Ronald Labonté, Glenn Laverack (Auth.) - Health Promotion in Action - From Local To Global Empowerment-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2008)

Health Promotion in Action
Also by Glenn Laverack

PUBLIC HEALTH: Power, Empowerment and Professional Practice
HEALTH PROMOTION PRACTICE: Building Empowered Communities
HEALTH PROMOTION PRACTICE: Power and Empowerment
Also by Ronald Labonté

POWER, PARTICIPATION AND PARTNERSHIPS
FATAL INDIFFERENCE: The G8 and Global Health (with T. Schrecker, D. Sanders
and W. Meeus)
HEALTH FOR SOME: Death, Disease and Disparity in a Globalizing World
(with T. Schrecker and A. Sen Gupta)
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE IN PUBLIC HEALTH (co-editor with J. Green)
Health Promotion in
Action
From Local to Global Empowerment
Ronald Labonté
University of Ottawa, Canada
Glenn Laverack
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
With a Foreword by
Fran Baum
Flinders University, Australia
© Ronald Labonté and Glenn Laverack 2008
Foreword © Fran Baum 2008
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-00722-2
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First published 2008 by
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Labonté, Ronald N.
From local to global empowerment : health promotion in action /
Ronald Labonté & Glenn Laverack.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Health promotion. 2. Social medicine. 3. Globalization—Health
aspects.
[DNLM: 1. Health Promotion. 2. Community Health Services.
3. Social Justice. WA 546.1 L122f 2008] I. Laverack, Glenn.
II. Title.
RA427.8.L28 2008
362.1—dc22 2008020584
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Boxes x
List of Tables xi
Foreword xiii
Acknowledgements xvii
Introduction: Localising the Global 1

An overview of the book 4
1 Health Promotion: Concepts and Context 6

Health, equity (social justice) and empowerment 7
Health promotion roles 9
Health promotion tensions 10
Setting the historical context 15
From biomedicine to health behaviourism 17
Health promotion on the ascendancy 19
Health promotion in decline 20
The new millennium 23
2 Health Promotion Practice: Power, Empowerment and the

Social Determinants of Health 25
Power: The capacity to create or resist change 25
Health promotion: Power, empowerment and the
practitioner 29
The ‘domains’ of empowerment 30
The concept of ‘community’ 37
Health promotion competencies and ethics 38
Health promotion and the social determinants of health 43
Social determinants of health in health promotion
practice 44
The politics of policies affecting the social determinants of
health 51
v
vi Contents
3 Pathways to Local Empowerment 53

Why a continuum? A brief history 53
The empowerment continuum 54
Personal action 57
Small groups 58
Community organisations 59
Partnerships 61
Social and political action and beyond 65
Health activism 68
4 Working to Build Empowerment: The Local Challenge 73

Engaging with people to address local concerns 73
Building local partnerships 81
Building community capacity 82
Influencing health policy 84
The steps to influencing health policy 87
Evaluating local empowerment 94
5 Pathways from the Local to the Global 103

Unhealthy contradictions: The emergence of global
production chains 103
Explaining globalisation 106
From the international to the global 108
Of debts, structural adjustment and neoliberal
globalisation 111
Maybe yes, maybe no, mostly no: Interrogating
globalisation’s dominant health ‘story’ 116
An unhealthy tale of winners and losers 122
6 Working to Build Empowerment: The Global Challenge 127

Health as security 128
Health as development 130
Health as global public good 139
Health as commodity 141
Health as human right 150
The health imperative of redistribution 155
7 Glocalisation: Health Promotion’s Next Grand Challenge? 159

Saying no is necessary but not sufficient 159
Relocalising the economy 162
Contents vii
Democratising the global economy 166

Globalising the economy as if poverty, health and the
environment mattered 174
What can health promoters do? 178
Revalorising the idea of empowerment: A closing caution 182
Bibliography 185
Index 204
Figures
3.1 The local empowerment continuum 55

5.1 Life expectancy and per capita income (adjusted for
purchasing parity) 121
6.1 Comparative costs, aid and tax cuts, Canada 2000–5,
Millions of C$ 137
6.2 Worldwide, external debt service dwarfs development
assistance flows 137
ix
Boxes
1.1 Health education or health promotion? 18

2.1 Some criteria for selecting groups to organise or support 39
3.1 The case for and against Herceptin® in the UK 69
3.2 Treatment action campaign 70
4.1 Improving the delivery of local services 80
4.2 Improving local involvement in road maintenance 82
4.3 The role of media: Advocacy that changes the frame 90
5.1 Measuring poverty? 119
6.1 Global public-private partnerships: For better, for worse? 134
6.2 Health promotion activism and the Framework
Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) 142
6.3 Thailand’s note of caution 149
6.4 When health activism meets the law 153
7.1 The Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA) 161
7.2 Glocalising health activism 180
x
Tables
2.1 Judgemental assessment 26

