The German G20 Presidency features health prominently and will hold for the first time a health ministers’ meeting on 19-20 May 2017. In the run-up to this event and the Hamburg G20 Summit in July, Professor Ilona Kickbusch, Director of the Global Health Centre, elaborated in a lunch briefing held on 11 April 2017 at the Graduate Institute the reasons behind this year’s focus on health.

The G20 vision for 2017, “Shaping an interconnected world”, highlights the close interlinkages between economic development and issues such as climate change, gender equality, migration, and health. The focus of the German Presidency is on horizontal, transversal health issues: addressing threats posed by infectious diseases, which are considered of crucial importance for sustainable economic growth; health system strengthening, which is seen as a fundamental prerequisite for safeguarding against outbreaks of diseases; and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which is increasingly compared to climate change in terms of complexity and magnitude.

Already in 2015 through its G7 Presidency, Germany shaped the international political agenda through the inclusion of health in the G7 discussions. The international response to Ebola, neglected tropical diseases, AMR, and global health security were among the topics discussed by world leaders at the June 2015 Elmau G7 Summit and were included in the Leader’s Declaration. Furthermore, Germany hosted the 2015 replenishment conference of Gavi and launched the “Healthy Systems – Healthy Lives” initiative to support actionable commitments at the country level. The closeness of Germany’s 2015 G7 and 2017 G20 Presidencies has, therefore, allowed for continuity by maintaining health on the global policy agenda.

In addition to this, in the aftermath of the Ebola crisis, Germany strongly supported the World Health Organization (WHO) as the only international organisation with political legitimacy on global health issues. This on-going support, coupled with Germany’s engagement in global health, has been instrumental in positioning the G20 as a forum for health discussions.

However, as priorities are set by the group’s rotating presidency, the question remains whether a strong focus on health will be maintained in the coming years. As the G20 has evolved into a broader ecosystem of meetings and events, other stakeholders also have a role to play in developing policy proposals and promoting the inclusion of health in future G20 summits. The German Presidency has acknowledged this multistakeholder nature of policy processes and created seven streams of civil society groups: Business20, Civil20 (bringing together non-governmental organisations), Labour20 (with trade unions), Science20, Think20 (engaging think tanks), Women20, and Youth20. These fora will draft recommendations on relevant G20 topics, including health.

Although critics of the group raise questions in relation to the legitimacy of these self-appointed bodies, the G20 discussions can have a positive impact on global actions. Professor Kickbusch emphasised the importance of symbolic politics, highlighting the G20’s ability to bring together some of the most powerful political actors in the world. While we cannot realistically expect global health to be the main or only focus of the G20 forum, there is an obvious added value in heads of state spending an hour discussing health in order to create incentives to foster solutions and political will for collective action.