The One Health approach is increasingly invoked as a solution-oriented agenda in addressing contemporary, complex, interrelated public health crises. The One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) is a response by the Quadripartite Organizations (FAO, UNEP, WOAH and WHO) to prevent future pandemics. The French presidency and a multistakeholder group of actors have recently launched a One Health & Beyond initiative that integrates climate-health policy aspects with One Health Goals. The One Health principle is also at the heart of the EU’s Global Health Resilience Initiative, embedding it into the European external agenda and shifting its focus to ‘deep prevention’ – the ability to identify and address environmental threats before pathogens cross from animals to humans. The post-World War II constitution of the WHO has envisioned health as a fundamental human right. This is a far cry from the biosecurity and economic approach that drives the One Health approach on the contemporary diplomatic agenda, 80 years later.
Historical and contemporary tensions exist between comprehensive, globalist One Health policies and nationalist-statist (bio)security approaches. This tension appears to be a constant in the governance of infectious disease control. In a recent chapter in an edited volume on One Health, Ecology, and the Politics of Emerging Infectious Disease, I have unpacked the different types of power dynamics in One Health Networks (OHN) and their governance. It feeds a policy dialogue on why some framing and approaches are dominant, and why others remain relatively neglected. The analysis builds on Suerie Moon’s framework on 8 typologies of power expressed in Global Governance of Health (2019).
In an overview, the different types of power in OHN can be illustrated as follows:
| Type of Power | Examples of actors wielding such power | One Health related examples of such power |
| Physical | Military, Public Health Authorities, Judiciary | Market closure, Culling of poultry and livestock |
| Economic | Governments, Pharma companies, Agro-industry | Trade restrictions, Intellectual Property, Lobbies |
| Structural | State, Political and business leaders | Political decisions on investments, industry access |
| Institutional | Multilateral bodies, regulatory authorities | AMR Regulations, WHO Pandemic Agreement |
| Moral | NGOs. Religious leaders, Media | Integrative, rights-based, One Health strategies |
| Expertise | Academia, Expert bodies | OHHLEP, Lancet One Health Commission |
| Discursive | Media, activists, Scientists | Berlin One Health Principles, health security frame |
| Network | Networked individuals and institutions of above | US Global Health Security Partnership |
Power dynamics in One Health Networks
My analysis follows Moon’s typologies of power in global health governance and questions the transformative potential of contemporary One Health Policies. This analysis reveals that different forms of power dynamics, while interrelated, are more dominant than others. For instance, the expert claim of One Health, and its academic evidence base, expressed via the One Health High-Level Expert Panel and the expansion of scientific One Health centres, is considerable. Many of these centres are dominated by a biomedical scientific discourse and include only limited representation of environmental and earth-system disciplines, not to mention social and political science expertise. Related discursive, network, and institutional powers then reinforce such an epistemic project. While there are several One Health initiatives and networks outside Europe and the U.S., these are often backed by funding from high-income countries, hence setting agendas and directions. These economic interests are often expressed via public-private partnerships and embedded in initiatives that are risk-mitigating, rooted in blended finance mechanisms and principles of cost-effectiveness and return on investment. This leads to targeted, specific interventions, e.g., for surveillance, diagnostic, and treatment options. Given the One Health focus on biomedical interventions, the governance and political economy of the Intellectual-Property regimes of these so-called ‘medical countermeasures’ require close attention. The benefits and profits following from these interventions may be influenced by commercial and private interests, and their distribution is very unequal.
Interestingly, the moral power of the One Health argument seems less often used, especially in comparison with Global Health actors, where human rights-based approaches, health equity, and the determinants of health are more prominently invoked as arguments for action and cooperation. While ecological and biodiversity concerns are more frequently incorporated in One Health advocacy and policies, and despite some conceptual improvements, the overall One Health approach remains anthropocentric and utilitarian. It primarily aims to mitigate and adapt to the health risks for humans coming from the animal, societal and natural environment. The One Health policies still put humankind as a separate entity from the rest of the living world, rather than integrating it as a vital part of the metabolism of the Earth ecosystem. Moreover, One Health approaches continue to neglect the critical scrutiny of the (capitalist) structures that sustain the artificial rift between humans and the rest of the living and natural world. One health policies largely ignore the need for addressing the enormous global economic inequities and the requirement to at least regulate and de-grow the industrial agrifood and bio-industry, its land investments, and the speculative oligopolies behind it.
A Structural One Health approach
Mwatondo and colleagues suggest three recommendations to make OHN more equitable and inclusive. OHN should:
- Encourage mutual collaboration and cooperation between partners.
- Calibrate and balance economic power to ensure country leadership and ownership of activities; investment in OHN should be driven by local needs and priorities, not by donor priorities.
- Include community actors in their partnership structures and governance arrangements to meaningfully engage with local realities and establish priorities for action.
Moreover, policy actors should strive for a Structural One Health agenda that embeds the principles of agroecology as a pathway toward food sovereignty, hereby joining the calls of peasants, smallholders, Indigenous Peoples, fishers and forest dwellers globally. This paradigm of food production takes a truly ecosystems approach in embedding place-based production systems within political economies centred on human and more-than-human relations rather than on extraction and division. One Health without structural integrity only sustains a status quo of industrial food production systems and biosecurity measures, serving to reinforce rather than transform the current dominant economic and food system.
The structural One Health Orientation was discussed in a panel discussion and side-event at the Global Health Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur in June 2026. Please contact the author via email vandepas@unu.edu for details and follow-up.
This article is reproduced in its original form from The Collective Blog of the Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo. The original blog post was first published on the Centre's website and is available at THIS LINK.
