A Monitoring Pandemic Preparedness : Global Health Security’s Politics of Accountability, Development, and Infrastructure (Paperback)

An assessment of contemporary global preparedness monitoring.

This book presents an encompassing understanding of the practice of monitoring, measuring, and assessing how well countries have prepared for a pandemic. It explains the much-discussed failure of preparedness monitoring in the COVID-19 pandemic and the paradoxical introduction of even more preparedness monitoring in the moment of its obvious failure. Combining unique ethnographic observations and document analysis, this research allows us to understand the power relations that inform preparedness governance, the contradictive politics of accountability, and the developmental project and specific soft-law character of preparedness monitoring. The study questions the modernism inherent in infrastructural thinking, be it in the practice of preparedness monitoring or the study’s infrastructural analytics derived from science and technology studies and actor–network theory.