Monitoring Pandemic Preparedness : Global Health Security's Politics of Accountability, Development, and Infrastructure by Carolin Mezes

How well are countries prepared for the next pandemic? And how to measure and evaluate pandemic preparedness? ? In this book, Carolin Mezes examines how the practice of pandemic preparedness monitoring has become an important feature of global health security governance-and how the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed its failure. By way of document analysis and an ethnographic case study of the Joint External Evaluations, her study considers the well-rehearsed critique that preparedness monitoring cannot predict pandemic response performance and appears as a hollow paperwork exercise of box-ticking. An analysis of the media-technologies of preparedness monitoring gives nuance to these critiques and allows us to understand how preparedness monitoring gets caught up in the (contradictive) goals of objective knowledge production, soft-law accountability, and infrastructural development. Considering the power relations of global health, her research scrutinizes the infrastructural politics of preparedness monitoring and the modernism inherent in this developmental effort. ?
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