Private Foundations and Global Health Partnerships: Philanthropists and ‘Partnership Brokerage’

Abstract

This chapter broadly explores the influence of private foundations in the governance of global health. Such foundations, including the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, have historically played an important role in infectious disease control, providing seed finance to develop vaccines (e.g. yellow fever) and in direct interventions to eradicate intestinal parasites (e.g. hookworm). More recently, such actors have utilised their material resources to facilitate and broker strategic coalitions between pharmaceutical companies, civil society groups, international organisations, and states in ‘innovative’ policy arrangements variously known in the literature as public–private, multi-sectoral, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Partnerships such as the GAVI Alliance, the Institute for OneWorld Health, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (hereinafter the Global Fund), to name but a few high-profile cases, have all been identified as appropriate policy responses to complex and seemingly intractable global health problems.