The Emergence of International Health Policy in Southeast Asia, India, and Sri Lanka, 1937-1978

“This book makes a remarkable contribution to understanding the emergence, limits, and obliteration of a progressive vision for international health and social reform in South and Southeast Asia during the 1930s – a crucial read for better understanding how to decolonize global health, and emphasising solidarity and equity as its organising principles.” (Marcos Cueto, President, Division of History of Science and Technology, International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology)

“Carefully researched and clearly written, this pathbreaking book exposes the tensions between technical approaches to health promotion – focusing on medicines, vaccinations and disease eradication – and a social approach that understood health in a broader sense. It tells a fascinating story of ideological tension in the domain of public health, and is an important contribution to our understanding of modern South and Southeast Asian history.” (Robert Cribb, Emeritus Professor of Asian History, Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University)

“This book makes a remarkable contribution to understanding the emergence, limits, and obliteration of a progressive vision for international health and social reform in South and Southeast Asia during the 1930s – a crucial read for better understanding how to decolonize global health, and emphasising solidarity and equity as its organising principles.”

—Marcos Cueto, President, Division of History of Science and Technology, International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

“Carefully researched and clearly written, this pathbreaking book exposes the tensions between technical approaches to health promotion – focusing on medicines, vaccinations and disease eradication – and a social approach that understood health in a broader sense. It tells a fascinating story of ideological tension in the domain of public health, and is an important contribution to our understanding of modern South and Southeast Asian history.”

—Robert Cribb, Emeritus Professor of Asian History, Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University

Examining the emergence of international public health policy between the 1930s and 1980s, this book sheds light on the role that rural community health initiatives in South and Southeast Asia played in the movement towards ‘primary health care’ and ‘health for all,’ articulated ultimately at the 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. The author argues that the movement was not directed exclusively from the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, but also by institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division in rural Southeast Asia, and through local community initiatives including the Bandung Plan for Health in Indonesia. The book illustrates how an exclusive association of global health with the emergence of the WHO in the 1950s fails to account for the local, national, or regional contexts that shaped the evolution of primary health care in South and Southeast Asia.

Vivek Neelakantan was a 2023 Visiting Fellow at the Brocher Foundation, Switzerland.