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Meanings and Mechanisms of One Health Partnerships: Insights from a Critical Review of Literature on Cross-government Collaborations

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posted on 2024-09-05, 21:54 authored by Syed Shahid Abbas, Tim Shorten, Jonathon Rushton
Complex health policy challenges such as antimicrobial resistance and other emerging infections are driven by activities in multiple sectors. Therefore, addressing these also requires joint efforts from multiple sectors as exemplified in the One Health approach. We undertake a critical review to examine the different ways in which multisector partnerships have been conceptualized across multiple disciplines and thematic areas. We started with a set of six articles from the disciplines of health, nutrition and public administration that reviewed conceptual frameworks within their respective fields. We conducted backward citation tracing using the bibliography of the six articles to identify other articles in the same and related fields that conceptualized multisector partnerships. We identified 58 articles published from 1967 to 2018 from the fields of global health, infectious diseases, management, nutrition and sustainability sciences indicating that multisector partnerships have been a topic of study across different fields for several decades. A thematic analysis of the 58 articles revealed that multisector partnerships assume a variety of forms and have been described in different ways. Partnerships can be categorized by scope, scale, formality and strength. Multisector partnerships emerge in conditions of dynamic uncertainty and sector failure when the information and resources required are beyond the capacities of any individual sector. Such partnerships are inherently political in nature and subsume multiple competing agendas of collaborating actors. Sustaining collaborations over a long period of time will require collaborative approaches like One Health to accommodate competing political perspectives and include flexibility to allow multisector partnerships to respond to changing external dynamics.

Key messages: Multisector collaborations are complex political enterprises, which incorporate within themselves, different visions around, objectives, mandates, function and success. Collaborations can take various forms which allow practitioners to choose the form of collaboration that is most relevant to their requirements. Most collaborations consist of partners who pursue different individual and institutional agenda and who exercise different amounts of influence. Collaborations should learn how to manage rather than minimize these differences. While there are no fixed parameters for success, given the dynamic contexts within which multisector collaborations function, they can result in unintended outcomes. Collaborations that are responsive to changing internal and external dynamics are more likely to thrive.

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Oxford University Press

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Abbas, S.S.; Shorten, T. and Rushton, J. (2021) 'Meanings and Mechanisms of One Health Partnerships: Insights From a Critical Review of Literature on Cross-government Collaborations', Health Policy and Planning, 2021;czab134, DOI: 10.1093/heapol/czab134

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© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press in association with The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

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en

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Health and Nutrition

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NH/17029::a657a798-579e-4b6e-b609-0d3b781f0f36::600

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RVC-let One Health Poultry Hub NH/17029 UKRI GCRF (BB/S011269/1); NH/16014 UKDHSC – UK Dept of Health & Social Care

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