Locating regional health policy: Institutions, politics, and practices.

Poverty reduction and health became central in the agendas of Southern regional organisations in the last two decades. Yet, little is known about how these organisations address poverty, inclusion and social inequality, and how Southern regional formations are engaging in power constellations, institutions, processes, interests and ideological positions within different spheres of governance. This article reviews academic literatures spanning global social policy, regional studies and diplomacy studies, and the state of knowledge and understanding of the 'place' of regional actors in health governance as a global political practice therein. It identifies theoretical and thematic points of connection between disparate literatures and how these can be bridged through research focusing on the social policies of regional organisations and regional integration processes. This framework hence locates the contributions of each of the research articles of this Special Issue of Global Social Policy on the regional dimension of health policy and diplomacy in relation to Southern Africa and South America. It also highlights the ways in which the articles bring new evidence about how social relations of welfare are being (re)made over larger scales and how regional actors may initiate new norms to improve health rights in international arenas engaging in new forms of 'regional' diplomacy.

Going global: the transnationalization of care.

This article critically examines the contours of 'care transnationalization' as an ongoing social process and a field of enquiry. Care transnationalization scholarship combines structural understandings of global power relations with an emphasis on social interactions between defined actors in ways that keep sight of human agency, material welfare and wider social development. It has, however, tended to privilege particular forms, dynamics and sites of care transnationalization over others. The body of research on care labour migration, which is otherwise the most developed literature on care transnationalization to date, contains a number of biases and omissions in its coverage of border-spanning relations and their mediation across country contexts. At the same time, other significant forms of care transnationalization, such as those involving consumer-based care migration, corporate restructuring and the formation of care policy, have suffered from comparative neglect. Working towards an integrated agenda that addresses these diverse expressions of care transnationalization and how they 'touch down' in a range of sectoral, social and country contexts is of prime importance to policy research agendas directed at understanding the wider development impacts of processes of social and economic restructuring.