From Medical Development Aid to Global HealthGerman Approaches to International Health Work, 1950-2010

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With regard to the academic and political debate on Global Health that is quite intense in Germany presently the contextualised and overlapping succession of the diverse approaches of German actors to international health work with their development and varying success, change and disappearance, revival and reformulation has to be compiled and analyzed on the basis of archival and published sources as well as by interviews of 'oral history'. The diverse history of this field exhibits which roles were played by medicine and health during the establishment and in later phases of national, church and private 'development aid' in West Germany and 'solidarity' in East Germany - and how the entanglement with international contexts changed their discussion and implementation. The fate of the health sector in the syn- and diachrone tensions of development co-operation between promotion of economic development and basic needs approaches, between regulation and deregulation as well as between short-, medium- and long-term objectives becomes just as visible as reciprocal effects between international, national and local levels, national and non-governmental participants, the health service and other sectors of development co-operation. The research does not aim at a repetition of the respective health-economic or epidemiological debates, but at a first survey of the medical and health-political issues and their importance in the more general lines of development politics as well as at its local (to be demonstrated by selected examples) and international conditionality. The study is not primarily comparative, but on international entanglement, contains however - by the inevitable consideration of Federal Republic and GDR, churches and social movements - inevitably moments of comparison which will be done in systematic ways as far as it is relevant for the overall question. The focus of the research remains the respective, occasionally changing orientation between curative medicine and prevention, different health problems, utility for others and self-utility, charity and justice, technical and political approaches, partners on leadership levels and populations concerned, administrative and participatory approaches, state and civil society, broad effects and concentration on majors, individual and social interests, macro-economic and socio-political models. Setbacks such as HIV, failing states and new wars, brain drain and climate change are considered in their effects on health in development cooperation.