Monitoring Pandemic Preparedness: Global Health Security’s Politics of Accountability, Development, and Infrastructure

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.