Justin Parkhurst
Biographic Data
| ID | 1446211 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Justin Parkhurst |
| GIVEN NAMES | Justin |
| FAMILY NAME | Parkhurst |
| SIGNATURE | PARKHURST J |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0831-6213 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Normative convergence between global health security and universal health coverage
BACKGROUND: The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and WHO Thirteenth General Programme of Work underscored the importance of mitigating health emergencies while ensuring accessible and affordable health services. Central to these efforts are global health security (GHS) and universal health coverage (UHC), which act both as standalone goals and as cross-cutting approaches to health policy and practice. While GHS and UHC each operate as dist…
(Re)constructing global health security and universal health coverage
To effectively tackle public health challenges, policy-makers increasingly advocate for aligning global health security (GHS) and universal health coverage (UHC), two influential norms driving international health cooperation. However, despite operating within overlapping spheres of governance, the normative histories linking GHS and UHC remain relatively unexplored in the literature. This article examines how GHS and UHC have been (re)constructe…
System dynamics modelling and the use of evidence to inform policymaking
In recent years there has been growing interest in the policy community to apply insights from system dynamics modelling to address the complexity of many policy issues. This, however, has occurred in parallel to recent developments in critical scholarship on the nature of evidence use within public policymaking. While system dynamics aims to assist in the analysis and solving of complex policy problems, in doing so it also serves to identify whi…
Mapping regional cooperation of state actors for health research systems in Africa
Regional bodies can potentially play an important role in improving health research in Africa. This study analyses the network of African state-based regional organisations for health research and assesses their potential relationship with national health research performance metrics. After cataloguing organisations and their membership, we conducted a social network analysis to determine key network attributes of national governments’ connection…
Complexity and evidence in health sector decision-making
To better understand and plan health systems featuring multiple levels and complex causal elements, there have been increasing attempts to incorporate tools arising from complexity science to inform decisions. The utilization of new planning approaches can have important implications for the types of evidence that inform health policymaking and the mechanisms through which they do so. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the application o…
Beyond the metrics of health research performance in African countries
While it is important to be able to evaluate and measure a country’s performance in health research (HR), HR systems are complex and multifaceted in nature. As such, attempts at measurement can suffer several limitations which risk leading to inadequate indices or representations. In this study, we critically review common indicators of HR capacity and performance and explore their strengths and limitations. The paper is informed by review of dat…
Interventions to improve district-level routine health data in low-income and middle-income countries
Competing interests, clashing ideas and institutionalizing influence
This article explores how malaria control in sub-Saharan Africa is shaped in important ways by political and economic considerations within the contexts of aid-recipient nations and the global health community. Malaria control is often assumed to be a technically driven exercise: the remit of public health experts and epidemiologists who utilize available data to select the most effective package of activities given available resources. Yet resea…
Understanding evidence use from a programmatic perspective
Background: Conceptualisations of what it means to use evidence in policymaking often appear divided between two extremes. On the one side are works presenting it as the implementation of research findings – particularly evaluations of intervention effect. In contrast stand theoretically informed works exploring the multiple meanings of evidence use, political complexities, and the constructed nature of research evidence itself. The first perspec…
What drives political commitment for nutrition? A review and framework synthesis to inform the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition
INTRODUCTION: Generating country-level political commitment will be critical to driving forward action throughout the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025). In this review of the empirical nutrition policy literature, we ask: what factors generate, sustain and constrain political commitment for nutrition, how and under what circumstances? Our aim is to inform strategic 'commitment-building' actions. METHOD: We adopted a framewo…
Addressing trade policy as a macro-structural determinant of health
Addressing trade policy as a macro-structural determinant of health: the role of institutions and ideas
How do external donors influence national health policy processes? Experiences of domestic policy actors in Cambodia and Pakistan
