One Health, an integrated health concept, is now an integral part of health research and development. One Health overlaps with other integrated approaches to health such as EcoHealth or Planetary Health, which not only consider the patient or population groups but include them in the social-ecological context. One Health has gained the widest foothold politically, institutionally, and in operational implementation. Increasingly, One Health is becoming part of reporting under the International Health Legislation (IHR 2005). The Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) has played a part in these developments with one of the first mentions of One Health in the biomedical literature. Here, we summarise the history of ideas and processes that led to the development of One Health research and development at the Swiss TPH, clarify its theoretical and methodological foundations, and explore its larger societal potential as an integrated approach to thinking. The history of ideas and processes leading to the development of One Health research at the Swiss TPH were inspired by far-sighted and open ideas of the directors and heads of departments, without exerting too much influence. They followed the progressing work and supported it with further ideas. These in turn were taken up and further developed by a growing number of individual scientists. These ideas were related to other strands of knowledge from economics, molecular biology, anthropology, sociology, theology, and linguistics. We endeavour to relate Western biomedical forms of knowledge generation with other forms, such as Mayan medicine. One Health, in its present form, has been influenced by African mobile pastoralists’ integrated thinking that have been taken up into Western epistemologies. The intercultural nature of global and regional One Health approaches will inevitably undergo further scrutiny of successful ways fostering inter-epistemic interaction. Now theoretically well grounded, the One Health approach of seeking benefits for all through better and more equitable cooperation can clearly be applied to engagement in solving major societal problems such as social inequality, animal protection and welfare, environmental protection, climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and conflict transformation.

The health of humans and animals is strongly influenced by nature and socio-cultural variables resulting from co-existence between humans and animals. By including natural, social and humanities scientists with an interdisciplinary approach from the beginning in research planning, these socio-cultural influences are adequately considered. In our One Health projects, we establish and maintain research partnerships with local institutes and universities in developing and transition countries. Developing health care cannot be limited to the academic field but must include local communities and authorities in co-production of implementation knowledge. Although many participants in such processes have no formal training, they are experts who bring experiential local knowledge often hidden from purely academic approaches. Using repeated participatory stakeholder meetings, effective and sustainable health care in a highly targeted manner can be implemented to address priorities of populations in an acceptable way that is feasible for the authorities.

Writing reflects some of the different characteristics of the language being used and of the people who are communicating. The present paper focusses on the internal written communication in international and inter-disciplinary research projects. Using a case study of an international public health research project, it argues that the authorship and the languages used in internal project communication are not neutral but help to generate or reinforce power hierarchies. Within research partnerships, language thus raises ethical issues that have so far been neglected. Current ethics guidelines often focus on interactions between scientists and participants of social research and clinical trials, with less attention paid to the interactions among the scientists themselves. Describing all the different project phases based on writing within a research project, the paper distinguishes different influences on the distribution of power that emerge through a focus on written communication. The focus of the present paper is to illuminate the issues of ethics, power and the dimensions of hierarchy, physical location and native versus non-native English speakers that arise from paying attention to such communications.

In recent years, numerous proposals have been made with the aim of establishing a systematic hierarchy of relationships for languages for special purposes (LSP), and different approaches have been classified in terms of vertical and horizontal models. Recently, however LSP research has moved more and more towards Applied Linguistics and a segregation has emerged between studies focusing on systematic topics and those based on concrete case studies. While studies in applied LSP research have increased, work on systematic approaches has been neglected. The present study follows a different approach, in that instead of segregating the analysis of concrete case studies from the work on systematic approaches, examples from case studies will be used for testing and revising systematic approaches. In this paper we shall first address the question based on these examples of which long established classifications need to be revised, and consider further whether revising and applying classifications is the way to go in LSP research or whether there is a need for a new typology. In the present paper we shall thus be building on and developing the work on structuring LSP in (Roelcke 2014) and on project-specific terminology (Pelikan & Roelcke 2015).

Tätig in der Schweiz, Europa und mit einem Fokus auf Länder mit niedrigen und mittleren Einkommen wirbt das Schweizerische Tropen- und Public Health-Institut als ein weltweit führendes Institut im Bereich der globalen Gesundheit knapp 80 Prozent seines Gesamtbudgets kompetitiv ein. Eine Kernkompetenz der 995 Mitarbeitenden im Headquarter und im Ausland stellt die Projektarbeit dar – in verschiedenen Projekttypen von Innovation über Validierung bis zur Anwendung. Am Beispiel des Forschungsprojekts im Bereich One Health wird die konkrete Anwendung des internen Projektlebenszyklus aufgezeigt. Obwohl er alternative Subprozesse zulassen muss, ist er dennoch ein sehr aktiver und erfolgreich gelebter Prozess des Swiss TPH, der Qualität schafft und damit Vertrauen: Wirkungsvolle Projekte sind die beste Voraussetzung für nachhaltigen Erfolg.

As researchers from different nationalities and disciplines collaborate in research projects with joint grants, science becomes more and more global. For conducting the research, project members from several different professional and national backgrounds work together on a daily basis using English as lingua franca (ELF). This results in a very heterogenic linguistic setting, influenced by several mother tongues and languages for specific purposes (LSPs). Systematic approaches have been neglected during the last years while LSP research moved more and more towards applied approaches working on concrete case studies. The present study follows an alternative approach. Applied linguistics and further development of systematic approaches shall here be seen as a circular flow. For instance, communication optimisation during a case study benefits from system-thinking and vice versa. How could the project language of a case study be structured and which long established classifications need to be revised based on these data? Is there a need for a new understanding of applied LSP research?