Strategic solidarity: solidarity and self-interest in Scandinavian contributions to global Covid-19 vaccine equity

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Nordic states were praised for leadership on global vaccine equity, notably through strong support for the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) and COVAX. At the same time, like other high‑income countries, they took decisive measures to secure priority access to vaccines for their own populations, contributing to global inequities. Scholarship on global health security and diplomacy often treats global solidarity and national self-interest as a binary and focuses on great powers and inter-state dynamics, overlooking how domestic drivers also shape global pandemic response. This article instead proposes the concept of “strategic solidarity” to analyse how solidarity and self‑interest were combined and justified in Norwegian and Danish global health diplomacy during the acute phase of the pandemic (2020–2022). Through analysis of three key policy debates – support for vaccine R contributions to global vaccine distributions and positions on intellectual property reforms to boost vaccine supply – the article shows how Norway and Denmark simultaneously enabled and constrained multilateral efforts for vaccine equity. Domestic political pressures, public opinion, national identity narratives, and inter-ministerial tensions shaped how authorities practiced multi‑level diplomacy and managed trade‑offs between national protection and global commitments. Strategic solidarity operated both as a policy orientation distinct from purely security‑driven logics and as a justificatory frame used to reconcile apparent policy incoherence and sustain the countries’ self‑images as solidaristic states. Strategic solidarity better captures the empirical reality of pandemic policymaking than a strict solidarity/self‑interest dichotomy and can inform the design of future mechanisms for more equitable global health responses.