About the project
The Emergency Medical Teams initiative, spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO), is an innovative governance arrangement that brings together a wide range of public and private actors as one ‘global health reserve army’ to respond to epidemics and humanitarian emergencies.
But how does cooperation between civil protection, military, charity and for-profit response teams play out in practice, both in the governance of the initiative and operationally? How do global health and humanitarian actors work together in epidemic crises? How do national health authorities coordinate epidemic response led by humanitarian actors?
This PhD project takes the Emergency Medical Teams initiative as a case-study to analyze new forms of cooperation in global health security: between public and private entities, across sectors, and not least, increasingly global.
Objectives
This doctoral project’s main objective is to critically analyze the consequences of new forms of global, public-private and cross-sectoral collaborations for the politics of epidemic response, taking the case of the WHO Emergency Medical Teams initiative. More specifically, I will analyze the following research questions:
- How does the Norwegian EMT initiative foster cooperation across sectors, with private actors and international partners?
- What role and influence does the private and charity sector play within the WHO EMT initiative?
- What consequences does the development of global and often private health emergency capacities (such as EMTs) have for state sovereignty and national coordination in impacted countries?
Background
The project is financed by a personal PhD Fellowship (2019-2023) from the Centre from Development and the Environment, University of Oslo awarded to Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée.