Contesting boundaries: understanding industrial–health policy integration across time and contexts

This review analyses how industrial and health policy objectives have been linked, justified, and contested across diverse contexts. Drawing on 39 peer-reviewed studies, we develop a typology of four industrial-health linkages—implicit, challenge-based, capacity-building, and urgency-driven—each characterized by distinct degrees of integration, directionality, policy instruments, governance, and legitimacy. Building on frameworks from transformative and mission-oriented innovation policy, we embed dimensions of contestation and governance into our analysis. The findings reveal how global asymmetries, institutional fragility, and the politics of mission labelling shape policy integration. The typology offers scholars an analytical vocabulary for structured cross-case comparison, and provides policy analysist with a diagnostic framework for identifying operative linkage logics, anticipating contestation dynamics, and assessing whether governance arrangements match the intended depth of integration between health and industrial policy goals.