This PhD thesis examines the intersection of global health, law, and finance, exploring how law facilitates the financialization of global health through three case studies of Innovative Financing Initiatives for Health (IFI-Hs): the Solidarity Levy (Unitaid), the Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine Advanced Market Commitment (GAVI), and the Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria (Global Fund). The thesis looks at the historical and institutional character of these IFI-Hs. The thesis builds on existing scholarship that describes the financialization of global health by studying the constitutive role of law in enabling and structuring financialization in global health. Drawing on theory that law and finance are co-constitutive, law and development scholarship, TWAIL, and Law & Political Economy scholarship, the thesis treats these initiatives as legal artefacts through which power is organized. It argues that soft and informal international law, trust arrangements, contracting, and regulatory frameworks constitute a governance architecture that protects financial interests while embedding conditions on access to essential medicines. The thesis concludes that IFI-Hs replicate a familiar civilizing mission dynamic: framing the Global South’s inability to deliver medicine access as a deficit requiring deeper integration into capitalist economic ordering, while privileging the interests of asset-holders and donor States. Law assists financialization by establishing norms that prioritize financial actors, protecting assets as vehicles for extraction, and integrating financiers into global health governance. Though IFI-Hs produced real health outcomes, they also entrenched systemic inequalities and marginalized rights-holders. The thesis challenges the managerial framing of resource mobilization and calls attention to how legal architecture determines whose interests global health ultimately serves.
