Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 06 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

The financial power of philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has raised questions about the intersection of philanthropy and global health. This chapter examines how and whether philanthropy has an effect on the global health agenda. It begins by defining philanthropy and exploring how philanthropy operates in international relations, philanthropy’s historical role in global politics, and its relationship to larger power dynamics. The second section identifies key global health philanthropic actors and their roles in global health governance. The third section describes the potential positive roles that philanthropic organizations can play in global health, bringing new ideas and additional resources. The final section critiques the relationship between philanthropy and global health, paying particular attention to how financial clout could distort the global health agenda and whether philanthropy covers up larger structural imbalances that give rise to health problems.

Keywords: philanthropy, global health, resources, power, international relations, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Jeremy Youde

Jeremy Youde, University of Minnesota, Duluth

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.