can improve compliance with their summit commitments, accountability for those commitments and results from them — including by mobilizing the power of civil society, scientists and business, by adding accountability mechanisms that work and by using surrounding summits in support.
The project embraces broadly multilateral summits with a comprehensive agenda, such as those of the United Nations on the Millennium Development Goals and those with a specific focus such as the UN high-level meetingon non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in September 2011. It focuses on plurilateral summits that deal with health, notably the G8, G20, BRICS, APEC, the North American Leaders’ Summits, the Summit of the Americas and CARICOM.
- Charting Compliance with the 2007 Port of Spain Summit Commitments on Non-communicable Diseases
- Port of Spain Declaration Evaluation (POSDeval) [flyer]
- G7/8 Summit Health Performance
- G20 Summit Health Performance
Innovation in Global Health Governance
This project develops and tests a framework of challenge-response-innovation that captures the dynamics of the new vulnerability brought by disease in the 21st century and the nature and effectiveness of the innovations in international governance that they have evoked.
The project began an assessment with the selection, compilation and overview of the leading articles in the emerging multidisciplinary field of global heath.
The primary emphasis has been on developing and testing the challenge-response-innovation framework through an overview of the performance of the major international institutions and through detailed case studies of the governance of critical contemporary diseases.
The next phases are to develop and test the general framework and the component concept of “Moving Health Sovereignty” and to explore the connection between global health and climate change.
Forging the Health-Diplomacy Link
To develop the links between challenge and response and between response and innovation, this project focuses on the global health diplomacy that brings together those in the health community, on the one hand, and in the foreign policy, trade, development, environment and security communities, on the other, in the intergovernmental, state and non-state realms.
The project began with an analysis of the governance of global health by the G8, as an apex international institution of the most powerful countries, where health can be integrated with international and domestic affairs comprehensively, coherently and authoritatively.
Work is continuing to explore a broader range of compliance catalysts and the processes within G8 member governments through which commitments made at the annual summit are carried back home, implemented and monitored across the government as a whole.
Canadian Foreign Policy for Global Health
This project assesses and advises on Canada’s contribution to global health. It examines Canadian foreign policy on global health, in a comprehensive, strategic sense and in regard to critical issues of infectious and non-infectious disease. It explores Canadian foreign policy in unilateral and bilateral contexts, in a North American regional context, and in the global context as a whole.
Key Links
Caribbean Public Health Agency | SETH Fund | POSDEVAL