Although concerns have historically been raised about the influence of external donors on health policy process in recipient countries, remarkably few studies have investigated perspectives and experiences of domestic policymakers and advisers. This study examines donor influence at different stages of the health policy process (priority setting, policy formulation, policy implementation and monitoring and evaluation) in two aid-dependent LMICs, …
The Politics of Evidence (Open Access)
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.tandfebooks.com/, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be…
What Constitutes “Good” Evidence for Public Health and Social Policy-making? From Hierarchies to Appropriateness
Within public health, and increasingly other areas of social policy, there are widespread calls to increase or improve the use of evidence for policy-making. Often these calls rest on an assumption that increased evidence utilisation will be a more efficient or effective means of achieving social goals. Yet a clear elucidation of what can be considered “good evidence” for policy is rarely articulated. Many of the current discussions of best pract…
Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems
Wicked policy problems are often said to be characterized by their ‘intractability’, whereby appeals to evidence are unable to provide policy resolution. Advocates for ‘Evidence Based Policy’ (EBP) often lament these situations as representing the misuse of evidence for strategic ends, while critical policy studies authors counter that policy decisions are fundamentally about competing values, with the (blind) embrace of technical evidence depoli…
The Politics of Evidence
There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ?improved? use of …
The Use of Evidence Within Policy Evaluation in Health in Ghana
The use of evidence in policymaking is commonly considered a good practice of democratic governance by improving accountability, effectiveness, and stakeholders’ involvement in policy decisions. The features of this practice, however, remain vague in the general discourse of evidence‐based policymaking (EBPM) with the risk of obscuring important governance and legitimacy implications. In policy evaluation especially, the use of evidence can be cr…
The ‘good governance’ of evidence in health policy
Calls for evidence-based policy often fail to recognise the fundamentally political nature of policy making. Policy makers must identify, evaluate and utilise evidence to solve policy problems in the face of competing priorities and political agendas. Evidence should inform but cannot determine policy choices. This paper draws on theories of ‘good governance’ to develop a framework for analysing and evaluating processes of evidence-informed polic…
Breaking out of silos – the need for critical paradigm reflection in HIV prevention
International audience
Doubt, defiance, and identity
Global policy recommendations to scale up of male circumcision (MC) for HIV prevention tend to frame the procedure as a simple and efficacious public health intervention. However, there has been variable uptake of MC in countries with significant HIV epidemics. Kenya, for example, has embraced MC and has been dubbed a 'leader' by the global health community, while Malawi has been branded a 'laggard' in its slow adoption of a national programme, w…
Migration as a Tool in Development Policy
The World Bank and UNDP have proposed that migration and mobility facilitate economic development. Yet the epidemiological and public health literature has often associated migration and population mobility with the extension and intensification of infectious diseases, most recently epitomised by the AIDS pandemic. Within the context of the well-documented negative developmental impact of AIDS, this suggests a potential clash in perspectives on t…
Comparative costs and cost-effectiveness of behavioural interventions as part of HIV prevention strategies
BACKGROUND: Behavioural interventions have been widely integrated in HIV/AIDS social marketing prevention strategies and are considered valuable in settings with high levels of risk behaviours and low levels of HIV/AIDS awareness. Despite their widespread application, there is a lack of economic evaluations comparing different behaviour change communication methods. This paper analyses the costs to increase awareness and the cost-effectiveness to…
Framing, ideology and evidence
Cognitive framing theories explain how individuals understand and apply information in relation to existing experiences and beliefs. Yet these theories have rarely been applied to explore the interpretation and application of evidence in policy development. This paper undertakes a critical discourse analysis of interviews and texts surrounding a highly contested United States policy for international HIV prevention. Analysis illustrates that, rat…
Linking migration, mobility and HIV
Population mobility is commonly identified as a key driver of the HIV epidemic, both linking geographically separate epidemics and intensifying transmission through inducing riskier sexual behaviours. However, beyond the well-known case studies of South African miners and East African truck drivers, the evidence on the links between HIV and mobility is nuanced, contradictory and inconclusive and is in part attributed to the abstract definitions o…
Assessing access barriers to maternal health care
BACKGROUND: In low income countries, several barriers exist to the use of health services for child delivery, including distance, transportation, informal costs or low perceived quality. Yet there is rarely information about which barriers are more or less important to the use of a given health facility. This study assessed the relative importance of different barriers to maternal health facility use in rural Uganda through the use of simple indi…
