Abstract
Background: Emerging and endemic zoonotic diseases continue to pose major challenges to global health, food security, livelihoods, and sustainable development. Although One Health has strengthened surveillance, preparedness, and multisectoral collaboration, many initiatives remain dependent on externally funded projects and temporary coordination mechanisms. Adaptive capabilities developed during implementation may therefore be difficult to sustain once projects conclude or outbreaks subside, raising the question of how they can become embedded within community practice and remain available for subsequent health priorities.
Aims: To develop a conceptual framework explaining how repeated adaptive One Health practice may contribute to cultural incubation and the progressive embedding of community adaptive capacity for sustainable zoonotic disease management.
Methods: An integrative conceptual synthesis combined literature on One Health implementation and zoonotic disease management, adaptive learning in complex systems, and the cultural embedding of collective practice. These perspectives were integrated to examine how implementation experience, collective learning, and repeated practice may contribute to adaptive cultural change.
Results: The synthesis identified a sustainability gap between successful implementation of individual One Health interventions and adaptive capacity that becomes embedded beyond a specific intervention. The resulting Adaptive One Health Culture framework proposes cultural incubation as the developmental process through which repeated cycles of collaborative action, reflection, learning, and adaptation may embed systems understanding, collaborative problem solving, evidence-informed decision-making, and adaptive ways of working within community practice. Adaptive One Health Culture is conceptualized as an emergent community-level capacity whose problem-specific expression can be indirectly examined through implementation practice.
Conclusions: The framework shifts the sustainability question from whether individual interventions continue to whether adaptive capabilities become embedded in community practice, persist over time, and can be mobilized for subsequent priorities. These propositions provide a basis for empirical investigation of cultural incubation and its contribution to sustainable zoonotic disease management.