Health governance to fight the Covid-19 crisis and prevent future pandemics

Towards a more resilient global health architecture after Covid-19

Despite impressive breakthroughs, the last two years of the pandemic have exacerbated pre-existing challenges to global health. The scientific and medical achievements of developing vaccines within 18 months, the launch of specific tools such as ACT-A and COVAX to support more equitable vaccine access, as well as more recent proposals to reform the global health architecture illustrate the potential contribution of international cooperation in response to this and possible future pandemics. However, COVID-19 has demonstrated the urgency of reforms to current global health architecture – the systems and policies that prioritize the allocation of resources, coordinate different actors’ initiatives and policies, incentivize innovation and collaboration, and govern the participation of different state and non-state actors.

The global health system’s failure to prevent the latest pandemic reflects the limitations of a primarily technical design and approach when confronted to a highly politicized threat. This illustrates the need to better consider the interplay between states and increasingly divided geopolitical blocs, industry, multilateral institutions, and civil society.

The Paris Peace Forum has been working on global health issues since the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020. Overall, the PPF’s added value on health issues is political rather than technical, enabling the PPF to play a supportive ‘platform’ rather than instigator role on the governance of global health.

Our main objectives:

1. Facilitating coordination to ramp up pandemic preparedness and the resilience of health systems, particularly in Africa
2. Ensuring that the views and priorities of civil society and the Global South, as well as governance and political considerations, are captured in global discussions on the future of global health architecture

Our results to date :

In 2020, our teams played a key role in mobilizing over $500 million in new commitments to the ACT-Accelerator.

In 2021, we hosted two high-level roundtables in the run-up to the G7 and G20. Five priorities were identified, and recommendations were published in The Lancet.

Our priorities moving forward:

In line with the Forum’s transformation and set up of a dedicated policy team, two global health policy workstreams were launched in 2022:

- Track 1: Governance and political conditions for the optimization of early warning and response systems
  - The Paris Peace Forum is conducting applied research on early warning and response systems (EWRS), with a focus on the political conditions for governing such systems at different levels (local, national, regional, global). The Forum is specifically exploring the incentives and disincentives to report and respond early, looking beyond the health sector for relevant lessons, and considering EWRS as global public goods.
  - Within this context, the Paris Peace Forum hosted a policy conversation around Bill Gates and in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Learning Planet Institute on May 6: “How to prevent the next pandemic: A policy conversation with Bill Gates and key pandemic response specialists”. The discussion focused on pandemic preparedness and response, exploring what shifts in global health governance – including those proposed in Bill Gates’ new book – could help us be better prepared for future pandemics.
- Track 2: Informing the reform processes of the global health architecture
  - The Forum will continue to host convenings and discussions around global health architecture reform, informing formal negotiations with perspectives from across the North/South divide and including civil society alongside governments.
  - On 14 April 2022, the Paris Peace Forum and Pandemic Action Network co-hosted — with the support of the French Presidency of the European Union — an informal roundtable: “Following Africa’s lead: strengthening national and regional pandemic defences”. This was attended by close to 20 high-level policymakers, health experts and practitioners from key relevant institutions.