Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza as a Coordination Challenge: A Multi-Species Priority Application of the CORIN Framework

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) continues to generate significant impacts across animal health, wildlife management, food systems, and public-health interfaces. Despite strong scientific understanding and extensive surveillance capacity, outbreak responses remain fragmented and inconsistently coordinated across species, sectors, and jurisdictions. This draft preprint frames HPAI not primarily as a virological problem, but as a coordination challenge operating across multiple governance scales—individual, organizational, and institutional—and across multiple species, including wildlife, poultry, livestock, and companion animals. The paper applies the Collaborative Outbreak Response Integrative Network (CORIN) framework as a practical governance architecture for improving alignment, accountability, and learning in complex outbreak contexts. Rather than attributing failure to any single actor or jurisdiction, the paper adopts a systems-governance perspective that explicitly preserves individual accountability while addressing the structural and institutional conditions that allow coordination failures to persist across outbreaks, regions, species, and leadership changes. Accountability is treated as multi-scalar and grounded in transparency, due process, and procedural fairness. The preprint proposes a bounded, multi-species alignment process as a priority application of CORIN, emphasizing pilot-scale coordination, relational role clarity, and the generation of reusable governance artifacts. This approach is designed to improve outbreak preparedness and response without increasing regulatory burden, displacing statutory authority, or relying on adversarial enforcement. This work is shared to support discussion, review, and collaborative learning among regulators, industry, veterinarians, wildlife managers, public-health professionals, funders, and policy stakeholders. While motivated by real-world outbreak experience, it is jurisdiction-agnostic and intended to be applicable across national and international contexts.