Beyond market failures: IAVI and the organizational challenges of vaccine development

Recently, Product Development Partnerships (PDPs) for the development of vaccines affecting primarily developing countries have been emerging and gaining importance. This paper argues that the raise and diffusion of these ‘new species’ of organization suggests that the problems of vaccine development, particularly for neglected diseases, go beyond the ‘market failures’ argument, around which much of the current policy debate is centred. The turbulence that characterizes the organizational arrangements of vaccine development suggests that there is considerable uncertainty about how to distribute activities to organizations or groups, monitor them, evaluate their results, and integrate such results with those of other organizations or groups. Building on ongoing research on the International AIDS Vaccine, this paper argues that the difficulties in devising a way to organize the quest for new vaccines are linked to the complexity, interdependencies and fundamental uncertainties characterizing the bodies of knowledge underpinning the task4. While appropriate incentives may give a motivation to solve these problems, they do not per se guarantee that the players in the field possess the necessary competencies to address the challenges posed by managing vaccine development across an unstable and expanding set of bodies of knowledge. Therefore, the development of policies that will successfully address the problems of vaccine development requires an improved understanding of how the scientific, technical and social dimensions of vaccine development can be mapped into complex arrangements of actors, each of which possesses only a part of the competencies, and the motivation to use them, required to solve the overall task.