Epistemic Communities and Global Tobacco Control Policymaking

Between the early 1960s and the early 2000s, tobacco control evolved towards a global treaty, when the 56th World Health Assembly (WHA) unanimously adopted the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) on May 21, 2003 as the first public health treaty to be negotiated under the auspices of World Health Organization. This paper is an analysis of global tobacco control policymaking using the epistemic community approach. The purpose of the paper is to illuminate how tobacco control epistemic community built a value-rational basis for the development of a novel global institution, the FCTC. The paper utilizes World Conference on Tobacco OR Health (WCTOH) proceedings, World Health Organization (WHO) archival documents on tobacco control, tobacco industry internal documents and interviews of tobacco control experts to analyze the contribution of the tobacco control epistemic community towards the development of global tobacco control. The results show that tobacco control experts played an important role in the transformation of tobacco control from a concern of a few developed countries into a global issue, the adoption of key WHA resolutions on tobacco control, the genesis and adoption of the FCTC, and WCTOH resolutions and recommendations. In addition, the paper finds that WCTOH activities and WHO tobacco control policymaking are intertwined because of the involvement of tobacco control experts in the decision-making processes.