EUHealthGov with Óscar Fernández: Navigating Regime Complexity in Global Health

On Wednesday 13 June 2025, the EUHealthGov network was delighted to welcome Óscar Fernández for a work-in-progress discussion on the EU’s role in navigating regime complexity in Global Health. Although traditionally overlooked in European Studies, the EU’s impact in global health has begun to attract scholarly attention, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis served as a catalyst for examining the EU’s engagement with the intricate architecture of global health governance. Recent academic work has explored the EU’s key role in post-COVID-19 multilateral initiatives. These include the negotiations at the World Trade Organization over waiving certain intellectual property (IP) rules, as well as the EU’s active promotion of a new pandemic treaty at the World Health Organization, whose content has just been finalised. Both of these partially interconnected developments can be assessed from the lens of “regime complexity”—a notion that captures the density of rules and institutions governing global health. In this webinar, Dr. Óscar Fernández will draw on his research for the ENSURED project to explain how the EU has attempted to shape and leverage this complexity, which increasingly permeates global governance as a whole. Dr. Óscar Fernández is a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University. He is a contributor to the Horizon Europe project “ENSURED“, which focuses on how the European Union (EU) and its member states can transform global governance. His research sits primarily at the intersection between EU external action and global health governance, but also addresses other policy fields, such as security and defence.