What follows was originally drafted as a team concept paper in December 2019. I wanted to post it here on my blog because I kept referring back to it while thinking through global health and its connections to international drug control, development financing, the history of pharmaceuticals and Japanese diplomacy, which are new research interests for me. It’s a work on progress (WIP), so ideas will change – please enjoy!
In the space of a few short decades, global health has become a vast interdisciplinary enterprise. It emerged as a distinct field after the global economic recession of the 1980s in both developed and developing countries. As seen today, global health involves a wide range of stakeholders working in international organisations and their regional offices, national governments, private philanthropies, NGOs of various political and religious leanings, health consultancies and transnational activist networks.
What narrative of the ‘global’ underpins global health? Critical global health research means centrally engaging with the question of how exchanges within and across national borders, of individuals, institutions, products, information and finance, create new spatial and temporal landscapes of health and illness. Through understanding the energy trajectories of each sector, we arrive at a new conceptualisation ‘beyond the global’ that encompasses a wide range of theoretically underpinnings, rather than accepting one at the expense of another.
Why define global health? These questions are not specific to global health but to storytelling in a contemporary era at large. In the current climate, the meaning of ‘global community’ is in constant flux. Global health, due to the vastness of the enterprise and the number of stakeholders involved, is one of the best case studies to understand how members of the international community have discussed, disagreed, collaborated and implemented various projects towards achieving health, development and wellbeing for those not yet at an ideal state of health around the world. In other words, contemporary histories of global health can be used to explore new storytelling paradigms ‘beyond the global’ to make sense of an increasingly interconnected and disjointed yet simultaneously vibrant and hopeful world.
This paper elaborates my developing approach towards conceptualising ‘the global’ in global health. Recent papers have stressed a variety of approaches. Mason, Kerridge and Lipworth have focused on the importance of considering local context in policymaking and implementation.[1] Meanwhile, Taylor holds that with the decline of WHO as a central international health agency and mushrooming presence of multiple stakeholders, global health is danger of fragmentation and needs definition of core organising principles.[2]
In relation to and building on these stances, my approach to ‘the global’ in global health is grounded on three praxes. First, what has and what hasn’t changed in global health? Second, how do we conceive of power imbalances in global health? and finally, who or what becomes the protagonist and the victim in such a conceptualisation? Depending on how we approach and answer the questions above, we are embedding different values in our stake in global health.
Genres of ‘the Global’ in Global Health
First a brief contextual overview. Global health from the late 1970s until the turn of the century is best defined as the merging of various forms of post-war international governance for health, development and drug control following the turbulent economic crises and structural adjustment, as well as an uncertain AIDS pandemic. It was shaped primarily through dialogue between the leading international health agencies at this time: WHO, the traditional post-war disease control leader, and World Bank, the development financing agency that was increasing its health lending.[3] Thus, ideological power contestations have been embedded in global health from the very beginning, as it simultaneously stressed human rights and the socioeconomic determinants of health (coming from the World Health Organization’s health for all declaration), as well as the emphasis on austerity in the health sector amidst the balance of payments crises in developing countries (as per World Bank’s structural adjustment on health systems financing).
Although there are a wide range of disciplinary perspectives that make up the critical scholarship on global health, there are mainly two types of stories. First, there are the official celebratory narratives by those with the governing power to intervene. The vast number of global health ‘stakeholders’ – international, national and NGO agencies – each produce their own narratives of institutional success. These official reports are produced in a vacuum and centre the institution as the main mover and protagonist of this story.
However, as medical anthropologist Kavita Misra notes, ‘[t]here is a schism between what exists at an institutional and discursive level and what exists at the level of individual understanding’.[4] In response to the ‘official’ narratives are the second type of stories told about global health: the counter-narratives that are far more sceptical of the neatness of its plot progression.
