Understanding global security - Peter Hough

HEALTH THREATS TO SECURITY
Box 7.1 Gro Harlem Brundtland
Few individuals can have had the influence over such a range of international political
issues as three times Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The daughter
of a doctor-turned-politician, in the early 1970s Brundtand followed in her father’s
footsteps by swapping the physician’s coat for a political career. A socialist, though
married to a conservative politician, she quickly entered government as environmental
minister from 1974 to 1979.
A decade later, Brundtland’s credentials as an environmentalist saw her appointed
as chair of the UN-sponsored World Commission on the Environment and
Development (WCED) charged with the task of advancing global environmental policy.
The commission helped forge the concept of sustainable development, which became
the guiding ethos of future global policy, finding expression at the landmark 1992
UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) at Rio de Janeiro.
Sustainable development not only put the environment firmly on the international
political map, but revamped thinking and policy on global poverty. In recognition of
her contribution to this, Brundtland was awarded the Third World Foundation Prize
in 1988.
Brundtland’s role on the WCED coincided with her second term as Norwegian
head of government, heading the most female cabinet in history, having been the
country’s first woman prime minister in her first stint. After a third spell as premier in
the 1990s, she returned to her roots in public health in becoming elected as Secretary-
General of the WHO in 1998. A popular leader, she has done much to restore the
vibrancy and credibility of a position and organization that had been much criticized
under her predecessor and has overseen an unprecedented global fundraising effort
to help fight disease. One of Brundtland’s many reforms on taking up her position at
the WHO was to increase the number and prominence of women in managerial
positions at the institution. Hence, at the turn of the millennium, the work of Gro
Harlem Brundtland had left a clear mark on four major international political issues:
environmental change, economic development, public health and the role of women.
to a purely technical advisory role to global financial institutions that carry the real
influence in terms of health security. The history of the WHO can be characterized
by periodic shifts in overall strategy towards achieving its specified aim of the
‘attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health’. The strategy of the
WHO in its early years can be characterized as vertical in that the emphasis of its work
was targeting specific diseases for eradication campaigns. At this stage the role of
WHO was essentially non-political since its approach of applying technical fixes to
problems was universally accepted as effective and appropriate. However, once it
became evident that insect and microbe resistance to antibiotics and pesticides made
combating the spread of disease more complicated than had at first been anticipated,
‘horizontal’ strategies for achieving global health security came to be advocated in
opposition to the ‘vertical’ orthodoxy and the whole issue became politicized.
Horizontal strategies favour tackling underlying problems that exacerbate the effects
of disease as the best means of advancing global health and this became characteristic
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