The contemporary (re-)configuration of global health governance: reevaluating health politics in the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised probing questions about the politics that underly health governance. This article engages with recent sociological and political analyses in this regard and offers a reconsideration of what the pandemic represents for global health governance: a moment of reconfiguration rather than continuity or fundamental change. Drawing on Paul Rabinow's notion of ‘the contemporary’ as a mode of analysis, we conceptualise global health governance as a ‘contemporary configuration’ and analyse publicly available data from sources documenting the international response to COVID-19. We identify the appearance of a specific kind of problematisation of solidarity in the light of perceived disarray and fragmentation in global health governance. A perception related to the dynamics that evolved in the international political system during the emergency. Further, we discern processes of remediation in global health governance that unfolded around that problematisation of solidarity. We argue that global health governance, as it emerged in the COVID-19 emergency, should not simply be understood as bounded by the past nor as dramatically altered in the present. Instead, it had undergone a reconfiguration wherein solidarity may potentially become the crux of its politics.