Dismantling ‘Paper Tigers’: Global Experts Chart the Transition of One Health from Policy to Action
KIGALI, Rwanda — In the global health arena, “One Health” has long been celebrated as the gold standard framework for addressing complex, interconnected challenges across human, animal, and environmental sectors. Yet, Experts highlighted a profound gap remains between the concepts written on paper and actual operational impact.
The revelations were made during a milestone webinar organized by the University of Global Health Equity on Wednesday, 26th August 2026.
The session, titled “Institutionalizing One Health: Governance and Policy for Sustainable Impact,” brought together leading researchers and policy architects from the AMR Policy Accelerator, the Ministry of Health in Sudan, and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Together, they tackled the critical question of how to move past temporary crisis collaboration to permanently embed One Health into routine governmental machinery.
Dismantling ‘Paper Tigers’ Through Effective Governance
Opening the discussion, Dr. Arne Ruckert, Director of Research at the Global Strategy Lab’s AMR Policy Accelerator, addressed what he described as a persistent “implementation and monitoring gap”. While international frameworks mandate multisectoral cooperation, Dr. Ruckert warned that governments risk establishing superficial structures that look impressive but lack real operational capacity.
“We have a lot of paper tigers, especially in low-income settings, when it comes to multi-coordination mechanisms,” Dr. Ruckert noted. “Mechanisms that are there, but they don’t really function well.”
To resolve this, Dr. Ruckert presented a rigorous, evidence-based six-domain framework—encompassing participation, leadership, coordination, decision-making, resourcing, and accountability—as the blueprint for successful One Health governance.
His empirical research highlighted that participation must be carefully tailored, especially in highly decentralized systems. “Participation should be flexible and deliberate,” Dr. Ruckert explained. “You don’t need to have everybody participate at all all the time, but you have to strategically think about who should be participating at one point.” Furthermore, his research indicated that while high-income settings benefit most from dedicated, ring-fenced funding, integrated or pooled funding mechanisms often deliver superior results in resource-limited contexts.
Sudan’s Journey: A Story of High-Stakes Resilience
Providing a powerful national perspective, Dr. Hanadi Hussein, Director of the One Health Directorate at Sudan’s Federal Ministry of Health, demonstrated that institutionalization is not a single legislative event, but a gradual, milestone-driven evolution.
For Sudan, a country of 120 million head of livestock where humans and animals live in incredibly close contact, One Health is not academic. “When we speak about One Health in Sudan, I think we are not talking about like abstract concept but we are talking about a real need or necessity,” Dr. Hussein asserted.
Sudan’s milestone achievements include:
- Veteran Secondments (Since 2007): Embedding veterinarians directly into the Ministry of Health to institutionalize cross-sector communication.
- The 2021 Prioritization Exercise: Jointly ranking Sudan’s top eight endemic zoonotic diseases with active involvement from the environmental sector for the first time.
- The Sudan One Health Platform (2022): Formally endorsing and operationalizing standard operating procedures and a trained network of focal points across 18 decentralized states.
Even the outbreak of devastating civil conflict in April 2023 did not halt these efforts. The platform adapted, moving its coordination meetings entirely virtual and continuing essential campaigns against rabies and dengue fever in safer states.
“Systems must be adaptable to crisis and fragility,” Dr. Hussein reflected, adding that “One Health becomes sustainable when it is owned, governed, financed, and integrated into existing systems.”
Carpe Diem: Tearing Down Bureaucratic Silos in Europe
The challenge of institutionalization is not unique to resource-constrained or fragile states. Dr. Carlos Gonçalo Das Neves, Chief Scientist of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), addressed the policy bottlenecks within the highly developed yet highly fragmented systems of the European Union.
Dr. Das Neves pointed out that the global health community is suffering from an overload of strategic paperwork rather than a lack of ideas.
“We’re not lacking arenas to speak, and honestly, we’re not lacking paper written documents on how to do it,” Dr. Das Neves remarked candidly. “I like to say [we have] torn down every tree we should to print pages on how to get this done.”
The real friction lies in aligning political leadership, private industry, and isolated scientific communities under a single unified banner. To combat this, EFSA and its sister EU agencies are pioneering practical structural reforms. Dr. Das Neves highlighted the creation of an inter-service group within the European Commission designed to filter and align transversal policies across agricultural, health, and environmental directorates before they are implemented.
He also shared a highly successful joint venture: a unified scientific opinion on antifungals—a critical drug category used simultaneously in human medicine, veterinary care, cosmetics, and crop agriculture. Rather than submitting five conflicting advice papers, five separate EU agencies co-authored a single, integrated recommendation.
While conceptually straightforward, Dr. Das Neves admitted the bureaucratic reality was a logistical mountain: “This might seem simple, but in the mechanics and the bureaucracy of the Union, this was quite a challenge—from deciding which logo goes first to who gets to sign last.” Yet, it serves as a powerful testament to his core message: “Complex problems that are interlinked may need interlinked solutions that do not necessarily need to be complex.”
The Road Ahead: Embedding One Health Locally
Ultimately, the consensus of the UGHE webinar was clear: One Health cannot succeed if it remains a set of isolated, top-down directives or depends solely on individual “champions”. True sustainability is achieved when the framework is tied directly to local realities and national political priorities.
By establishing robust governance, committing to integrated resources, and remaining resilient under pressure, institutions can finally dismantle the “paper tigers” of global health and deliver lasting, unified protection for humans, animals, and our shared environment.
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