Aligning global health policy and research with sustainable development: A strategic market approach

Attaining Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3: Health and Well‐Being) faces a dual challenge of diminishing returns of established intervention designs, and a threat to future gains from complex inter‐connected global health challenges like antimicrobial resistance and global biodiversity loss. The growing movement of context‐sensitive approaches could help realise yet untapped potential for intervention designs, but contemporary global health policy and research still remain dominated by a model of individual market style choices. This paper therefore aims to support the development of global health planning processes that are more grounded and integrative across the SDGs. Reiterating calls for disruptive policy change is unlikely to impact the modus operandi of global health policy and research. This paper therefore builds on a logic that already finds widespread and intuitive application in their underlying planning processes: ‘the market’. However, it challenges the dominant supply‐and‐demand approach to healthcare markets and redefines them from a strategic marketing perspective. Translated to the interface of populations and health systems, the strategic market is a site for solving problems that are defined by people with multidimensional health needs. This framework offers four guiding questions to define the strategic market and six premises as a simple intellectual starting point and checklist for more grounded and inter‐sectorial action across the SDGs. The analysis of data from one of the largest behavioural survey data sets, covering 6683 villagers across China, India, Lao PDR and Thailand, demonstrates the relevance of the premises empirically.