The World Health Organization between North and South - by Nitsan Chorev (Hardcover)

About the Book

Chorev shows how the WHO bureaucracy has succeeded not only in avoiding having its agenda co-opted by either coalition of member states but also in reaching a consensus that fit the bureaucracy's own principles and interests.

Book Synopsis

Since 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched numerous programs aimed at improving health conditions around the globe, ranging from efforts to eradicate smallpox to education programs about the health risks of smoking. In setting global health priorities and carrying out initiatives, the WHO bureaucracy has faced the challenge of reconciling the preferences of a small minority of wealthy nations, who fund the organization, with the demands of poorer member countries, who hold the majority of votes. In The World Health Organization between North and South, Nitsan Chorev shows how the WHO bureaucracy has succeeded not only in avoiding having its agenda co-opted by either coalition of member states but also in reaching a consensus that fit the bureaucracy's own principles and interests.

Chorev assesses the response of the WHO bureaucracy to member-state pressure in two particularly contentious moments: when during the 1970s and early 1980s developing countries forcefully called for a more equal international economic order, and when in the 1990s the United States and other wealthy countries demanded international organizations adopt neoliberal economic reforms. In analyzing these two periods, Chorev demonstrates how strategic maneuvering made it possible for a vulnerable bureaucracy to preserve a relatively autonomous agenda, promote a consistent set of values, and protect its interests in the face of challenges from developing and developed countries alike.

Review Quotes

[Chorev's] two lines of argument structure a well-executed and illuminating history of the WHO and key global health issues such as tobacco control, primary care, health systems strengthening and access to essential medicines. It should be especially widely read in global health governance, which needs more work like this.

Chorev does a thorough job of discussing the political, social, and economic factors that moved global culture from principles of equity (the importance of health to social development) to a more market-oriented and technological focus in the 1980s, with the rise of more international organizations, private foundations, and principles of cost effectiveness, with health seen as good for economic growth and productivity.

In her latest book, Nitsan Chorev weaves a fascinating and compelling narrative in describing the evolution of policy making at the World Health Organization WHO during the late 20th century..... [T]his book will be required reading for students of international organizations, global inequality, and macrocomparative approaches to health and development. Chorev's study offers an important examination into world-level processes that are ignored, or only briefly alluded to, in other research. As such, her book will change the way scholars view international organizations and the role that they perform in constructing policy and shaping the global development agenda.

Nitsan Chorev provides an in-depth exploration of the institution and its secretariat during two phases where there was great political pressure on the delivery of the WHO's mandate: the pursuit of health for all. Chorev's use of archival research presents the WHO as a living, breathing organism, which has individuals with beliefs of their own and agendas that they pursue, sometimes in conflict with the interests driving states' engagement in the institution.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been the subject of considerable angst over the past two decades.. Chorev's book is timely, in this context, offering new insights into the complex, sometimes obscure, politics engaged in by an international organization with roots in the nineteenth century but at the frontline of contemporary efforts to transition into global governance in the early twenty-first century.

About the Author

Nitsan Chorev is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University. She is the author of Remaking U.S. Trade Policy: From Protectionism to Globalization, also from Cornell.