The political environment of HIV
Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems
Wicked policy problems are often said to be characterized by their ‘intractability’, whereby appeals to evidence are unable to provide policy resolution. Advocates for ‘Evidence Based Policy’ (EBP) often lament these situations as representing the misuse of evidence for strategic ends, while critical policy studies authors counter that policy decisions are fundamentally about competing values, with the (blind) embrace of technical evidence depoli…
How do external donors influence national health policy processes? Experiences of domestic policy actors in Cambodia and Pakistan
Although concerns have historically been raised about the influence of external donors on health policy process in recipient countries, remarkably few studies have investigated perspectives and experiences of domestic policymakers and advisers. This study examines donor influence at different stages of the health policy process (priority setting, policy formulation, policy implementation and monitoring and evaluation) in two aid-dependent LMICs, …
Doubt, defiance, and identity
Global policy recommendations to scale up of male circumcision (MC) for HIV prevention tend to frame the procedure as a simple and efficacious public health intervention. However, there has been variable uptake of MC in countries with significant HIV epidemics. Kenya, for example, has embraced MC and has been dubbed a 'leader' by the global health community, while Malawi has been branded a 'laggard' in its slow adoption of a national programme, w…
The ‘good governance’ of evidence in health policy
Calls for evidence-based policy often fail to recognise the fundamentally political nature of policy making. Policy makers must identify, evaluate and utilise evidence to solve policy problems in the face of competing priorities and political agendas. Evidence should inform but cannot determine policy choices. This paper draws on theories of ‘good governance’ to develop a framework for analysing and evaluating processes of evidence-informed polic…
Framing, ideology and evidence
Cognitive framing theories explain how individuals understand and apply information in relation to existing experiences and beliefs. Yet these theories have rarely been applied to explore the interpretation and application of evidence in policy development. This paper undertakes a critical discourse analysis of interviews and texts surrounding a highly contested United States policy for international HIV prevention. Analysis illustrates that, rat…
System dynamics modelling and the use of evidence to inform policymaking
In recent years there has been growing interest in the policy community to apply insights from system dynamics modelling to address the complexity of many policy issues. This, however, has occurred in parallel to recent developments in critical scholarship on the nature of evidence use within public policymaking. While system dynamics aims to assist in the analysis and solving of complex policy problems, in doing so it also serves to identify whi…
Improving Maternal Health
Maternal mortality reduction in many countries is unlikely despite the availability of inexpensive, efficacious interventions that are part of official policy. This article explores the reasons why, based on research on maternity services in Bangladesh, Russia, South Africa and Uganda. A simple dynamic responses model shows that the key to understanding challenges in implementation lies in the reflexive, complex and dynamic responses of health wo…
The Response to HIV/Aids and the Construction of National Legitimacy
Uganda faces continual challenges as a low‐income nation reliant on international donors and non‐state actors. It was also one of the first countries to face a population‐wide HIV epidemic, a disease that can strain state capacity to its limits. One would expect that such a combination would weaken the governance structures in a developing country; yet, if anything, the Ugandan state has emerged from its HIV crisis with its legitimacy bolstered. …
The Crisis of Aids and the Politics of Response
Assessing access barriers to maternal health care
BACKGROUND: In low income countries, several barriers exist to the use of health services for child delivery, including distance, transportation, informal costs or low perceived quality. Yet there is rarely information about which barriers are more or less important to the use of a given health facility. This study assessed the relative importance of different barriers to maternal health facility use in rural Uganda through the use of simple indi…
Understanding evidence use from a programmatic perspective
Background: Conceptualisations of what it means to use evidence in policymaking often appear divided between two extremes. On the one side are works presenting it as the implementation of research findings – particularly evaluations of intervention effect. In contrast stand theoretically informed works exploring the multiple meanings of evidence use, political complexities, and the constructed nature of research evidence itself. The first perspec…
Addressing trade policy as a macro-structural determinant of health
Addressing trade policy as a macro-structural determinant of health: the role of institutions and ideas
The Use of Evidence Within Policy Evaluation in Health in Ghana
