"Strengthening International Collaboration for Capitalizing on Cost-Effective and Life-Saving Commodities (i4C)" project is evaluating eight different policy interventions related to improving global access to and prioritization, financing and incentives for the innovation of such commodities.
Of the eight interventions, five (1-5) aim to improve global access to existing, life-saving commodities; and the other three (6-8) aim to improve prioritization, financing and incentives for global innovation of new, life-saving commodities.
Our main research question is how can international collaboration be strengthened to scale-up cost-effective and life-saving commodities, especially for the world's poorest women and children. We will pursue this question by evaluating eight policy interventions directed at global health governance institutions. Five aim to improve global access to existing, life-saving commodities. These include: 1) evaluating the impact of free trade agreements and regulatory harmonization; 2) examining how emerging economies like Brazil, India and China promote access on the international stage to provide learning for other developing economies; 3) assessing advocacy strategies for promoting evidence-informed policymaking; 4) evaluating existing and new global health governance architecture's contributions to improving access; and 5) considering the role of existing and potentially new international legal mechanisms. Three aim to improve prioritization, financing and incentives for global innovation of new, life-saving commodities. This includes: 6) developing a multi-criteria priority classification model for value-based R&D investments; 7) proposing an R&D investment prioritization framework; and 8) examining global incentives to increase R&D investment in antibiotics. These interventions represent options across all four types of global governance arrangements; international rules (1,5), norms and discourses (2,3), market interventions (6,7), and access to domestic policy processes (4,8). Building on the diverse disciplinary expertise of the research team, each intervention is evaluated using a tailored social science method that is most appropriate, whether that is economic modeling (6-8), interrupted time-series analyses (1,5), interviews and document analyses (1,2,6,7), legal analyses (4,5,8), policy analyses (4,8), political analyses (2,3,8), simulation (7), surveys (1,6) or systematic reviews (5,7).