The twin model aims to challenge the conventional flow of knowledge, innovation, and intervention, write Caroline Juhl Arnbjerg and colleagues
Helicopter or parachute research in global collaborations in medicine is a long standing and concerning practice.1 When this occurs, it involves researchers from the Global North conducting studies in the Global South with little or no involvement of and credit to local researchers. This is still too commonplace despite calls for more inclusive and equitable approaches, which started in the early part of the 21st century among the global health community and are now extending to the realms of research and advocacy for planetary health. Calls to “decolonise” and engender more equitable collaborations are a demand to distance collective global health work from its predecessors, such as colonial medicine, tropical medicine, and certain approaches to international health.234 The lack of equitable partnerships between researchers in the Global North and Global South contributes to the perpetuation of coloniality—the “invisible power matrix” that continues to uphold power structures and attitudes originating from historical colonialism—in science and medicine. …