Global health citizenship and the city: Global cities as nodes of global health construction and contestation

Our overarching objective is to investigate how global health citizenship is being conceptualized, constructed and contested by institutions based in Geneva, asking what it means to build an “inclusive global health community” that “supports collaboration with colleagues, partners and the countries.”  With this as our guiding research question, our objectives have four main empirical foci.

1) First we plan to interview leaders from GAVI, the Global Fund and the other IPPPs involved in co-locating in Campus Santé, asking them about their visions, hopes and the underlying rationale for consolidating in the new location in Grand Saconnex. We want to explore what the inclusivity of their community vision includes and what ethical ideals of global health citizenship are thereby elevated. But we are also simultaneously concerned with what the Campus Santé community excludes, especially as these exclusions relate to policy agendas and partnerships with WHO-related inter-governmental organizations and G2H2-related non-governmental organizations respectively.

2) Second, we aim to take up these same questions concerning the ethical ideals of global health citizenship with WHO leaders involved in partnerships with the leading Geneva-based IPPPs.  We are especially interested in how officials are navigating the transition from older models of international health to the new norms of global health that are so closely related to the cost-effectiveness and return on investment calculations of the IPPPs. In the same way, we plan to trace the ways in which terms such as ‘partnership’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘community’ do diplomatic duty in both defusing and diffusing political differences over priorities and the historical norms of governmental leadership in international health.

3) Third, we want to explore the ways in which civil society organizations tied to G2H2 view the same political tensions from the perspective of inclusive global citizenship and democratic representation. How does democratic accountability to the communities where global health services are delivered provide a different perspective on the norms of community and partnership in Campus Santé?  The founders of G2H2 speak of “building a strong civil society space in Geneva for more democratic global health governance,” and so their descriptions of the limits on democratic accountability at Campus Santé will be of great interest.

4) Fourth, we also would like to explore what Geneva’s evolution as a global health hub means for local city leaders and developers, including for their own varied visions of Geneva as a global city with worldwide governmental reach and impact. In other global cities that highlight their importance in global health, much is made of the local benefits of urban identities associated with global care. But at the same time, the associations often also lead to new questions about inequalities in care and health outcomes locally within these same city contexts tied to advancements in health care and healthy futures globally.