Making of One Health: Emotional and cultural political ecologies of tackling zoonoses

Abstract

With COVID-19, and its potential origin in a live animal market, One Health firmly found its footing as the key global policy framework to tackle zoonoses – infectious diseases that circulate between animals and humans. Both popular and policy understandings are saturated by particular imaginings of zoonoses. Images of a forest-hugging village where residents hunt and eat wild primates, or a market with wire-cages stuffed to the brim with bats and civets, come unbidden to most, although zoonoses also have definitive links to intensive livestock production and global travel and trade. In this study, I develop an emotional and cultural political ecology framework to examine the political and emotional production of uneven geographies of blame within the One Health discourse on zoonoses, and its deployment through global, national, and sub-national policies to tackle zoonoses.
I begin by critically analysing key zoonoses and One Health policy documents and conference proceedings, through which I illustrate how certain practices of human-animal interaction prevalent in three specific spaces of blame – ‘wet’ markets, ‘bush’ meat, and ‘backyard’ farming – in developing countries are ascribed greater culpability for zoonotic disease emergence than others. I draw from emotional political ecologies, cultural politics, anthropology and psychology to examine how uneven geographies of blame for zoonoses are informed by Euro-American normative conceptions of nature-culture order, specifically in connection with human-animal interactions. By locating the emotional state of disgust within One Health texts, I highlight that spaces of blame are effectively moral landscapes for the varied global policy communities that coalesce around these policies. I then mobilise an emotional and cultural political ecology of One Health that builds on political economy, biopolitical, and geopolitical examinations to explain the importance afforded to strategies of epidemiological surveillance and disease monitoring in developing countries within these policies.
I complement the above analysis with ethnographic research in Nagaland in northeastern India. I draw on interactions with district and state public health, veterinary, and forestry officials, and residents, to demonstrate how uneven geographies of blame in a specific zoonotic ‘disease situation’ layer on to historical and contemporary nature-culture imaginaries and dynamics of Othering informed by processes of colonial and post-colonial state-making. While every ‘disease situation’ is a specific place, One Health policies’ treatment of them as interchangeable, third-world template locations, highlights the coloniality that continues to pervade contemporary global public health and infectious disease policies. The findings of this study indicate a path towards decolonising One Health and the co-production of equitable and culturally plural policies to address human, animal, and environmental health and well-being.

Date of Award	18 Dec 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Francis Masse (Supervisor), Andrew Collins (Supervisor) & Gita Gill (Supervisor)