Research-Cluster-Led Initiatives and the Reconfiguration of Global Health Governance

• In Event: Putting Sociology to Work for a More Equitable Global Health

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, stark disparities in vaccine access have revealed entrenched global hierarchies in science, innovation, healthcare, and essential medicines, disproportionately affecting countries in the Global South. These dynamics highlight the urgent need for “pharmaceutical autonomy” to reduce reliance on a small number of multinational firms and promote more equitable distribution. Yet vaccine production remains highly concentrated, and market and political incentives often discourage investment in manufacturing, leaving critical gaps in global capacity.

Using four UK government-funded vaccine manufacturing research clusters as a case study, this paper demonstrates that such clusters constitute a distinctive form of global health governance, filling gaps where state capacity and market incentives are limited. Drawing on emerging scholarship bridging the sociology of development, organizational sociology, and the sociology of professions, we show that academically led research networks function as epistemic arbiters: they provide essential technology transfer to partners in the Global South, absorb risk, identify structural bottlenecks, and advance pharmaceutical autonomy.

Based on fieldwork conducted in Indonesia and Thailand, the paper further expands conventional definitions of vaccine development by showing how meso-level organizational arrangements can generate macro-level effects on global health governance. In doing so, it highlights the role of research clusters as hybrid, transnational networks that both reorganize expertise and reshape the production and governance of vaccines in a global context.

Author

• Su Yeone Jeon, University of York