Spring 2021 - 60664 - PA 388K - Advanced Topics in Public Policy

The course introduces students to major aspects of global health governance from the perspective of a political scientist. To give you some context, we begin with some historic disease epidemics, the plague, a cholera outbreak in the UK, and the flu epidemic of the early 20th century. We then talk about the origins of public health as a responsibility of the nation-state and the evolution of a wider sense of concern for global health. We then introduce essential concepts related to collective action and public goods and discuss the selective attention to some health issues. The course surveys the landscape of major organizations that deal with global health including international organizations like the World Health Organization and the World Bank, publicprivate partnerships such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, and by private sector actors like the Gates Foundation, the Rotary Club, and the Carter Center. Before the mid-term, we survey the current state of health attainment in the world. After the mid-term, we review historic attempts to deal with transnational health problems in the aftermath of World War II, including the successful eradication of smallpox, near success eradicating polio, partial efforts to address the global AIDS pandemic, halting efforts to address malaria, and the emergence of new threats such as Ebola. The course will also explore the emergent issues associated with non-communicable diseases such as some kinds of cancers, diabetes, and illnesses associated with smoking and obesity. We will also look at related issues of basic health care, including maternal and infant mortality as well as nutrition. We conclude with the challenges to strengthening public health systems and disease prevention and talk about the future of global public health. The goals are to (1) familiarize you with the key debates and issues past, present, and future in global health governance, (2) provide you with a set of analytical tools to understand the scope for progress in this arena, (3) develop your sense of the landscape of organizations and information in this space, and (4) spur your creative engagement with global health issues in your subsequent professional career. Grading and Assignments Grading will be based on a final paper that you submit (40%), a midterm exam (35%), and class participation (25%). For your paper, the idea is for you to take a transborder health problem that continues to persist and write a paper that describes the nature of the problem and evaluating the response to date and prescribes how the problem could be addressed in the future. The paper will be 12-15 pages and be due the Friday after the last day of class. 2 Your overall participation grade will depend equally on three grades: (1) a grounding exercise (2) a writing summary and (3) general participation. For the grounding exercise, I will select a news article or two related to the class session, and you will be asked to lead a class discussion relating the news stories to the class readings. You will also submit a one-page double-spaced paper summarizing linking the news to the class readings. For the writing summary, you will write a two-page double-spaced summary of the readings for a different day. Finally, the third part of your participation grade will depend upon my evaluation both of the frequency of your in-class contributions and their quality. So, do speak up but quantity alone isn’t the goal! All of your work should be original. Please no plagiarism; don’t pass off some author’s work as your own. If you do and I find out, bad news! I will enforce the strongest punishments in the LBJ School's plagiarism policy that I can. Please refer to the official policy for further details. * Late assignments will be penalized by 1/3 of a letter grade for every day late. Thus, an A- would become a B+, a B+ a B, etc. Readings: All readings will be available on Canvas, unless otherwise noted on the syllabus as a URL or through UT LIBRARY. I also encourage you to read current events related to the coursework. I have a Twitter feed that you might find interesting for posts on health. https://twitter.com/busbyj2