Offering new insights into the how the excesses of capitalism shape pandemic preparedness and response, Investable! by Professor Susan Erikson is an ethnography of a financial innovation. While global health crises continue to emerge one after the other, there is a quiet behind-the-scenes churn to turn pandemics and catastrophes into investment opportunities. Global financiers, like the World Bank, are catalyzing new ways to deal with recurring threats to human health. Pandemic bonds, the subject of this book, are emblematic of their cunning capitalist logics. Erikson uses the World Bank’s 2015-2020 pandemic bond fiasco to investigate how global investors were encouraged to think they could solve big-ticket global health concerns by gambling on whether they would happen at all.
The pandemic bonds were designed with investors in mind, not the actual care of sick people. When COVID-19 hit, the 2020 payouts to the world’s poorest countries were paltry, and the structural change promised never materialized. COVID-19 laid bare the pandemic bonds largely empty humanitarian promises.
About the speaker
Professor Susan Erikson studies highly complex political and economic systems that shape human health experiences. She is a medical anthropologist who has worked in Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and North America. During an earlier international affairs career, Prof. Erikson first lived in an eastern Sierra Leonean village for two years before working for and/or with government departments and foreign affairs organizations on foreign policy and trade issues. As an academic, she combines her practical experience with a critical study of global political economy of health.
Her current research is on the financialization of global health, particularly new forms of global health aid funding, including the first pandemic bond. Publications on that work are found in The Lancet, Medicine Anthropology Theory, and Critical Public Health.
About this seminar series
“Global Health Unpacked” is a seminar series that aims to bring together the global health community on a regular basis to critically discuss key debates in Global Health in informal and interactive seminars. Guest speakers (both from the University of Oslo and from other universities) will bring an original perspective to the topic and engage in a conversation with the audience.
With this seminar, we also hope to facilitate exchanges and collaborations between global health researchers and students present in Oslo and foster interdisciplinary research. “Global Health Unpacked” is jointly organized by the research group Global Health Politics, Centre for Development and the Environment and the UiO Centre for Global Health.