After polio: Imagining, planning, and delivering a world beyond eradication

As the world comes closer to the eradication of polio, the question of preparing for life after this debilitating disease becomes increasingly pertinent. This paper focuses on on-going institutional attempts to conceptualise, plan, and deliver a world after polio. Drawing upon interviews with global health officials and ethnographic fieldwork with eradication initiatives in Nigeria and Pakistan, I explore how international donors are transitioning towards life after the disease and the curtailment of the substantial resources it has successfully mobilised. Focusing specifically on the wind-down of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, I critically examine key risks emerging from polio transition and highlight a series of spatial and political assumptions about the emergent post-polio contours of global health that have largely been obscured by attempts to render transition planning as little more than a technical exercise.