@article{Burci:319347,
      recid = {319347},
      author = {Burci, Gian Luca},
      title = {The COVID-19 pandemic and the development of global health  law managing crises or achieving structural changes?},
      address = {2024},
      number = {ARTICLE},
      abstract = {The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global crisis with  multiple causes, effects and consequences going beyond its  immediate health impact. On the one hand, environmental  drivers may have facilitated the spillover of the virus to  humans, while on the other the pandemic has affected most  areas of international relations and revealed a troubling  lack of equity and solidarity within and among countries.  However, what was the real crisis? Framing COVID-19 as a  health crisis brought the negotiation of a new pandemic  agreement into WHO as a crisis measure to fill the gaps  left by the International Health Regulations and reduce the  risk of future pandemics. International law has been  defined as a “discipline of crisis”, evolving through  responses to violent shocks, and COVID-19 seems to confirm  this view. However, international law has also been shaped  by a counternarrative highlighting the structural causes of  crises and addressing them rather than the symptoms. This  historical tension has negatively affected the negotiation  of the pandemic agreement, with Global South countries  moving beyond a crisis approach and demanding “equity”  through structural changes to the pharmaceutical market,  support for self-reliance in pharmaceutical manufacturing  and guarantees of financing. This fault line also has  consequences for global health law in general, in  particular because the scarcity of dedicated global health  instruments and the limited mandate of WHO questions what  issues can be regulated through that organisation and which  will require the interplay of different institutions and  regimes, pointing to regime complexity as the appropriate  conceptual tool to undertake that analysis.},
      url = {http://repository.graduateinstitute.ch/record/319347},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4337/jghl.2024.01.01},
}