Sarah Hodges in ‘The Global Menace’ warned of the dangers of ignoring the politics of formerly colonial contexts in writing ‘place-less’ globalised histories of disease.[5] Medical anthropologists/health professionals such as Stacey Leigh Pigg, Vincanne Adams, Paul Farmer and Salla Sariolla have each asked how global health funding distorts health priorities and the missions of genuine grassroots NGO action in developing countries.[6] For AIDS in India, Cecilia Van Hollen’s Birth in the Age of AIDS interviewed low-income women in Tamil Nadu to understand how global and national priorities for Prevention of Parent-to-Child Transmission of HIV (PPTCT) impacted birth giving and motherhood. Drawing out the lingering overtones of coercive sterilisations conducted during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, Van Hollen highlighted how those in power inscribe their agendas on the bodies of those unable to resist, as the women were being ‘strongly encouraged’ to undertake voluntary testing at the same time that they navigated the social web of gendered stigma.[7] Similarly for gay and lesbian activism, Lawrence Cohen pointed to the demands of global health funding for men who have sex with men created conflicts between UK-based Naz Foundation International and Mumbai-based Bombay Dost as to who was most qualified to speak about true Indian homosexuality and gender norms.[8]
Following this are activist academic perspectives, particularly critical public health scholars critiquing their own government and by extension international agencies. In India, health researchers at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health have critiqued the Indian government’s low prioritisation and budgetary allocations for health and its eagerness to work with World Bank and other donor agencies since the 1970s.[9]
There are also ‘counter-narratives’ in behind-the-scenes semi-autobiographical accounts by former global health figures. James Chin (WHO/GPA epidemiological forecasting) responded to concerns about WHO’s overestimation of global HIV statistics in order to encourage donor funding, blaming mainstream health agencies for creating unnecessary fear.[10] Similarly, Elizabeth Pisani (UNAIDS) in The Wisdom of Whores wrote about the ‘messiness’ of AIDS epidemiology, as a mix of inconsistent data-gathering and political biases.[11] Michael Merson (WHO/GPA) co-authored with Stephen Inrig a book of his time leading WHO/GPA after the departure of Jonathan Mann and gave his perspective on the infamous interpersonal conflicts between Mann and Mahler’s successor Hiroshi Nakajima. This is not limited to global health. Sujatha Rao (India-NACO DG during NACP-III) wrote about her time leading the National AIDS Control Programme in India, clearly detailing NACO’s position vis a vis civil society, international donors, state governments and other central government bureaucracies.[12] Clearly, global health is not without politics and power struggles even amongst key decision-making organisations: counter-narratives within the official narratives.
This line of argument takes inspiration from a similar earlier shift in development studies. Drawing theoretical roots from subaltern studies and Marxist theory more broadly, James Ferguson, Arturo Escobar, Tim Mitchell and James Scott pioneered seminal works in critical development studies throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This trend emerged in light of the failures of grand interventions by World Bank, USAID and other development agencies, exemplified by Narmada Bachao Andolan (India) and other civil society movements resisting community displacement in development projects. This has led to a new generation of economic thought that focuses on poverty elimination as a core aspect of development, as put forth by Amartya Sen, Mahbub ul Haq and 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics award-winning research team Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.[13] Building on this new conception of development economics, the UN has prioritised holistic measurements of human development, such as the Human Development Report, the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Is it then useful now to adopt a counter to the counter-narrative? We tend to mete out justice in our current output based on our perceptions of historical wrongs. But is cycling back and forth between these two types of stories the only path?
Conceptualising ‘the Global’ beyond the Counter-narrative
This is fundamentally a question about who is being centred in narratives about the global. I argue that our challenge is to think how we can conceptualise global health in a way that does not ignore or deny the validity of either of these perspectives. Rather, we seek a broader story that contextualises the scale of each of these stories towards an enveloping narrative about who we were and continue to be as a postwar international community and define a humane and sustainable path towards where we are going. How can we work towards an encompassing understanding of the ‘global’ in global health that gives due diligence and listens to the concerns of both the official narratives and the counternarratives? I propose an approach in three steps.
