Global Governance of Health and Sovereignty: An Agenda for Reforms

The world has been plagued by pandemics earlier leading to the evolution of several mechanisms and institutional structures for controlling the spread of pandemics. Creation of the World Health Organization was a development emerging from the efforts to control the spread of diseases and it was charged with the mandate of governance of health at a global level. The spread of Covid-19, however, shows that the present structure of the governance of global health is ill-suited to the task. The paper discusses the present architecture of the global he alth governance. It discusses the impact of the concept of Westphalian sovereignty on this global health architecture and advances the suggestion that the global health governance architecture should be based on the principle of the duty to cooperate rather than atte mpts to modify the Westphalian sovereignty that forms the basis of international relations with the opt-out mode of ratification of treaties.