Rethinking Global Health Research as a foundation of Europe’s future
Why one of Europe’s long-standing research investments has become a quiet corner of the FP10 negotiations, and how Re-Imagine Europa is helping to reframe the conversation
Global Health Research and Innovation (R&I) has a long record of contributing to Europe’s interests. It has supported the growth of Europe’s biotechnology sector, strengthened manufacturing and clinical research capacity, reinforced preparedness against biological threats and built scientific partnerships across the world. Yet as the European Union negotiates its next long-term budget and the Tenth Framework Programme (FP10), it features less prominently in the debate than that record might suggest.
The reason lies less in the evidence than in the frame. Global health research is still often presented as an extension of development cooperation, at a moment when the budget debate judges every area of spending by what it contributes to competitiveness, preparedness, resilience and strategic autonomy. Seen through that lens, a case built on solidarity can struggle to be heard, however well founded. The same evidence resonates with one policymaker and not with another, and stakeholders find themselves talking past one another.
This is, at its core, a question of narratives: of how the same evidence is framed, received and acted upon by audiences with different starting points. Re-Imagine Europa has spent the past year examining that question as it applies to global health research and innovation.
What REFRAME brings to global health
Re-Imagine Europa’s REFRAME methodology was developed on some of Europe’s most polarised debates. Through the European Narratives Observatory (NODES), it has been applied to climate and migration, fields where the exchange of facts alone had long ceased to move positions. Its premise is that people interpret evidence through the frames they already hold, and that durable common ground is found not by winning the argument but by identifying the shared objectives that sit beneath competing narratives.
Global health research lends itself well to this approach. We mapped how the debate is actually conducted in Brussels and across Member States, consulting stakeholders from research, industry, public health and international cooperation. What emerged is a field with a solid evidence base and broad, if often latent, support, whose case has not fully adapted to the questions now being asked of it. Compared with the most entrenched debates, the differences here are less about values than about which question each audience brings to the same investment. That is a gap that dialogue can close.
Its starting point is that the choices often presented as trade-offs, competitiveness or health, Europe or the world, tend on closer inspection to be complementary, and that the more useful question for FP10 is not whether Europe can afford such investment but how it is best designed
From listening to a strategy for Europe
Our White Paper, Rethinking Global Health Research and Innovation: A European Strategy for FP10, is where this analysis becomes a set of proposals.
It is addressed to the decision-makers now shaping FP10 and is informed by what we heard: the underlying concerns driving today’s debate, and the shared objectives that connect them. Its starting point is that the choices often presented as trade-offs, competitiveness or health, Europe or the world, tend on closer inspection to be complementary, and that the more useful question for FP10 is not whether Europe can afford such investment but how it is best designed. Rather than a further request for resources, it offers a coherent framework for considering global health research alongside Europe’s wider ambitions for competitiveness, resilience and international partnership, and for translating scientific excellence into healthier populations, more resilient societies and trusted cooperation, in Europe and beyond.
Read the White Paper here.