Recap — Repoliticizing Health System Resilience: Unpacking the Political Determinants of Health with Benjamin Ewert

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Published on October 10, 2025

On September 17, 2025, Benjamin Ewert, a political scientist and Professor of Health Policy and Health Professions at Fulda University of Applied Sciences in Germany, presented his work on health system resilience and political determinants of health.

Ewert began by introducing his two hypotheses. First, that political determinates remain underexplored in current literature on health system resilience. Second, that current health system resilience policies in Germany reinforce the existing political and governance structures rather than changing them.

Guiding Ewert’s research was the question, how political is health system resilience? When examining frameworks for health system resilience Ewert described two distinct frames, a global health frame and a health system frame.

For his research, Ewert conducted a scoping review guided by his hypotheses. He found that there was a modest increase in political determinates of health in health system resilience literature after 2020, with a peak in 2023. Many of these were written by health and social scientists. Overall, Ewert found that there was an underrepresentation of political determinants in health system resilience concepts.

Next, Ewert highlighted gaps in current research. He found that political determinants were often fragmented and isolated factors were the focus. Alongside this he found that political science theory was not integrated into research and issues were framed as managerial or technical. Lastly, Ewert highlighted resilience discourse and how this risks reinforcing the status quo. As a result of these gaps, Ewert proposes that more systematic political analysis is needed in literature on health system resilience.

Ewert provided an example from the German context based on a paper published by himself and colleagues in 2022. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic the primary focus was on individuals in the healthcare system to cope on their own. However, since the pandemic, the focus has shifted towards organizational and economic resilience and calls to improve in order to ensure better response to the next crisis.

To conclude, Ewert stated that health system resilience is a political task and in order for it be effective in implementation, HSR must be re-politicized.

Connect with Benjamin Ewert.

A publication has been released by Dr. Ewert related to this talk, and can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744133126100437

Ewert, Benjamin. (2026). Depoliticising resilience? Uncovering the political theories of health system resilience. Health Economics, Policy and Law, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744133126100437

Watch the full seminar: https://youtu.be/UN_ce8qrn9o

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