The UN and HIV/AIDS Agenda Setting

The issue of HIV/AIDS has a long history of being taken up by various UN agencies. Coinciding with the reframing of HIV/AIDS as a issue of poverty and development – and arguably a major factor contributing to this reframing process – the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO; also a UN agency) in 1987 in the formation of the WHO/UNDP Alliance to Combat AIDS (Ingenkamp 2008).

1996 marked the founding of UNAIDS as a fully operational UN agency specifically dedicated to responding to global AIDS epidemic. As Nina Ingenkamp notes, “the starting point for the idea of UNAIDS was an external study of the GPA in 1992, which concluded that improved collaboration among UN agencies was needed” (2008: 37). Many of the agencies at the table agreed that the WHO was not the best organization to be addressing the AIDS epidemic giving the multidimensional nature of the problem as it was now being framed; that is, primarily as an issue of development. In replacement of the UNDP/WHO Alliance, a new alliance under the banner of UNAIDS was formed, and was composed of ten other co-sponsoring UN agencies: UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Population Fund (UNPF), UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODCD), the International Labor Organiation (ILO), and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

UNAIDS thus plays a pivotal role in the ways in which AIDS is placed on the global agenda. The governing body of the agency – the Programme Coordinating Board – brings diverse UN agencies, governments, civil society organzations, and People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) Associations together twice a year, maintaining network ties and facilitating a space where ideas can be shared and agendas can be set. UNAIDS also maintains a network made up of major governmental donors called “Friends of UNAIDS,” composed of representatives from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, the US, and the UK. As Ingenkamp notes, “these strong interorganizational ties are a good basis for discursive, strategic and contested processes leading to global frame development and moreover build a favourable contextual factor regarding frame dissemination and consequent establishment” (2008: 26).

UNAIDS has undisputably done much to keep AIDS on the global agenda and to maintain a particular way of framing the issue that consequently leads to particular modes of action responding to the epidemic. They have done extensive lobbying to ensure that the issue is on the radar of other major international organizations, particularly those dealing with development. As one representative of the organization has noted:

When we noticed that e.g. in the document of the World summit on Aging there is not reference on AIDS we were talking to member states and persuading them that this was the issue, the global issue that should somehow be reflected, and without any problem they were accepting it.

The same informant continued on to note that within a few years “HIV/AIDS was mentioned in all development related UN documents” (2008: 39-40).

Finally, another major contribution of UNAIDS has been the collection and dissemination of country-level statistics. Prior to the founding of the organization, information regarding the epidemic stopped at the regional level, but UNAIDS was able to reveal in a global report that prevalence rates exceeded 25% of the population in some countries and was able to connect these patterns with patterns in UN conceptualizations of economic development. These numbers were widely publicized in the media (often front page) (Ingenkamp 2008).

Ingenkamp, Nina. 2008. How HIV/AIDS Has Made it: An Analysis of Global HIV/AIDS Agenda-setting Between 1981-2002. Saarbruken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller