Department Representation in Panel at Almedalen 2026

During Almedalen Week, Associate Professor Claudia Merli aims to provide new insights into the importance of international research collaborations and the consequences that reductions in funding may have for Sweden’s academic development. On Tuesday, she will moderate a panel discussion with leading actors in research, global health, and development work.

Claudia Merli is specialized in medical anthropology at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology. Through the network GlobeLife, she is organizing the panel discussion ”Stärkt kunskapsöverföring och kapacitetsuppbyggnad inom global hälsa” together with Associate Professor Jaran Eriksen, a medical researcher at Karolinska Institutet.

The discussion takes its starting point in the ongoing cuts to Sweden’s development aid budget, where the previous target of 1 percent of GNI has been abandoned. Sweden is ending its development cooperation with a number of countries in Africa and Latin America in order to prioritize migration, security, and support to Ukraine.

With a panel consisting of leadership in development work and researchers in medical and social sciences, the focus of the discussion will be on how to reinforce and build capacity in global health, in this new political landscape.

– We want to emphasize that this has major consequences also in Sweden. International research and educational collaboration is often described today in terms of passive loss, that we give them money so that they can develop, without us receiving anything in return. The purpose of the panel is to make people understand that the cuts in funding are also a loss for Sweden, not just for the recipient countries. We now need to find new forms of future collaboration, for example with more reliance on digital solutions, says Claudia.

International academic collaboration is an important part of global knowledge exchange, where all participating actors contribute something and take something back with them.

– Knowledge transfer must be seen as bilateral. It is not about Sweden being a good state helping poor people. When we lose bilateral agreements with the next generation of academics in the Global South, we also lose important perspectives within our own academic environment. Not least at KI, where many international students study medicine. We lose knowledge integration when we cannot import new perspectives, for example from medical students doing internships in specific wards or laboratories.

Claudia argues that the withdrawn funding is linked to the government not understanding how Sweden’s highly technological healthcare system can learn from exchange with poorer countries.

– Sweden still relies heavily on a one-sided model of knowledge transfer. We export our way of doing things, which can in fact be seen as a new form of colonial enterprise. The lack of adaptation to local contexts creates obstacles to real change. Professor Sten Hagberg and I represent the anthropological perspectives in the discussion, that we cannot understand what others need until we take their perspectives. That is the bottom-up approach.

In a globalized world, cultural awareness is also required within healthcare in Sweden.

– Health and healthcare are more than just biomedical issues. There must also be an understanding of the cultural and structural conditions that affect people’s health and access to healthcare.

GlobeLife is a multi-faculty collaboration between Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University focusing on research on global health, development, and planetary health. Claudia Merli is part of the GlobeLife steering group and, together with Co-lead Jaran Eriksen, is organizer and moderator of the panel discussion.

The panel consists of researchers with extensive experience of international collaborations and exchanges with the Global South, both in medicine and social sciences. Magdalena Eriksson is a researcher and member of SweDev, a network that aims to strengthen collaboration within the research community and increase interaction between development researchers and practitioners. Soorej Puthoopparambil is a senior lecturer in global health and head of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Migration and Health Data and Evidence at Uppsala University. Jakob Wernerman is head of the humanitarian department at Sida.

– The panel is thus both academic and includes the perspective of funding bodies when state funding is withdrawn. Jaran Eriksen works with collaborations, while Soorej Puthoopparambil places health at the center of the discussion. Sten Hagberg works with development anthropology in West Africa and Mozambique, and I myself am a medical anthropologist with long experience of work in Southeast Asia, says Claudia.

She sees Almedalen Week as an important arena for researchers to participate in.

– As far as I know, this is the first time that the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology has a panel discussion in Almedalen. I think it is important to be there and to carry out the university’s third mission: to engage in civil society. Almedalen is the most important democratic forum in Sweden. Here, academia has the chance to communicate directly with a wider audience and the politicians who are actually responsible for the cuts. I hope they come and listen to the discussion.

The panel discussion takes place on Tuesday, June 23 at 14:00, directly after GlobeLife’s first panel Global hälsa i klimatförändringens tid - vilken roll spelar Sverige? in House B at Uppsala University in Visby.

More information about the panel at the Almedalen website.

Text: Jennie Sjödin, May 2026