International Cooperation Failures in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Learning from Past Efforts to Address Common Threats

While COVID-19 presented a “once in a generation” challenge to states and their leaders, the past two years have witnessed the devastating impact of the failure to address the pandemic as a shared global problem. Cooperation broke down across a variety of multilateral settings as states retreated inward with unilateral and competitive strategies.

As part of deliberations on what went wrong and what reforms might contribute to more effective pandemic preparedness and response going forward, the Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict project engaged in a process of expert consultation and research to specify the nature of the cooperation problem confronting today’s policy-makers, the preconditions for effective cooperation that have been identified in the academic literature, and the ways in which cooperative arrangements could be and have been designed.

International Cooperation Failures in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Learning from Past Efforts to Address Common Threats includes recommendations for states and other actors as they prepare for high-level diplomatic discussions on potential changes to our global health architecture to better meet the challenges of infectious disease.

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