Book Talk: A New Vision for Global Health Justice and Governance

April 9, 2019

In a world of growing health disparities, increased globalization, and increasingly complex networks of health actors and health systems, how do we move forward? Dr. Jennifer Prah Ruger’s new book Global Health Justice and Governance (Oxford University Press, 2018) offers a compelling vision and architecture for addressing these tangled problems. This guided the conversation between Dr. Prah Ruger and expert panelists in mid-March, during a book talk hosted by the Global Health Rights Project (GHRP)—a collaboration between the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI) at Harvard University.

In Global Health Justice and Governance, Dr. Jennifer Prah Ruger—the Amartya Sen Professor of Health Equity, Economics, and Policy in the School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania—argues that we have the responsibility to create conditions and systems of global governance that allow other humans to flourish, that is, to reach their maximum potential and capabilities. Joining Prah Ruger in discussing her book was GHRP’s inaugural Senior Fellow and GHELI Senior Scholar in Residence Alicia Ely Yamin, as well as Michael Stein, Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Co-founder and Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. The Petrie-Flom Center’s Executive Director, Carmel Shachar, moderated the expansive conversation. 

Together, the three discussed how global health needs a “trans-disciplinary approach”—in Yamin’s phrase—to be more ubiquitous not only in academia, but also in practice. After all, lawyers practicing in the field of public health are not just “just the janitors that clean up the liability messes, [they are] architects of social institutions,” remarked Yamin. That responsibility comes with the moral obligation to uphold justice and do good in both the national and global health levels. Additionally, Yamin commented that global health is more than just health in different international systems; it is a different concept and space that comes from interactions between local and global actors.

At the end of the event, Shachar posed a provocative question to the panelists: “If you had to tweet out the #1 question to tackle in this area, what question would you tweet out to the world to try to solve here?” The panelists remarked that they would ask questions such as how to prioritize health and flourishing as a human right and not just an add-on, and how to further collaborate to achieve health equity.