Global health partnerships, governance, and sovereign responsibility in western Kenya

Brown, H.

doi:10.1111/amet.12134

Global health partnerships, governance, and sovereign responsibility in western Kenya

Brown, H.

Authors

Professor Hannah Brown hannah.brown@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

The delivery of resources to citizens in the global South is increasingly managed through international partnerships. As systems of plural governance, such arrangements are characterized by alignments, accommodations, and conflicts between partners’ respective interests. This article focuses on partnerships between the Kenyan Ministries of Health and organizations funded by PEPFAR (the President's Fund for AIDS Relief), drawing on fieldwork with Kenyan government health managers. These partnerships were based on a separation between the ability to provide resources and the right to administer them. For Kenyans, partnerships animated a politics of sovereign responsibility in which they often felt a deep sense of managerial disenfranchisement. For their foreign collaborators, partnership relations legitimized the interventions they organized. This politics of sovereign responsibility reconfigured the importance of the state on the basis of its role in delivering resources within global relations of inequality. [global health, PEPFAR, HIV/AIDS, governance, partnership, sovereign responsibility, the state, Kenya]

Citation

Brown, H. (2015). Global health partnerships, governance, and sovereign responsibility in western Kenya. American Ethnologist, 42(2), 340-355. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12134

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Mar 29, 2014
Online Publication Date	Apr 29, 2015
Publication Date	May 1, 2015
Deposit Date	Apr 7, 2014
Publicly Available Date	Nov 13, 2015
Journal	American Ethnologist
Print ISSN	0094-0496
Electronic ISSN	1548-1425
Publisher	Wiley
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	42
Issue	2
Pages	340-355
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12134