What Regulators Can Learn from Global Health Governance

The Great Pandemic of 2020 shows how much public health around the world depends on effective global and domestic governance. Yet for too long, global health governance and domestic regulatory governance have remained largely separate fields of scholarship and practice. In her book, Global Health Justice and Governance, Jennifer Prah Ruger offers scholars and practitioners of regulatory governance an excellent opportunity to see how domestic regulation shares many of the same problems, strategies, and challenges as global health governance. These commonalities reinforce how much national and subnational regulators can learn from global health governance. Drawing on insights from Prah Ruger’s impressive book, I offer seven lessons for domestic regulators around the world to use to improve their performance, arguing that it is vital for regulators to see themselves as operating in a larger social environment in which they must remain agile, vigilant, and responsive to other actors and to changing circumstances.