Over the last twenty years, available funding for global health and the number of global health actors have both increased exponentially, making it one of the most dynamic and innovative arenas of global governance. This being said, the Millennium Development Goals related to health have largely gone unmet (UN 2013) and health crises such as the recent Ebola outbreak have powerfully underscored the fact that increased number of institutions and funding streams have not translated into sustainable health systems, effective governance, or decisive global health leadership. Indeed, this proliferation of actors and institutions has led to fragmentation, competition, and – in a word – “gridlock” in global health governance.

Gridlock is the tendency to stall in pressing international negotiations and describes the breakdown of the major tools of global policy making. Gridlock decreases the ability of international actors to coordinate effectively at a time when there is increased interdependence and need for collective action to protect global public goods.

This project seeks to operationalise the concept of gridlock to account for the deficiencies in global health governance and to illuminate the potential for reform. It will explore if, and how, the four pathways to gridlock (i.e. growing multipolarity, institutional inertia, harder problems, and fragmentation) can be applied to global health. The research will bridge existing literature gaps and draw on studies conducted on gridlock in other areas of global governance (including security, environment, and the economy). The research team will conduct a comparative analysis to understand not only the pathways to gridlock in global health governance, but more importantly, how to break the gridlock.