After the commitment: brokerage, fragmentation and the politics of turning planetary health governance into operational governance

Governments keep signing things. Climate and health strategies, well-being acts, ecosystem accounting frameworks, integrative laws that promise to connect human health, ecological limits and justice across domains that usually run on separate tracks. Then the signing ends and the institutions carry on as before. Budgets stay where they were. Enforcement criteria do not change. The framework gets written into a strategy document and quietly broken into sector-specific pieces that no longer add up to anything integrative. This research is about the gap between formal commitment and operational reality, and what forces it closed.

The work uses comparative process tracing across three cases. Wales and the Well-being of Future Generations Act, where 44 public bodies have been working under integrative legislation since 2015. Brazil and the recent push to integrate climate and health policy across federal ministries, anchored by Fiocruz, the University of São Paulo and the Belem Health Action Plan from COP30. Lishui in Zhejiang Province, China, where Gross Ecosystem Product accounting has been written into how local officials are evaluated and how land is planned. Three different political systems, three different starting points, the same underlying puzzle.

Two ideas do most of the analytical work. Strategic brokerage, meaning the work that specific actors do to push a formal commitment into operational rules, redirected budgets and rewritten enforcement. And fragmented adoption, the failure mode where an integrative framework gets accepted in principle, broken into disconnected pieces in practice, and ends up changing very little. The research asks under what conditions brokerage produces real institutional change rather than symbolic adoption, stalling or fragmentation.

The work sits inside planetary health but reads it from a different angle. The field has built a strong case for why human health depends on the state of the planet. The harder question is institutional. Why do governance systems built for a stable planet keep absorbing integrative frameworks without changing their operating logic, and what does it take to shift that. The contribution is to institutional change theory from inside the planetary health field, rather than to its epidemiological evidence base.

The PhD runs from October 2025 to 2029 at the Universidade de Lisboa. Fieldwork sequence: Wales first, then Brazil, then China. Outputs will include the thesis, a practitioner brief, and a one-page decision aid for each case, written with the institutions that took part.