Abstract
Ilona Kickbusch’s thought provoking editorial is criticized in this commentary, partly because she fails to refer to previous critical work on the global conditions and policies that sustain inequality, poverty, poor health and damage to the biosphere and, as a result, she misreads global power and elides consideration of the fundamental historical structures of political and material power that shape agency in global health governance. We also doubt that global health can be improved through structures and processes of multilateralism that are premised on the continued reproduction of the ecologically myopic and socially unsustainable market civilization model of capitalist development that currently prevails in the world economy. This model drives net financial flows from poor to rich countries and from the poor to the affluent and super wealthy individuals. By contrast, we suggest that significant progress in global health requires a profound and socially just restructuring of global power, greater global solidarity and the "development of sustainability."
Highlights
Ilona Kickbusch’s important editorial suggests that a global power shift is occurring, involving “the rise of the rest” relative to the United States, and with it, changes in the nature of multilateralism
In 1980 Johan Galtung emphasised the significance of the underlying structures of power that configure the possibilities for action or agency in global affairs: “There is a crisis in the world today, felt even by those of us who enjoy the power and privilege at the top of the world
We would argue that current frameworks of multilateralism are constituted and shaped by the fundamental economic and political structures, forces and knowledge frameworks that configure the global political economy, namely those of existing neoliberal capitalism
Summary
Ilona Kickbusch’s important editorial suggests that a global power shift is occurring, involving “the rise of the rest” relative to the United States, and with it, changes in the nature of multilateralism.
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