Consensus can create momentum. But it takes relationships to carry it forward.
One of the things I value most about the World Health Summit is the energy it creates: new insights, unexpected conversations and encounters with people committed to improving health across borders. Last year, one meeting in particular stayed with me.
The challenge was clear, possible solutions were taking shape and the shared determination to act was tangible. There was a real sense of momentum in the room, driven by the knowledge that people from different organisations and backgrounds recognised the same urgency. I left encouraged, but also with a question: How can we help this momentum travel across organisations, sectors and markets?
With the global health community preparing to return to Berlin for the World Health Summit from October 11 to 13, I find myself returning to this question. This year’s theme, “From Crisis to Resilience: Innovating for Health,” reflects how much the global health environment has changed. Health security increasingly intersects with economic stability, national preparedness and international cooperation. Yet while health risks cross borders, the decisions that determine our response are made across very different political, regulatory and healthcare environments.
Connecting these levels is becoming more important just as geopolitical shifts, declining trust and pressure on multilateral cooperation are making collective action more difficult.
Resilience Is Also Relational
We often think about resilience in terms of what a health system has: infrastructure, financing, skilled professionals, data, preparedness plans and secure supply chains. All of these are essential. But a recent policy brief on health system resilience by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies offers a broader perspective. It distinguishes between the “hardware” of resilience as mentioned above and its “software,” including governance, communication and collaboration. It also identifies coordination across sectors and systems as essential.
This suggests that resilience is also relational. It depends on how institutions, policymakers, industry, experts and communities communicate, coordinate and make decisions under pressure.
Resilience also requires a longer political horizon. Europe’s response to the changed security environment shows what is possible when governments recognise a risk as strategic and invest for the long-term. Health security deserves the same foresight, not as a competitor to defence, but as another foundation of societal stability.
Coping, after all, is not the same as resilience. A system may absorb immediate pressure while postponing the investment, learning and structural change needed for the next shock. Preparedness therefore requires political attention before urgency turns into a crisis.
Shape Your Understanding, Not Only Your Position
Too often, prevention and preparedness compete with immediate pressures for political attention and resources. This is partly because their value is still discussed primarily within the health policy community, even though the consequences of insufficient preparedness reach far beyond it.
In a more fragmented world, political impact in health will depend less on mobilising the usual health stakeholders around a finished position and more on bringing different actors together early enough to shape how the challenge itself is understood.
Health actors need to enter other policy conversations, while actors outside health need to recognise their role in creating health resilience. A finance ministry, an employer, a technology company, a security expert or a community organisation may each see a different dimension of the same risk. Bringing those perspectives together can change not only who supports an issue, but how it is framed and which solutions become politically possible.
The starting question should not only be: Who agrees with us? It should also be: Who sees a part of this challenge that we do not?
This changes how we should think about coalition building. Whether through a formal coalition, a cross-sector partnership or a looser alliance, the objective should not simply be to make more actors repeat the same message. It should be to produce a more politically relevant and actionable approach.
From Shared Purpose to Action
In many areas of global health, the challenge is not a lack of possible solutions. It is creating the shared ownership, political relevance and sustained collaboration needed to put them into practice. That requires us to listen beyond the familiar health community, allow new perspectives to change our approach and continue working together after the moment of consensus has passed.
As the global health community returns to Berlin, the question is therefore not only where we agree, but what it will take to carry that agreement forward. That is how momentum travels beyond the room: not by turning a conversation into another shared position, but by building the lasting relationships that can turn shared purpose into action.
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