Conclusion: Recipient States Being Sovereign

Abstract

Refocusing analysis in states and governments, namely recipient ones, away from leading contemporary scholarly approaches to individuals, populations and social forces has invited a reassessment of the structural realist contribution to International Politics. The basic concern for the role of states as essential units of the system is increasingly important not just for the study of global health governance as such, but also the understanding of broader phenomena in the developing world, in which the increasing diversity of foreign investment and aid assistance sources challenges the traditional postcolonial prevalence of Western countries. In this landscape, recipient states of major global health (and development, in general) programmes reinforce their capability to opt in and out for partnerships across the international system in order to accomplish their political agency. This certainly does not mean that any idea of absence of conditionality in a context of an enduring asymmetric system is completely or partially played out. Policy conditionality is taken theoretically and practically for granted regardless of aid being provided by the United States of America or China. The major difference is that currently smaller, weaker states operate in a framework in which the possibility to choose has enlarged significantly, in addition to crucial domestic variables that have to do with national developmentalist policy and practice aiming to attain fundamental political goals.