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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Front. Public Health

Sec. Public Health Policy

This article is part of the Research TopicBuilding Resilient Healthcare: Integrating Economic and Health Policies for Pandemic PreparednessView all 4 articles

A Systematic Review of Global COVID-19 Vaccine PPPs: Drivers and Barriers to Governance Alignment

Provisionally accepted
  • Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Background: Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have emerged as a prominent governance model for vaccine equity in the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain. Previous studies focus on evaluating PPP's performance, lacking multi-dimensional analysis on the drivers and barriers that shape public and private actors' willingness to participate in PPPs. Method: Following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, a systematic review using the Web of Science (WoS) database was conducted to identify empirical factors influencing stakeholders' preference for PPPs and the alignment between sectors was explored by qualitative content analysis. Results: Three main categories of private sector drivers were identified, including regulatory facilitation, financial incentives and reputational incentives. While four sets of barriers emerged, including the political environment, economic and logistic constraints, and the contractual obligations. For the public sector, motivations centered on ethical considerations, national interest protection, and institutional advantages, while participation was also constrained by vaccine nationalism and administrative lag. The analysis demonstrates the degree of alignment and misalignment among these governance factors. Conclusions: Based on the analysis of factors, this study proposes the Governance Alignment Framework (GAF) as a conceptual tool to pair the profits of different sectors and guide governments and public sectors to improve the developmental-steering capacities to better align private incentives with public value during the pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccine, Public-Private Partnerships, Global health governance, Vaccine supply chain, policy coordination

Received: 18 Oct 2025; Accepted: 10 Nov 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Qi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Xuejing Qi, xuejing.qi@ugent.be

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