First, we begin from the understanding of global health is fundamentally a matter of principle, of inalienable human rights, dignity and social justice. In an increasingly interconnected world, we must work from the universal premise established at the end of the Second World War that there is an ethical and normative imperative behind caring about the welfare of those less fortunate than ourselves, whether by historical economic extraction, natural disaster or economic crisis. This means ensuring global health in principle does not become a shorthand for high income countries being charitable to low-income countries. Global health should be about addressing health and health inequalities locally and beyond our borders (the latter based on justifications of justice, not charity: we have profited from oppressing others, and continue to do so, therefore have a justice-based reason to attend their poor health). For example, one of the unique aspects of global health is its acknowledgment of civil society voices and action in policymaking.[14]
Following this, second, it is important to have mechanisms to interrogate what has not changed in global health, particularly when it reproduces colonial power structures. We must call out when donor governments, international organisations and aid recipient nations prioritise military or economic goals over health, regardless of borders, and critique the cases wherein ill health is seen as barrier to development, but underdevelopment is not seen as a cause of ill health. Thus, we must closely track the current aims and practices of global health to ensure they do not exacerbate or create health inequalities and vulnerabilities and perpetuate structural injustice in the global world order. This means understanding the processes behind how global health priorities are set, such as new types of metrics, global burden of disease, statistical manipulations. We must similarly contrast this with what global health implementers declare as their priority, through following the funding and interrogating the agendas of donors.
However, we need to similarly develop mechanisms for interrogating corruption in NGO and community-based sectors, and bring to light cases when even more marginalised and local voices are not heard. Here lie several uncomfortable questions that are rarely asked in global health: when and how do we balance our questioning of the motives of funders, decision-makers and agenda-setters in the Global North; the intentions of powerful developing country governments with clear agendas to achieve development by any means possible, no matter how coercive or exploitative; and the moments when civil society NGOs are not infallible, suffering corruption scandals and failing to represent the people they say they speak for?
Finally, bearing all the above, we must have a way to question of what is new and different about the global in global health. It is appropriate to begin to develop a language and a tone to talk about what has changed and what successes, even with qualification and conditions, were achieved. We cannot un-qualifyingly accept the celebratory narratives of global health implementers. But neither can we rest in the space of critique, scepticism and doubt, which may result in undoing the real successes that were achieved through many individuals’ efforts. By virtue of there being so much critique indicates a lively rather than stagnant field wherein the various futures of global health and the international community are being imagined. Something then can be made of this critique by respectfully bringing together all of these views in a contextualised forum.
A distinct example is the global AIDS response, wherein by the 1980s, international health, development and drug control agencies were forced to confront their postwar failures. To resolve this, so many ideas and arguments about social and economic development, human rights, addiction and criminality and most importantly, the appropriate place of government, civil society, donor and corporate in a new political economy were worked through their connections to a disease like AIDS in the 1980s. In other words, it is as much interesting and important to interrogate when global health isn’t neo-colonial, as when it is. Otherwise, we cannot capture change and chart a way forward to see ‘beyond the global’.
This move away from the counter-narrative, not rejecting but encompassing it, has already begun. From the mid-2000s, there have been voices in development studies, postmodern theory and neoliberal governmentality questioning whether in response to understanding the underside of development, a wholesale rejection was warranted. It began in the development field. Stuart Corbridge et. al. in Seeing the State argued, in contrast to James Scott’s authoritarian high modernism or Partha Chatterjee’s civil and political society, that people are actively being brought into politics to participate in and facilitate their own economic advancement.[15] Aihwa Ong’s Neoliberalism as Exception and Aradhana Sharma’s Logics of Empowerment highlighted this duality of contemporary governments, which apply to many countries other than India. At the same time that the state is exercising its military power to curb insurgency and other political groups that challenge its authority, it is also reconfiguring its relationship and the language with which it communicates to the rural poor by more actively initiating welfare programmes, albeit in ways that are designed to produce independent individuals that can self-generate economic activity over twentieth-century cash and goods handovers.[16] It is also more actively and single-mindedly encouraging domestic industries to prime them for international competition, as China and India have demonstrated in recent years. What new political economy within a global community is being envisioned in this duality, and how are various stakeholders actively creating this?
