Hot off the Press — Can Systems Analysis Help Avoid Potential Policy Failure for Emerging Zoonoses and Pandemic Prevention?

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Published on January 17, 2025

Dahdaleh Institute research fellows Chloe Clifford Astbury and Kirsten Lee, faculty fellows Shital Desai, Tarra Penney, and Cary Wu, and interim director Mary Wiktorowicz recently published a paper in BMJ Global Health titled, "Wildlife policy, the food system and One Health: a complex systems analysis of unintended consequences for the prevention of emerging zoonoses in China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Philippines."

The paper looks at preventing zoonotic spillover as a complex system problem and uses archetypes to examine unintended consequences of policies — fixes that fail. 

Some key findings:

• 📖 A systems perspective was used to illustrate how system adaptation may lead to the failure of prevention policies focused on wildlife.
• 🏛️ The ‘fixes that fail’ archetype emerges from actors with different goals unknowingly working at cross-purposes within a system, which can drive unintended consequences or policy failure. 
• 🌍 Considering three case-study countries—China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Philippines—they identify how this adaptation may impact zoonotic risk and food system outcomes.

Tension was found between the:

✅ policy goals of conservation and sustainable resources management;

✅ profit-seeking goals of local and global actors who exploit these resources, and

✅ goals of some local community members to maintain access to area that have cultural and religious meaning.

Led by Chloe Clifford Astbury and Tarra L Penney of Global Food System & Policy Research, this collaborative research would not have been possible without our local and global colleagues including Kirsten Lee, Mary Wiktorowicz, Shital Desai, Valentina De Leon, Dr. Marc Yambayamba, Helene Carabin, Eduardo Gallo-Cajiao, Russel Aguilar, Mala Ali Mapatano, Angran Li, Kathleen Chelsea Tongo, Zhilei Shi, Zhuoyu Wang, Cary Wu, Janielle Clarke, Krishihan Sivapragasam.

Read the full article here.

Astbury, Chloe Clifford, Demeshko, Anastassia, Aguilar, R., Mapatano, M. A., Li, A., Togño, K. C., Shi, Z., Wang, Z., Wu, Cary, Yambayamba, M. K., Carabin, H., Clarke, J., De Leon, Valentina, Desai, Shital, Gallo-Cajiao, E., Lee, Kirsten M., Sivapragasam, K., Wiktorowicz, Mary, & Penney, Tarra L. (2025). Wildlife policy, the food system and One Health: a complex systems analysis of unintended consequences for the prevention of emerging zoonoses in China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Philippines. BMJ Global Health, 10(1), e016313. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2024-016313

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