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Anthropology in One Health refers to the use of anthropological concepts, methods and field-based approaches to analyse health problems at the intersections of humans, animals, plants, microbes and environments. It examines how disease, risk, care, surveillance and prevention are understood, negotiated and organised in specific social and ecological settings. Its contribution is not simply to add a “social dimension” to biological problems already defined elsewhere. It also asks how a health problem is framed in the first place, whose observations are recognised as evidence, and how different ways of describing a situation shape the interventions that become possible. In this entry, One Health is approached primarily as a collaborative field of practice rather than as a single theoretical concept, bringing together ethnography, medical anthropology, political ecology, multispecies approaches, ethnobiology and studies of Indigenous and local knowledge.
- one health
- anthropology
- local knowledge
- ethnography
- zoonotic disease prevention
- interspecies relations
- ethnoveterinary knowledge
- transdisciplinarity
One Health is usually presented as an integrated approach to the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants and ecosystems. Its contemporary definition, endorsed by the One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP), emphasises transdisciplinarity, multisectoral collaboration, equity, socio-ecological balance and the inclusion of different forms of knowledge [1]. The Joint Plan of Action developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) has further anchored One Health within global health and environmental governance [2]. Terms such as collaboration, integration, prevention, interfaces and surveillance are now central to this field. They are useful, but they also require careful analysis.
Anthropology enters One Health by examining how the language of integration is applied in field settings. Many One Health projects begin with pathogens, reservoirs, vectors, transmission routes, samples, maps and indicators. These elements are essential. However, when research starts with these categories and only later turns to social life, it has already made assumptions about what the problem is. Communities may then be described mainly as sites of risk, audiences for health messages, or groups whose practices should be changed. Anthropology broadens the analysis by asking how certain practices become defined as risky, who is affected by that framing, and how histories of veterinary control, conservation, land access, laboratory work or development projects shape present interventions.
This question has been central to recent anthropological work on One Health, especially where scholars have argued that the approach must open itself to other ways of knowing rather than merely collecting local information as data [3]. It is also a question with a longer institutional background. The modern One Health agenda grew out of attempts to connect veterinary medicine, public health, ecology and conservation, especially around zoonotic emergence and wildlife-associated disease [4,5]. The Manhattan Principles and the later One World, One Health vocabulary made visible the links between ecosystem disruption, wildlife, livestock and human health [6]. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, this approach has gained even more political weight. The appeal is obvious. No pathogen respects administrative boundaries. No farm is isolated from markets, forests, labour, climate or trade. No environmental change remains purely environmental.
However, integration does not automatically produce equality between disciplines. Much One Health research remains shaped by veterinary, biomedical and epidemiological priorities. Social science is often invited after a difficulty has appeared, such as vaccine refusal, mistrust of authorities, limited adherence to biosecurity measures, rumours, resistance to culling, or low uptake of surveillance tools. This reflects a behaviour-change framing in which social factors are treated mainly as obstacles to technical implementation, and people are approached as targets whose conduct should be corrected, nudged or made more compliant. Anthropology can contribute to communication and public engagement, but its role should not be limited to explaining resistance or improving acceptance after major decisions have already been made [7,8].
This entry therefore presents anthropology not as a service discipline for One Health, but as a field that can contribute to the definition of problems, evidence and interventions. Zoonotic disease prevention, antimicrobial resistance, livestock health, wildlife conservation and environmental change are not only biological or technical issues. They are also shaped by livelihoods, social differentiation, institutional trust, animal movements, memories of past interventions, everyday care, and forms of knowledge that are not always easily translated into epidemiological tables. The aim is not to romanticise local knowledge, but to examine how people who live and work with animals and landscapes may notice, name and respond to changes before these changes enter official surveillance systems [9,10,11].
The discussion draws on medical anthropology, critical One Health, multispecies ethnography, political ecology, ethnobiology and Indigenous and local knowledge studies without treating any one of these traditions as sufficient on its own. Medical anthropology clarifies how disease categories, institutions and therapeutic pathways are socially organised; critical One Health examines unequal distributions of authority within integrated health programmes; multispecies ethnography and ethnozoology attend to practical relations with animals; political ecology connects disease emergence to land use, conservation, livelihoods and governance; and Indigenous and local knowledge studies draw attention to situated ways of observing environments, vectors, livestock, wildlife and illness without reducing them to raw data for external systems [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21].
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/encyclopedia6070151
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