In May 2025, Indonesia formally left the World Health Organization’s South-East Asia Region (SEARO) to join the Western Pacific Region (WPRO). This seemingly administrative change exemplifies what I call a ‘refunctioning’ of global health governance: the redirection of existing legal and administrative infrastructures toward new purposes without wholesale reform or repair. I conceptualize this process through what I would call ‘infrastructural regionalism’, where administrative arrangements, epidemiological rationales, and data practices both organize cooperation and reimagine what a ‘region’ is and does. Indonesia’s shift from SEARO’s developmental orientation to WPRO’s platform-driven infrastructures redistributes epistemic authority, potentially repositioning the (postcolonial) state from data contributor to agenda-setter. Yet such refunctioning also generates dynamics of what Alejandro Rodiles terms ‘global ungovernance’—where new regulatory forms emerge through contestation rather than coherence, exposing the contradictions of global institutional architectures. By analysing how regional infrastructures are repurposed, this paper contributes to debates in STS, socio-legal scholarship, and critical global health, showing how regions act as contested sites of governance in a fractured global order.

About the speaker

Sonja van Wichelen is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research examines the intersections of law, life, and science in a globalizing world. Publications include Biolegality: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave, 2024—with Marc de Leeuw), Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology (Rutgers University Press, 2018), and Religion, Gender and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (Routledge, 2010). Van Wichelen serves on the Editorial Committee of the Annual Review of Anthropology and the Editorial Boards of Science, Technology, & Human Values, The Sociological Review, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is also a Council Member of the Society for the Social Studies of Science.