Thinking Politically about Health

Research - Portfolios - Equal Rights Gender Diagram
Good evidence doesn't usually speak for itself when it comes to policy uptake. We analyse the ideas, interests and institutions, and the power that runs through them, that decide who gets to be healthy, and put that analysis to work.

Summary

Behind every health problem sit political choices — shaped by ideas, interests and institutions, and by how power is distributed among them: who sets the agenda, whose evidence counts, who benefits, and who pays. Thinking politically about health means taking those dynamics as seriously as the science, because even the best evidence stalls without a strategy to move the people and institutions with power. It is an approach the Department applies across issues, from HIV and food systems to climate and health security, and increasingly to the health politics of Malaysia and the region.

The approach is led by Professor Kent Buse, a political economist and lead author of Making Health Policy, the field's leading text. It is grounded in scholarship as well as practice: our lead drafted two UN General Assembly Political Declarations on HIV/AIDS (2011 and 2016) on behalf of UNAIDS, and has advised heads of UN agencies on political strategy — so the analysis we employ and teach is analysis we have used from the inside. The throughline is a conviction that runs across all our work: fix systems, not people, if you seek to improve health equity.