![]() | Mara Pillinger |
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01.02.2019-29.03.2019
To R&D or Not to R&D: Partnership Priorities for Neglected and Pandemic Disease Control
Mara is a PhD candidate in Political Science/International Relations at George Washington University. Her research focuses on global health governance. While at Brocher, she is working on a project that looks at the power dynamics behind organizational reform in major global health partnerships, with case studies of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and Roll Back Malaria. She hold an MA in Political Science from GW; an MSc in Global Governance & Diplomacy from Oxford University, where I was a Clarendon Scholar; an MPH from the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University (fields: global health, epidemiology); and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation investigates why multisectoral partnerships (MSPs) undergo repeated rounds of organizational restructuring, despite the fact that such efforts are costly and produce, at best, mixed results. She argues that restructuring is an exercise in organizational hypocrisy and ritual behavior which allows partners to cope with their ambivalence/ambiguity over the organization’s role and purpose. More specifically, there is a fundamental contradiction between the kinds of outputs and results that partners expect from the MSP and the kinds of inputs and resources they are willing to contribute to it. Restructuring lets partners take action and (ostensibly) attempt to make the organization “fit for purpose” without having to confront that contradiction. This behavior can undermine MSP stability and potentially lead to organizational collapse. These findings have important policy implications. Over the past 25 years, policymakers, particularly powerful donors, have shown a preference for working through MSPs rather than the UN system, which they consider “dysfunctional”. Her research suggests that partnerships, as an organizational form, come with their own forms of dysfunction and that, in the long run, they may actually be less stable than traditional intergovernmental organizations. Her findings are based, in part, on in-depth case studies of three episodes of restructuring across two partnerships: the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 2013, and Roll Back Malaria in 2006 and 2015.