The institutional afterlife of a pandemic: Zimbabwe’s One Health strategy and the limits of crisis-driven governance

Governance structures built during a crisis often outlive the emergency that produced them. Zimbabwe's National One Health Strategic Plan 2026-2030 (the Plan) is a direct institutional legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its coordination structure sits in the Office of the President and Cabinet rather than a line ministry, deliberately echoing the Whole-of-Government arrangement credited with the country's pandemic response. This debate piece asks whether governance built in a crisis survives once the crisis is over. It draws on the Plan itself, a 2024 baseline assessment of One Health in Zimbabwe, the self-assessment phase of the country's 2025 Joint External Evaluation of health security capacities, and published case studies from Kenya and Rwanda. I argue that the pandemic generated genuine political priority for One Health, but that institutionalisation has not kept pace. The Plan is costed in full, yet it carries no earmarked domestic allocation, no instrument establishing its coordination mechanism in law, and no reference to provincial or district implementation. Zimbabwe is best read as an illustrative early case rather than as evidence of a regional trajectory. As many governments turn pandemic-era emergency coordination into permanent health structures, it offers an early test of whether such institutions can outlast the memory that built them or quietly fade once political attention moves on.