Integrating health into a global citizens’ assembly: design considerations and infrastructure options
Authors: Johnny Stormonth-Darling & Canning Malkin (Iswe Foundation), Alexandra Parsons (Wellcome Trust)
Summary:
A permanent global citizens’ assembly (GCA) that is influential at the multilateral level will take the world into a new governance regime. It will reframe how nations, communities and every actor in between collaborate to address our collective challenges. Our personal and collective health circumstances are among the most visceral ways in which we relate to the complex global systems that a GCA will be wrestling with. This makes them a potent source of personal stories and essential context that can animate cold, hard statistics and produce better informed, collective priorities that can rebalance top-down power structures. Health also provides key metrics through which to engage other planet-scale challenges, ensuring that these agendas never stray too far from people’s lived reality and reminding us that health outcomes are inseparable from the large-scale policy levers that the GCA will seek to influence.
This paper explores how health could and should fit into a permanent GCA and how a health-literate GCA can amplify the voices of people who have experienced marginalisation in existing governance spaces. It shows how this can work to tackle persistent inequities while improving the prospects of everyone, in terms of health metrics and beyond them. And it provides practical suggestions for the infrastructure we need and purposeful motivations for why we need it. A GCA offers a healthier politics for a healthier planet in which the people’s health is foundational, both as a driver and an outcome. Designing the infrastructure to support this virtuous circle begins in the pages ahead.