Divorcing ‘Global Health’ from ‘global health’: Theories for the future of a social organization and an idea

Abstract

As conversations and thinking concerning changing the field that calls itself “global health” have proliferated over the past three years, a key predicament has emerged. While almost all in the field agree that something must change, for the vast majority a world without this complex, massive project and apparatus is still unimaginable and undesirable. Arguing that the vagueness yet moral encasing of the field created a situation in which efforts of change must end at preserving the field, I argue that ‘Global Health’ is not ‘global health,’ and understanding this leads to greater possibilities of what the field could be and how to change it. Engaging with a wide range of critical scholarship, I divorce Global Health—a loosely configured global apparatus—from global health—a utopian idea—I show how both this social system and this idea are constructed and exist in plurality. Through then denaturalizing widely accepted and embedded myths of the field’s necessity and moral transcendence to the world, I map the possibilities of what efforts of changing Global Health could be when these myths are rejected and reorient focus on how critical public health scholarship can be used to aid these efforts.