The use of evidence in policymaking is commonly considered a good practice of democratic governance by improving accountability, effectiveness, and stakeholders’ involvement in policy decisions. The features of this practice, however, remain vague in the general discourse of evidence‐based policymaking (EBPM) with the risk of obscuring important governance and legitimacy implications. In policy evaluation especially, the use of evidence can be cr…
Breaking out of silos – the need for critical paradigm reflection in HIV prevention
International audience
(Re)constructing global health security and universal health coverage
To effectively tackle public health challenges, policy-makers increasingly advocate for aligning global health security (GHS) and universal health coverage (UHC), two influential norms driving international health cooperation. However, despite operating within overlapping spheres of governance, the normative histories linking GHS and UHC remain relatively unexplored in the literature. This article examines how GHS and UHC have been (re)constructe…
Non-professional health practitioners and referrals to facilities
Over half a million women in the developing world die of pregnancy and childbirth related causes each year, despite well-known interventions to manage most maternal complications. One problem facing policy makers is that women in low-income settings often seek care from a range of non-professional sources when they have trouble with pregnancy and childbirth. Questions remain as to the best way to engage with such providers to encourage use of pro…
The Crisis of Aids and the Politics of Response
The political environment of HIV
The Response to HIV/Aids and the Construction of National Legitimacy
Uganda faces continual challenges as a low‐income nation reliant on international donors and non‐state actors. It was also one of the first countries to face a population‐wide HIV epidemic, a disease that can strain state capacity to its limits. One would expect that such a combination would weaken the governance structures in a developing country; yet, if anything, the Ugandan state has emerged from its HIV crisis with its legitimacy bolstered. …
Non-professional health practitioners and referrals to facilities
Over half a million women in the developing world die of pregnancy and childbirth related causes each year, despite well-known interventions to manage most maternal complications. One problem facing policy makers is that women in low-income settings often seek care from a range of non-professional sources when they have trouble with pregnancy and childbirth. Questions remain as to the best way to engage with such providers to encourage use of pro…
Improving Maternal Health
Maternal mortality reduction in many countries is unlikely despite the availability of inexpensive, efficacious interventions that are part of official policy. This article explores the reasons why, based on research on maternity services in Bangladesh, Russia, South Africa and Uganda. A simple dynamic responses model shows that the key to understanding challenges in implementation lies in the reflexive, complex and dynamic responses of health wo…
Structural approaches to HIV prevention
Assessing access barriers to maternal health care
BACKGROUND: In low income countries, several barriers exist to the use of health services for child delivery, including distance, transportation, informal costs or low perceived quality. Yet there is rarely information about which barriers are more or less important to the use of a given health facility. This study assessed the relative importance of different barriers to maternal health facility use in rural Uganda through the use of simple indi…
Linking migration, mobility and HIV
Population mobility is commonly identified as a key driver of the HIV epidemic, both linking geographically separate epidemics and intensifying transmission through inducing riskier sexual behaviours. However, beyond the well-known case studies of South African miners and East African truck drivers, the evidence on the links between HIV and mobility is nuanced, contradictory and inconclusive and is in part attributed to the abstract definitions o…
Framing, ideology and evidence
Cognitive framing theories explain how individuals understand and apply information in relation to existing experiences and beliefs. Yet these theories have rarely been applied to explore the interpretation and application of evidence in policy development. This paper undertakes a critical discourse analysis of interviews and texts surrounding a highly contested United States policy for international HIV prevention. Analysis illustrates that, rat…
Migration as a Tool in Development Policy
The World Bank and UNDP have proposed that migration and mobility facilitate economic development. Yet the epidemiological and public health literature has often associated migration and population mobility with the extension and intensification of infectious diseases, most recently epitomised by the AIDS pandemic. Within the context of the well-documented negative developmental impact of AIDS, this suggests a potential clash in perspectives on t…
Comparative costs and cost-effectiveness of behavioural interventions as part of HIV prevention strategies
BACKGROUND: Behavioural interventions have been widely integrated in HIV/AIDS social marketing prevention strategies and are considered valuable in settings with high levels of risk behaviours and low levels of HIV/AIDS awareness. Despite their widespread application, there is a lack of economic evaluations comparing different behaviour change communication methods. This paper analyses the costs to increase awareness and the cost-effectiveness to…
The Use of Evidence Within Policy Evaluation in Health in Ghana
