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Norway’s public-private cooperation for pandemic preparedness (PANPREP)

How did public-private cooperation become central to Norway’s approach to pandemic preparedness and response?

About the project

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought attention to the importance of reliable public-private cooperation in ensuring national and global health security. According to Gro Harlem Brundtland, former director-general of the World Health Organization and former prime minister of Norway, to ensure global equitable access to a vaccine for Covid-19, “we need to embrace the unprecedented scale of partnership between governments, business, international organisations such as the UN and WHO, non-profits, and scientists and researchers.”

Though widely touted as both essential and innovative, the growing reliance on non-state actors creates significant challenges of oversight and introduces a new ethos and interests into global public health efforts.

The PANPREP project aims to discern how such public-private collaboration operates in practice, and the consequences for public trust in the state and its ability to deliver national health and societal security in the face of a major crisis like Covid-19.

The project examines how public-private cooperation became central to Norway’s approach to pandemic preparedness and response both at home and abroad. Through ethnographic and policy research, we study how public authorities and private enterprises collaborate on disease surveillance technologies, medical commodities and emergency medical response.

We will also examine the logics, interests and implications of new financing mechanisms for vaccines and new forms of global cooperation arrangements such as the Norwegian-initiated Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI), which aims to coordinate the development of vaccines against potential pandemics.