Development economists Banerjee and Duflo released a seminal paper in 2010 on the actual effects of increasing financial access in rural communities through applying Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank in Hyderabad, India and the real dangers of corruption in over-speculative lending.[17] This paper was historic because the data was gathered amidst the Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis of 2010, wherein over fifty debtors committed suicide as they could not meet their debt obligations to microfinance lenders. At stake in their paper was whether the field was ready to question the post-developmental alternatives to traditional government, banking or donor funding of development projects, such as microfinance.
In development studies outside India, James Ferguson whose work The Anti-Politics Machine pioneered post-development theory, revisited his own arguments in ‘The Uses of Neoliberalism’ due to what he felt was increasingly alarmist scholarship that argued neoliberalism meant any case wherein ‘the rich are benefiting and the poor are getting screwed’.[18] Instead, Ferguson challenged scholars to question how the arts of government were changing as a result of new global health stakeholders active in social sectors for health, education and sanitation that were previously the remit of the twentieth-century social welfare state. We are also starting to think of development as global history, evidenced by David Engerman’s recent The Price of Aid that for the first time in a single monograph drew equally from Indian, American and Russian archives to show how Indian elites bandied US and USSR bilateral aid to achieve their own individual visions for a modern India outside of Nehru’s rigid developmental state.[19]
More broadly in cultural theory and science studies, Bruno Latour’s ‘Why has Critique Run out of Steam?’ has warned that ‘there is no greater intellectual crime than to address with the equipment of an older period the challenges of the present one.’[20]Factfulness, the recent best-selling popular non-fiction book in economy policy and development by Hans Rosling, Ola Roslin and Anna Rosling Ronnlund argues that progress must be seen in context rather than in a vacuum.[21]
In political theory and history of political thought, Locke scholar Timothy Stanton investigates the careers of liberalism origin narratives throughout the Western world in the twentieth-century to demonstrate how unstable the narratives we tell about our own social progress can be: ‘A well-told story has the ability to transform the way we understand ourselves and the world in which we live, shaping it into significance after its own fashion and interpreting it to us authoritatively. We take our bearings from it. It explains, for good or ill, how we came to live and think as we do.’[22] In critical global health also, there is a move away from broad and unspecific binary power dynamics of ‘Global North’ preying on ‘Global South’.[23] Manjari Mahajan has recently argued that philanthropic actors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while perceived to be overwhelmingly powerful, are more often than not forced to work collaboratively in countries with powerful central governments such as India.[24]
There are signs in the actual practice of global health as well that new ways of doing things, resolving past conflict and finding common ground between government, for-profit and voluntary sectors to achieve universal goals are being trialled. For example, the UN-backed Medicines Patents Pool was created in 2010 as a space to reward and incentivize the different roles that patented and generic pharmaceuticals play towards the aim of ensuring access to medicines for all. Another example is the joint NGO-government hospital model in delivering opioid substitution therapy trialled in India, to account for the lack of healthcare centres but also ensure quality of care. Finally, in January 2002, the Indian National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) supported a workshop titled ‘Societal Concerns and Strategies for AIDS Control in India’ with various civil society actors in academia and the voluntary sector that had been quite critical of the government’s actions in the AIDS response, particularly what they perceived as NACO’s willingness to give in to donor demands. Is it significant that in the early 2000s, a public forum was hosted by an Indian government agency on a serious national issue like HIV/AIDS that brought together such opposing parties? What does it say about the futures of political participation and neoliberal governmentality being realised through global health? Whether these are sustainable and will lead to actual results is still unclear, but we argue they should be taken seriously and given proper due by those observing global health and invested in its success.
