Foreign Policy
Global health and other development interventions need to be carefully considered from the foreign policy perspective. Do programs and activities support, or undermine, broader foreign policy goals? How can development programs be better aligned with foreign policy, applying the principles of ‘smart power’ in order to leverage capacity for diplomacy, statecraft, and international relations? This approach represents a valuable new tool for foreign affairs & policy in lieu of ‘hard power’ initiatives.
Global Health & Development
Global health has become an increasingly central part of international development initiatives. Focusing on the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, as well as long-term cross-cutting interventions such as health systems strengthening initiatives, the concept of ‘smart global health’ is representative of the ascendancy of such initiatives on both donor and recipient country foreign policy, political, fiscal, and diplomatic agendas.
Diplomacy
Diplomatic program alignment makes global health programs ‘smart’, or multifariously effective. Such programs have the capacity to generate a range of ‘collateral’, downstream, indirect, or hidden, benefits from the diplomatic perspective. Similarly, programs need to be carefully aligned with principles of diplomacy in order to ensure that international relations goals are represented in intervention design, selection & delivery, through awareness of cultural, religious, & social sensibilities.
Conflict and Post-Conflict Settings
Global health and development programs require an extensive range of adaptations to conflict and post-conflict settings, both to ensure feasibility of service delivery and in order to facilitate contributions to nation-building and peace-keeping activities such as winning ‘hearts & minds’. In this way, diplomatically-designed development programs in settings such as such as South Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan have shown significant value in resolving conflict and contributing to reconciliation processes.
Diplomatic & Foreign Policy Evaluation
For the first time, Diplomatic Health has developed the capacity for donor governments and organizations to undertake “diplomatic” or “foreign policy” evaluations of global health and development programs. The evaluation tool takes into account criteria such as geopolitical location, target population, and nature and focus of the intervention, classifying results as “diplomatically advantageous” or “diplomatic threat” to create an overall score, recommendations, and performance assessment.