Markets and Mutations: mosquito nets and the politics of disentanglement in global health

•Analyses mosquito nets as a 'humanitarian goods'.•Ethnographically locates negative externalities of framing nets in global health logic.•Identifies local economy and ecology as disentangled from nets as humanitarian goods.•Questions the dominance of insecticide-treated nets in malaria control.•Advocates a more modest approach to malaria management.

Malaria management involves the continuous calibration of micro-environments, namely of the entangled habitats of mosquitoes, parasites and humans. This article focuses on humans and mosquitoes as unruly actors of environmental management. Drawing on economic sociology, I show how framing mosquito nets as 'humanitarian goods' disentangles particular economic and ecological realities. Juxtaposing politico-economic processes of mosquito net production and distribution with the emergence of insecticide resistance in mosquitoes I show how their disentanglement creates unintended social and disease realities. This suggests rethinking the spatio-temporal politics of environmental management of mosquitoes and malaria, and nuances the patterns of how exactly humanitarian goods 'do good'.