The Evolution of the Health INGOs Network

• In Event: 156 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Health, Medicine, and Global Networks

Abstract

International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have proliferated rapidly since the end of World War II along with the subsequent rise of global governance institutions. Some view the INGOs as benevolent, or at least good intentioned, actors seeking to ameliorate global inequality; others view the INGOs as usurping local authority over domestic issues and further propagating a global hierarchy. These contrarian views have spurred debates regarding the impact of INGOs, and the research emerging from these debates has begun to examine the structure of the INGO and intergovernmental organization (IGO) networks. Researchers have concluded that the INGO network is become increasingly stratified by examining the networks’ density and countries’ eigenvector centrality. However, the number of countries and number of INGOs has increased over this time period, which makes the density comparisons problematic. We build off of the prior research by focusing on the entire structure of the health INGO network. To do so, we preform an Eigen decomposition of the adjacency matrices from 1960 to 2005. This produces eigenvalues and eigenvectors, which better illuminate the overall structure and changes of the health INGO networks. Taken together, the health INGO networks are becoming increasingly flat such that participation is becoming increasingly equal rather than stratified. These findings have important consequences for our understanding of the evolution of these networks and their potential impacts on health outcomes.

Authors

• Nolan Phillips, University of California at Irvine

• Matthew Pearce, UC Irvine