(Un)intended consequences: a social sciences stocktake of a decade of Global Action Plan-inspired antimicrobial governance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) remains a major global health threat. Despite increasing international attention, AMR governance has often neglected social and equity dimensions, and there is a crucial need to synthesise evidence from social sciences and humanities scholarship to devise more people-centred approaches. In this Personal View, we report a qualitative stocktake of the intended and unintended consequences of the most recent phase of global AMR governance that started around the year 2000 and reached a high point with the 2015 Global Action Plan (GAP) on AMR. Our interdisciplinary analysis was guided by the five key objectives of current AMR governance, as organised in the 2015 GAP, to reduce AMR through awareness, surveillance, infection reduction, antimicrobial use optimisation, and research and innovation. The resulting assessment indicated mixed outcomes. Although the past decade witnessed unprecedented AMR-related action and investment, empirical studies highlight negative consequences of the decontextualised export of high-income governance frameworks and the neglect of upstream antibiotic-sensitive reforms of production, care, and innovation systems. Not embedding AMR within more general developmental and environmental challenges has also undermined local buy-in and contributed to the siloed status of AMR policies. For the next GAP, we recommend foregrounding equitable interventions; adopting a bottom-up, integrated perspective to incorporate local realities and solutions; and creating robust social sciences and humanities feedback loops for global AMR frameworks.