Theory of Change for Building Stronger Wildlife Health Surveillance Systems Globally

Background Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases that infect wildlife have highlighted the necessity for wildlife health surveillance (WHS) due to the interconnectedness of wildlife in maintaining the health of natural resources, agriculture, and humans. While global policies and guidelines exist, a critical gap remains in local-to-national implementation of WHS systems. A group of local, national, and global actors in WHS have formed a working group to address this gap. Methods and Findings The working group reports on a theory of change (ToC) developed to implement WHS from local to global scales. Using proven methods for developing a collaborative ToC, we leveraged the expertise of working group members and identified six transformative pathways to be implemented via collaborations across scales and contexts: mindset change, policy and investment, evidence-based practice, user-driven technologies, capacity enhancement, and mobilization of a global community of practice. Interpretation This ToC serves as a roadmap to develop effective WHS systems that support adaptive management and implementation. WHS is fundamental to understanding the impacts of health threats to biodiversity, domestic animals, and humans. This ToC presents an approach to operationalize the integration of wildlife health into collaborative One Health surveillance.