WS 16a - The Sustainable Development Goals

The SDGs do a remarkable job of illustrating, for a global lay audience, how health is both a product and a determinant of all other global public goods. As the defining development compact of the next 13 years, the SDGs thus provide a timely and powerful window-of-opportunity for health. Ideally, health stakeholders around the world should be empowered by the SDGs, to successfully demand greater political commitment and cross-sectoral policy coherence for health.

This makes sense in theory, but what is the reality? What impact are the SDGs actually having on health on the ground? Representatives of policy research institutions in Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe will describe the political and governance dimensions of SDG roll-out in their countries, with an analysis of what this means for health. This lunchtime panel gives a taste of the contents of a "Global Health Governance" journal special issue on these topics, which will be officially launched at WHS Berlin 2017.