Methods: Research in Practice
How then do we embed in our research practices this perspective of going beyond the counter-narrative in conceptualising the global? What do we consider data and evidence when we study a contemporary phenomenon like global health? Lukas Engelmann recently used visual history creatively to raise a critical question we must eventually confront about what we do with the ‘fading’ and forgotten images that document certainty being constructed in an unprecedented global health crisis.[25] By focusing on anxiety and knowledge insecurity ingrained in documents that did not result in ground-breaking policy change, Mapping AIDS conceptualises time and historical significance differently in this innovative narrative of global health.
Thus, a key consideration is the types of data practices we use to inform our conclusions. Are we instinctively looking for power imbalances and hero-victim stories, or are we keeping our minds open for more complex stories of multiple power struggles in an interlocking tapestry? The main types of data employed in critically engaged global health scholarship are official policy documents, archival grey literature and interviews/observation. While at first glance, archival documents appear to simply validate the ‘official’ outward-facing institutional narratives, upon closer inspection, they tell rich stories of diverse conflicts between disciplinary training, seniority hierarchies and even individual personality differences that show how global health policy is formed as much through compromise within an institution. When cross-examined alongside the archives of other international agencies, even richer stories emerge. For example, histories of global health have so far told the stories of WHO and World Bank’s postwar activities in isolation. However, by focusing on their interactions during the economic turbulence and emerging AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s, we can see that their relationship was complex and interdependent: both were equally unsure about what the economic crisis meant for their postwar mandates in health and development and carried this insecurity directly into their first encounters with AIDS.
In more social scientific research on global health, interviews are used in a variety ways. Oral history interviews, as used for example by health policy historian Virginia Berridge in the early years of the UK AIDS epidemic, seek to capture or reconstruct a narrative according to the historical actors involved: contemporary historians believe collating all of the realities as seen and re-told by historical actors leads to the most representative narrative.[26]
On the other hand, medical anthropologists use interviews in a very different way, combined with observation in fieldwork. I have not yet fully developed a stance on this discipline, as I’m still not sure how I engage with anthropologies of global health as a contemporary historian. Where am I situated vis a vis this discipline, which tends to adopt and advocate for those they perceive to be the ‘victims’ – especially when I am not sure that in the stories I feel need to be told, any historical actor is so disempowered to be a victim?
Why Does Global Health Matter Now?
We have just entered the second decade of the new millennium. A key theme of this new era will be determining the meaning of ‘global’. On the one hand, we see the rise of conservatism and a turning-inward for many countries. This is evidenced by the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Brexit and the UK’s decision to leave the EU, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the question of democracy in China’s crackdowns on political protest and Japan’s increasing self-questioning of its place in the international economic/geopolitical order: a model, follower or outlier? At stake is the identity and shape of the post-twentieth-century nation: as democratic, as rights-based and as the best vehicle for delivering and efficiently re-distributing economic wealth and stimulating the flow of capital to allow for new growth driven by the next generation.
What is less talked about however is that new ideas about ‘the global’ are constantly emerging, reframing how we create, measure and exchange value within and between nations, with or without the authority of a national government, a mega-corporation or a union. Post-war accepted common-sense about lifetime employment and redistribution of wealth accumulated across generations are in constant untraceable flux, as new pockets of extreme wealth and poverty emerge and dissipate faster than ever. For-profit corporations as the machines behind postwar national wealth are tested in every generation, either fading away due to pointless competition and lack of foresight or evolving and enduring in new ways. Economic stagnation and rot are far more visible and easier to avoid in a digital era: not only are institutional entities like governments and corporations liable, we are now all accountable as self-governing and value-producing machines.
