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A number of authors advocate for a radical, innovative shift in global health governance, as complex global health challenges cannot be longer be borne by WHO alone.
Network governance emerged as a leading institutional design to guide 21st century global health governance.
We argue WHO needs to take up the role of meta-governor, for which it should ensure five key functions: consensus building among different sets of actors and networks, steering, ensuring policy coherence, facilitating knowledge innovation through exchange and learning and finally, ensuring democratic accountability.
WHO may need to reconsider its divisionalised bureaucratic structure and move towards a ‘beehive’ configuration. In order to be better deal with the complexities of global health, it should become a learning organisation with relational capabilities and a matrix structure, which is loosely coupled to key issues, networks and actors.
In this journal, Lee and Smith lament the lack of institutional innovation in the WHO, arguably the crux of global health governance (GHG).1 They contend that WHO can only regain its leadership role if it focuses on ‘enabling consensus in a nimble and timely manner’ and foremost, if it supports ‘mechanisms to facilitate the formation of networks, sharing of resources, generation of ideas and enabling of decision-making across constituencies that are not confined to states alone’. Like Mackey,2 they argue for a radical, innovative shift in GHG as complex global health challenges can no longer be borne by WHO alone. Lee and Smith rightly consider network governance as the leading institutional design to guide 21st century GHG.
In the light of events related to WHO’s reform of the past year, we would like to focus on what this networked model-WHO looks like and specifically of how WHO could play the meta-governor role. Democratic networked or interactive governance has been advanced as the …