Social science contributions to the global action plan on antimicrobial resistance

Journal article, 2026

Since the adoption of the Global action plan on antimicrobial resistance in 2015 notable progress has been made in combating antimicrobial resistance. In 2024, 178 countries had developed multisectoral national action plans, with many drawing directly on the global action plan. However, only 20 of these countries have dedicated funding for implementation, 93 have a functioning multisectoral coordinating mechanism and 121 are implementing them.
Furthermore, very few national action plans address inequities in adverse health and social consequences of antimicrobial resistance, including from gender, disability and human rights perspectives.
Current efforts to curb antimicrobial resistance have stalled. Without faster implementation of effective interventions, including antimicrobial stewardship, water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure, therapeutics and vaccines, antimicrobial resistance is estimated to reduce global life expectancy by 1.8 years by 2035. 
The landscape of global health governance has changed dramatically since the action plan was established. Several cross-border public health crises have occurred, including a pandemic; unprecedented diplomatic challenges for multilateral organizations; and the alteration of the health funding landscape. Nonetheless, public health institutions have strengthened in many parts of the world, and the global health architecture for antimicrobial resistance is maturing through the establishment of institutions such as the Global Leaders Group on Antimicrobial Resistance and the AMR Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Platform. The international health community increasingly recognizes that antimicrobial resistance is not only a human, biomedical and regulatory issue, but also a social, animal, ecological and economic one.
Social science research on antimicrobial resistance has gained traction in the last decade, employing a diverse set of theoretical perspectives to better understand topics ranging from antimicrobial stewardship to political coordination. As the action plan commitments will be updated in 2026, an opportunity exists to employ a broader social science scope to accelerate national antimicrobial resistance interventions.
In January 2025, the Global Strategy Lab convened leading antimicrobial resistance social scientists from a variety of disciplines to determine which new ways of understanding antimicrobial resistance could catalyse and incentivize action. Three conceptions stood out as important to revisions of the action plan: antimicrobial resistance as socio-ecological dynamics, antimicrobials as essential infrastructure4 and antimicrobial resistance as collective action
problems.
In this article, we propose that these three social sciences conceptions can be applied to global action plan revisions to improve how problems are defined and their solutions implemented. These three concepts can also engage important new partners to ensure antimicrobial resistance policies are sufficiently equitable, sustainable and multisectoral.