The use of evidence in policymaking is commonly considered a good practice of democratic governance by improving accountability, effectiveness, and stakeholders’ involvement in policy decisions. The features of this practice, however, remain vague in the general discourse of evidence‐based policymaking (EBPM) with the risk of obscuring important governance and legitimacy implications. In policy evaluation especially, the use of evidence can be cr…
The ‘good governance’ of evidence in health policy
Calls for evidence-based policy often fail to recognise the fundamentally political nature of policy making. Policy makers must identify, evaluate and utilise evidence to solve policy problems in the face of competing priorities and political agendas. Evidence should inform but cannot determine policy choices. This paper draws on theories of ‘good governance’ to develop a framework for analysing and evaluating processes of evidence-informed polic…
Breaking out of silos – the need for critical paradigm reflection in HIV prevention
International audience
Doubt, defiance, and identity
Global policy recommendations to scale up of male circumcision (MC) for HIV prevention tend to frame the procedure as a simple and efficacious public health intervention. However, there has been variable uptake of MC in countries with significant HIV epidemics. Kenya, for example, has embraced MC and has been dubbed a 'leader' by the global health community, while Malawi has been branded a 'laggard' in its slow adoption of a national programme, w…
The Politics of Evidence (Open Access)
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.tandfebooks.com/, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be…
What Constitutes “Good” Evidence for Public Health and Social Policy-making? From Hierarchies to Appropriateness
Within public health, and increasingly other areas of social policy, there are widespread calls to increase or improve the use of evidence for policy-making. Often these calls rest on an assumption that increased evidence utilisation will be a more efficient or effective means of achieving social goals. Yet a clear elucidation of what can be considered “good evidence” for policy is rarely articulated. Many of the current discussions of best pract…
Appeals to evidence for the resolution of wicked problems
Wicked policy problems are often said to be characterized by their ‘intractability’, whereby appeals to evidence are unable to provide policy resolution. Advocates for ‘Evidence Based Policy’ (EBP) often lament these situations as representing the misuse of evidence for strategic ends, while critical policy studies authors counter that policy decisions are fundamentally about competing values, with the (blind) embrace of technical evidence depoli…
The Politics of Evidence
There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ?improved? use of …
What drives political commitment for nutrition? A review and framework synthesis to inform the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition
INTRODUCTION: Generating country-level political commitment will be critical to driving forward action throughout the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025). In this review of the empirical nutrition policy literature, we ask: what factors generate, sustain and constrain political commitment for nutrition, how and under what circumstances? Our aim is to inform strategic 'commitment-building' actions. METHOD: We adopted a framewo…
Addressing trade policy as a macro-structural determinant of health
Addressing trade policy as a macro-structural determinant of health: the role of institutions and ideas
How do external donors influence national health policy processes? Experiences of domestic policy actors in Cambodia and Pakistan
Although concerns have historically been raised about the influence of external donors on health policy process in recipient countries, remarkably few studies have investigated perspectives and experiences of domestic policymakers and advisers. This study examines donor influence at different stages of the health policy process (priority setting, policy formulation, policy implementation and monitoring and evaluation) in two aid-dependent LMICs, …
Understanding evidence use from a programmatic perspective
Background: Conceptualisations of what it means to use evidence in policymaking often appear divided between two extremes. On the one side are works presenting it as the implementation of research findings – particularly evaluations of intervention effect. In contrast stand theoretically informed works exploring the multiple meanings of evidence use, political complexities, and the constructed nature of research evidence itself. The first perspec…
Beyond the metrics of health research performance in African countries
While it is important to be able to evaluate and measure a country’s performance in health research (HR), HR systems are complex and multifaceted in nature. As such, attempts at measurement can suffer several limitations which risk leading to inadequate indices or representations. In this study, we critically review common indicators of HR capacity and performance and explore their strengths and limitations. The paper is informed by review of dat…
Interventions to improve district-level routine health data in low-income and middle-income countries
Political science (25 works) · Economics (19 works) · Medicine (19 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Economic growth (12 works) · Public relations (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Global Maternal and Child Health (8 works)