Approximately 15% of the world’s population have a disability—and nearly 4 out of 5 live in the Global South. However, disability is seldom mentioned in global health and international development research. People with disability experience attitudinal and environmental barriers that limit their social inclusion. Due to different cultural perspectives and institutional capacities worldwide, people with disability experience various social conditions. In many settings, moralized beliefs toward disability assume one’s value, while medicalized beliefs are influenced by biomedical infrastructure. We develop a theoretical framework that cross-arrays these moral and medical dimensions to argue different framings of disability present varied opportunities for social inclusion. As a demonstration of this framework, we use data from the Accelerating Core Competencies for Effective Wheelchair Service and Support (ACCESS) Project (2014–2017) (n=6601) to analyze social inclusion differences in India, Kenya, and Nicaragua. We found that Nicaragua reported the highest count of social inclusion, followed by Kenya and India, respectively. These findings support our theoretical framework, respectively, which suggests there are three unique disability regimes—moral regime, integrative regime, and civic regime. We conclude that disability in the Global South is more complex than the Western perspective that emphasizes a unidimensional moral-to medical-to-social model continuum.

世界上大约 15% 的人口患有残疾，并且近五分之四的人生活在南半球。然而，全球健康和国际发展研究中很少提及残疾问题。残疾人经历的态度和环境障碍限制了他们的社会融入。由于世界各地不同的文化观点和机构能力，残疾人经历着不同的社会状况。在许多情况下，对残疾的道德信念承担着一个人的价值，而医学信念则受到生物医学基础设施的影响。我们开发了一个理论框架，交叉排列这些道德和医学维度，认为不同的残疾框架为社会包容提供了不同的机会。作为该框架的演示，n =6601）分析印度、肯尼亚和尼加拉瓜的社会包容性差异。我们发现尼加拉瓜的社会包容性最高，其次是肯尼亚和印度。这些发现分别支持了我们的理论框架，该框架表明存在三种独特的残疾制度——道德制度、整合制度和公民制度。我们的结论是，南半球国家的残疾问题比强调单一维度的道德、医疗、社会模式连续体的西方观点更加复杂。