Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic clearly illustrates the centrality of politics to outbreak response. From state-level policies, to the World Health Organization (WHO) and other multilateral mechanisms emerging to govern the global response, political considerations shaped policy and outcomes during the pandemic. This chapter shows how foreign policy analysis (FPA) approaches can be used to shed light on key outcomes during the pandemic including border policy, WHO actions, and COVAX—the mechanism for global vaccine development and distribution. The chapter demonstrates both connections between FPA and traditional International Relations theory and the added value of FPA for explaining challenges in outbreak response. Furthermore, we make clear that FPA approaches can be applied beyond government decision-making to small-group decision-making within international organizations (IOs) as well as IO and non-state actor behaviour, and macro-level outcomes like the design of cooperative mechanisms like COVAX.
Professor Catherine Z. Worsnop co-authored the chapter titled "Foreign Policy and Global Health," part of the edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis with Summer Marion.