Cognitive Communities And Regional Public Health Governance

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has once again brought the issues of global and regional public health governance to the focus of academic attention.This dissertation attempts to identify the role of epistemic community in regional public health governance by tracing the collaborative governance on cross-border infectious diseases in the Greater Mekong sub-region.The author reviews the existing literature on public health and international relations,and points out that the analytical frameworks of global public health governance,health diplomacy,securitization theory,and institutionalism have a certain explanatory power,but also shortcomings,especially neglecting the important role of non-state actors in regional public health cooperation.This dissertation then puts forward a theoretical framework on how the epistemic community promotes collaborative governance among regional countries.This study assumes that the epistemic community is a group of experts who gather based on recognized professional knowledge and skills.Through the participation and interaction of members on certain issues,the group has created its unique identity and interests,followed common norms and took concerted action to achieve specific goals.The epistemic community can influence the decision-making process through four mechanisms,including developing causal frameworks that generates new cognitive structures or policy references,acting as a “filtering” mechanism,providing validity and legitimacy for decision-making,and proposing alternative plans and paths.In addition,the epistemic community is not only a producer of knowledge,but also a practitioner of knowledge,implementing policies at the international,national,and local levels,so that they can quickly perceive whether the relevant policies are effective,and then propose new knowledge or policy recommendations.This makes the production of knowledge and the formulation of policies always in a dynamic interaction,realizing the continuous development of collaborative governance mechanisms.This study uses the Greater Mekong Sub-regional Cross-border Infectious Disease Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism as a case to test the above hypothesis.It is found that,driven by the public health epistemic community of the Greater Mekong sub-region,the joint prevention and control mechanism has been established and developed gradually.It has developed from the cross-border malaria control project between China and Myanmar to a collaborative governance mechanism covering multiple diseases and involving all region countries and being accepted by other regional cooperation frameworks.This study refutes the view that the epistemic community has little role in East Asian regional cooperation,and points out that the epistemic community in the context of East Asia has the dual attributes of knowledge producers and practitioners,which is also helpful for us to understand the East Asian cooperation in other issue areas.Moreover,a large number of interviews and field investigations conducted in this project are also valuable materials accumulated for future interdisciplinary research on international relations and public health.