Neoliberal governmentality has changed how the state performs its duties and communicates with its citizens, which publics and communities are being ‘imagined’ and the place of popular politics in irreversible globalisation. Digital technologies such as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are in their early stages. While they are still an unregulated frontier capitalised by those seeking quick gains, they are also seen as a stable and trustworthy system for those fatigued by the over speculation in traditional banking backed by fiat currencies, leading to the formation of new economic microcommunities based on the social contract of digital transparency. Ideas about aging, retirement, death and a fulfilled life in an era of extended lifespans are being worked through in not just developed but also emerging economies, and are part and parcel with broader concerns of sustainability over growth. As individuals, we are constantly confronted with new frontiers of technology and an increasingly diverse digital economy of human creativity. We feel lonelier than ever, but we also know we can connect more easily if we choose to invest. In an increasingly diversified economy, we need each other less, thus redefining the core of how and why people connect.
In the international economic order, we have steadily seen a levelling as the postwar leadership of United States enters a slow decline. Moreover, there is an increasingly evidence split between the two types of developed economies, each exploring a sustainable economic model for their own ‘post-industrial futures’. The Western service economies seek to apply emerging software technologies to resolve (and simultaneously disrupt) existing 20th century businesses regarding efficiency and quality of service, exemplified by Uber (taxi), Amazon (mail delivery) and AirBnB (hotels). Here, digital entrepreneurship is seen as the centre of this new future, as Silicon Valley (and the entertainment stories being told about it) evidence.
On the other hand, different futures are propelled by Japan in the East Asian trajectory of development, which still holds the twentieth-century state as the basis, though this is slowly changing as society evolves. Creative applications of the hard industries that were the engines of post-war reconstruction (sound systems, visual technologies and computer hardware) are being explored, most evident in the rapid maturation and diversification of the gaming industry. Gaming, which interestingly has almost the exact same lifespan as global health (it was in the same year 1987 that WHO and World Bank confronted global AIDS that Super Mario Bros. was released on the Nintendo Entertainment System), has now replaced traditional film and television in terms of revenue at almost 200 billion USD. More important are the types of stories and futures this industry wants to imagine, maximising its hardware tools: overcoming struggle (ie: Dark Souls), the implications of layering multiple endings into a single narrative (Nier Automata), and human connection and reliance (ie: Death Stranding), in ways that could only be told in digital interactive media.
Meanwhile, we similarly see the steady rise of China, India, Brazil, Thailand and other middle-income nations with sizable industries, whether driven by techno neo-mercantilism or genuine grassroots entrepreneurialship. India’s pharmaceutical sector and its role in global health is an excellent example of this duality. When Western patented pharmaceutical companies failed to expand their product outside of the developed countries that had early AIDS experiences, unable to resolve manufacturing and supply issues combined with fear of competition, Indian generics company Cipla announced ART at half price in 2000. Now, Indian generics underpin many countries’ public health systems, even the ultra-capitalist United States, thus allowing them to continue to make ideological arguments about state socialism. Is this an emerging Indian humanitarianism and development aid or a government-protected industry since the 1970s maturing and entering international markets? Or maybe it is both?
Put simply, there are diminishing returns to framing this new world in simple binaries of ‘official narratives’ and ‘counter-narratives’. Both the celebratory stories and the dire tones of ‘conspiracy theory’, while still important, do not answer all questions.
Conclusion
Conceptual thinking of what ‘beyond global’ means experimenting with new narratives that can hold together in one story multiple power tensions within diverse networks: ensemble casts over the hero’s journey. This is my current conceptual stance on the ‘global’ in global health: a storytelling paradigm that goes ‘beyond the counternarrative’ to make sense of an exciting, dangerous yet hopeful world.
