The Impact of Buzzwords on Global Public Health Practice and Scholarship
…By Luchuo Engelbert Bain, MD, PhD
The unchecked proliferation of buzzwords in global health—terms like “diversity,” “accelerators,” “decolonization” “localization” “gender sensitive, transformative” “intersectionality” —risks undermining intellectual rigor, policy clarity, and evidence-based action. Buzzwords often serve marketing over meaning, masking power imbalances, perpetuating technocratic jargon, and diluting critical scholarship. Their use fosters strategic ignorance, narrows research scope, and skews accountability. To preserve the integrity of global health scholarship and evidence-to-policy pathways, urgent recalibration of language and discourse is needed across institutions and funders alike.
Buzzwordization and checkbox syndrome are killing critical public health research, widening the gulf between who sets the agenda, what communities need, and what gets implemented. By masking power asymmetries and prioritizing optics over substance, these trends stifle meaningful knowledge translation and distort accountability, threatening the very equity global health claims to champion.
10 Ways the Buzzword Epidemic Undermines Global Health Scholarship and Evidence Translation
To reclaim the integrity of global public health scholarship, we must urgently move beyond seductive but hollow buzzwords and confront the structural power imbalances they obscure. Only by prioritizing grounded, context-driven research and resisting performative compliance can we close the widening gap between global health rhetoric and lived realities—and build systems truly responsive to the needs, voices, and agency of the communities we claim to serve.
