Unequal ecosystems of global health authorial expertise: Decolonising noncommunicable disease

Clare Herrick; Oritsematosan Okpako; James D A Millington

doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102670

Unequal ecosystems of global health authorial expertise: Decolonising noncommunicable disease

Health Place. 2021 Sep:71:102670. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102670. Epub 2021 Sep 17.

Authors

Clare Herrick¹, Oritsematosan Okpako², James D A Millington³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Geography King's College London, Bush House NE Wing 6.07, London, WC2R 2LS, UK. Electronic address: clare.herrick@kcl.ac.uk.
² London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT, UK. Electronic address: Oritsematosan.Okpako1@student.lshtm.ac.uk.
³ Department of Geography King's College London, Bush House NE Wing 6.07, London, WC2R 2LS, UK.

PMID: 34543840
DOI: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102670

Abstract

The decolonisation agenda is gathering momentum in global health. Within this movement, one domain of analysis has been the ways in which the geographies of scholarly knowledge production (re)produce the inequities of coloniality. Drawing on the example of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), here we deviate from this and instead examine the authorship of the key global documents that were used to ignite and mobilise the NCD advocacy agenda from 2000 to 2020. In doing so, we reflect on the changing ecosystems of authorial expertise. It shows that while the geographic distribution of expertise has broadened over time, the NCD domain remains a fairly tight and circumscribed network. Importantly this research also shows the complexities of ascribing location to expertise, a finding that speaks back to the decolonisation debate.

Keywords: Authorship; Decolonisation; Ecosystem; Global health; Noncommunicable disease.

MeSH terms

Ecosystem
Global Health
Humans
Noncommunicable Diseases*