Pharmaceuticals from and for the Global South

Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Fanny Chabrol

Chapter 20 in Handbook of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology Studies, 2026, pp 323-339 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: During the past 30 years, pharmaceuticals have become central to the international governance of health and to the medical practices prevailing in many countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The chapter presents this major change by focusing on the processes of pharmaceuticalization. This category has been applied by sociologists and anthropologists to analyze how the invention, production, and circulation of drugs in the Global South foster access and frame public health practices. This literature has shown that – in contrast to its dominant mode of existence in Europe and North America – the pharmaceuticalization of care in the Global South has marginally been associated with the prevention and the treatment of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). It has merely been a pharmaceuticalization of health interventions against infectious diseases. The chapter explores more thoroughly: (1) the transformation of care through the standardization of drug uses and therapeutic citizenship; and (2) the ways in which the mass-production of generics in Asia reinforced the massive investments of global health in drug access programs and its prioritization of infectious diseases. A combination of institutional continuity and medico-economic calculus have thus created a situation such that NCDs are massively present in the Global South, the consumption of pharmaceuticals too, but they do not meet.

Keywords: Non-communicable diseases; Generics; Herbal remedies; Global health; Pharmaceuticalization; Local production (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035338443
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