This edited collection looks at how globalisation is influencing patterns of health and disease worldwide, in particular how decisions on health are made and organised. Despite some successes in developing better global governance for health, overall progress has been disappointingly slow given the number of health crises today, both long standing and relatively new.

This book explores how progress has often been limited, but also on occasion assisted, by the role of ideas. It identifies how health issues, such as HIV/AIDS, pandemic influenza and tobacco control, are framed in such a way as to resonate with a set of ideas, or worldviews, associated with particular policy communities. A successful framing can generate possibilities for action, but can also lead to competition when ideas conflict or suggest different pathways of response. Global Health Governance is therefore an arena of competition as well as cooperation, where ideas matter as well as resources and political will.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Public Health.

Colin McInnes is the UNESCO Chair in HIV/AIDS Education and Health Security in Africa and Director of the Centre for Health and International Relations at Aberystwyth University, UK. Kelley Lee is Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences and director of Global Health at Simon Fraser University, Canada.