**The image is from the UK Charity National AIDS Trust's Advertisement for World AIDS Day (1 December) 1994. Accessed via Wellcome Trust: Wellcome Library no. 666548i https://search.wellcomelibrary.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1666548?lang=eng
[1] Paul H. Mason, Ian Kerridge and Wendy Lipworth, ‘The Global in Global Health is Not a Given’, American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 96, 4 (2017), 767-769. [2] Sebastian Taylor, ‘”Global health”: meaning what?’, BMJ Global Health, 3, 2 (2018), 1-4. [3] Reiko Kanazawa, ‘Disease in a Debt Crisis: Financing Global Health, Development and AIDS between WHO and World Bank, 1978-87’, Medical History, 64(3) (2020), 303-24. [4] Kavita Misra, ‘Politico-moral Transactions in Indian AIDS Service: Confidentiality, Rights and New Modalities of Governance’, Anthropological Quarterly, 79, 1 (2006), 46. [5] Sarah Hodges, ‘The Global Menace’, Social History of Medicine (2011), 719-28. [6] Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, Arthur Kleinman and Matthew Basilico (eds.), Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Vincanne Adams and Stacey Leigh Pigg (eds.), Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Salla Sariolla, ‘Performing Global HIV Prevention: Incentives, Identities and Inequality amongst Sex Workers in Chennai’, Journal of South Asian Development, 4, 1 (2009), 65-81. [7] Cecilia Van Hollen, Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction and HIV/AIDS in India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). [8] Lawrence Cohen, ‘The Kothi Wars: AIDS Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification’ in Vincanne Adams and Stacey Leigh Pigg (eds.), Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 269-304. [9] Mohan Rao (ed), Disinvesting in Health: The World Bank’s Prescriptions for Health (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999); Imrana Qadeer, Kasturi Sen and K. R. Nayar (eds.), Public Health and the Poverty of Reforms: The South Asian Predicament (London and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001). [10] A big issue in India was the halving of national epidemiological estimates, which NACO used India-tailored data gathering methods to challenge UNAIDS’ statistics. James Chin, The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness (Radcliffe Publishing, 2007). [11] Elizabeth Pisani, The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS (Granta, 2008). [12] Sujatha Rao, Do We Care? India’s Health System (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). [13] Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times (Allen Lane, 2019). [14] Jennifer Chan, Politics in the Corridor of Dying: AIDS Activism and Global Health Governance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). [15] Corbridge et. al. also highlight that development agencies such as World Bank and DFID do not wish to overstep the Indian government, but try to play an active role in encouraging this. Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Srivastava et. al., Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). [16] Aradhana Sharma, Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). [17] Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, Cynthia Kinnan, ‘The miracle of microfinance? Evidence from a randomized evaluation’, MIT Papers, (2014). <https://economics.mit.edu/files/5993>. [18] James Ferguson, ‘The Uses of Neoliberalism’, Antipode, 41, 1 (2009), 166-84. Other similar works are: Catherine Kingfisher and Jeff Maskovsky, ‘Introduction: The Limits of Neoliberalism’, Critique of Anthropology, 28, 2 (2008), 115-26; Sean Phelan, ‘Review Article: Messy Grand Narrative or Analytical Blind Spot? When Speaking of Neoliberalism’, Comparative European Politics, 5 (2007), 328-38. [19] David Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). [20] Bruno Latour, ‘Why has Critique run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 231. [21] Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund, Factfulness: Why Things are Better than You Think (Flatiron Books, 2018). [22] Timothy Stanton, ‘John Locke and the Fable of Liberalism’, The Historical Journal, 61, 3 (2018), 597-622. [23] Kirsten Bell and Judith Green, ‘On the Perils of Invoking Neoliberalism in Public health Critique’, Critical Public Health, 26, 3 (2016), 239-43; Ted Schrecker, ‘”Neoliberal epidemics” Public Health: Sometimes the World is Less Complicated than it Appears’, Critical Public Health, 26, 5 (2016), 477-80. [24] Manjari Mahajan, ‘Philanthropy and the Nation-State in Global Health: The Gates Foundation in India’, Global Public Health, 13, 10 (2018), 1357-68. [25] Lukas Engelmann, Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). [26] Virginia Berridge, AIDS in the UK: The Making of Policy, 1981-1994 (Oxford University Press, 1996).