2.2 Empowering assessment 27
2.3 The empowerment domains 31
2.4 The social determinants of health 45
3.1 Direct and indirect actions towards empowerment 67
4.1 Fundamental characteristics of participation, involvement
and consultation 78
4.2 A framework to influence policy 86
4.3 Five representative statements for each empowerment
domain 98
6.1 Millennium development goals and targets 131
6.2 WTO agreements with major public health implications 145
xi
Foreword
This book presents an ideal companion volume to the 2008 Report from
the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants
of Health. An idea central to the Commission’s report is that empowered
people and communities are much healthier than those that are not.
Indeed the Commission drew on the work of one of its members, the
Nobel Laureate economist Prof. Amartya Sen, to argue that empower-
ment is a central social determinant in rich and poor countries alike, and
that development goals are unlikely to be met unless empowerment is
central to policies and practices. Like many buzz words, empowerment
can come to lose its meaning through overuse and simply be a word
added to policies and programme plans. In this book it is seen as begin-
ning with community identification of what is needed to improve and
sustain health, progressing to the extent of support from government for
healthy and redistributive public policy and stretching to the rules and
systems of global governance to ensure health and well-being for all. Civil
society is envisioned to have a role at each level in lobbying, demanding
and fighting for power for those who are disempowered. Labonté and
Laverack remind us very clearly that if some people are going to be
empowered, then others will be sharing their existing power and giving
some of it up. Thus, far from presenting a cosy view of consensus partic-
ipation happening in romanticised, well-functioning communities,
devoid of economic and gender struggles, we are given a perspective on
the power struggles that underpin the work of health promoters in
whichever arena they work.
Often empowerment is associated primarily with working locally
using community development methods. This book challenges this view
and demonstrates unequivocally that health promotion does indeed
involve local empowerment but is equally concerned with national and
global power and that each level is intimately connected. Stories, rooted
in communities, tell of the working and family lives of poor people and
show the extent to which the tentacles of economic globalisation reach
into everyday experience. These stories make a compelling case that
effective health promoters have to understand the broad context that
affects the lives of people with whom they work. This is a far cry from
the early days of health promotion when the most important under-
standing health promoters were expected to have was of the various
xiii
xiv Foreword
theories of behaviour change. The social theories woven through this

book provide the twenty-first-century health promoter with a picture of
the grand narrative that shapes health and well-being in our modern
communities.
Acting locally and thinking globally has been an important mantra for
many concerned with social justice. A step further than this is the con-
cept of ‘glocalisation’ which describes how health promoters can com-
bine action that link the two. This book provides ample tools which are
designed to break the process of empowerment down into stages, build
capacity and to analyse the blocks to empowerment. These tools are
essential because, despite three decades of evidence about the lack of
effectiveness of behaviour change methods, when they are not backed
up by a strong policy framework to change the environments within
which people make their lifestyle choices, many health departments and
agencies still invest most resource in direct attempts to change behaviour
(Baum, 2008). This is because doing so has a beguilingly simple logic: the
behaviour leads to ill-health; so persuading people directly to change
their behaviour must be the most efficient and effective way to reduce
illness. But diseases are caused by a complex interaction of factors and
behaviours, which while playing a part in many, are generally well down
the list in terms of percentage contribution. By far, and by way, the most
crucial list of causes are those driven by social and economic determi-
nants. The fact that in some African countries life expectancies are in the
thirties while in the best performing countries of the world they are in
the eighties, or that Indigenous people in Australia live 17 years less than
their non-Indigenous counterparts, owes very little to behaviours other
than such behaviours being an expression of the broader structural fac-
tors driving the opportunities for health. Labonté and Laverack deftly
explore the connections between life circumstances, social and eco-
nomic structures and the concept of empowerment. They examine the
borders and terrains that connect powerlessness to power and reveal very
clearly that a more equal world will not come about without a struggle
of ideologies. This examination is situated in the dynamics of our glob-
alised twenty-first-century world and, despite its complexities, it is made
to seem possible that health promotion can come to play a central role
in working for a more equitable distribution of health.
The Commission on the Social Determinants of Health has, since its
establishment by the World Health Organization in 2005, determined
that its legacy would be more than a report (CSDH, 2008). It has recog-
nised that a vibrant social movement involving civil society, academics,
public servants and others will be required to bring about the changes
Foreword xv
it will recommend. This movement is already gaining momentum

through the activities of civil society groups such as the People’s Health
Movement. This book is an essential handbook for that movement.
Fran Baum
Professor of Public Health
Flinders University, Adelaide Australia
Co-Chair, People’s Health Movement Steering Council
Commissioner, Commission on the Social Determinants of Health
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the many people with whom they have
had the privilege of working and exchanging ideas during the prepara-
tion of this book. In particular, Elizabeth Vendetti and Jessica Melnik-
Gavreau for assistance in the final preparation of the manuscript, Dr Tim
Tenbensel for his insights into health policy and the late Dr Eberhard
Wenzel for his passionate belief in the importance of health promoters
confronting the global even while strengthening their work on the local.
Ronald Labonté would like to thank all participants in the Globalisation
Knowledge Network for the insights they brought to global health, only
some of which are reflected in this book; and his partner, Lisa Coy, for her
usual long-suffering tolerance.
Glenn Laverack would like to thank his family – Elizabeth, Ben, Holly
and Rebecca – for their continued support, love and understanding.
xvii
Introduction: Localising the Global
The average plate of food eaten in western industrial

food-importing nations is likely to have travelled
2,000 miles from source to plate. Each one of those
miles contributes to the environmental and social
crises of our times.
(Bello 2002)
In a Canadian city, a ghettoising enclave of high-rise apartments holds

thousands of poor families on social assistance allowances. Most are
single-parent families. Most live well below the poverty line. Most can-
not afford healthy food. If they could, they would first have to weave
their way past convenience stores selling high fat, salt, carbohydrate and
sugar processed foods offering cheap but unhealthy bursts of energy.
A stalwart group of single mothers decides that they have had enough of
being preached to about nutrition. They have as good an understanding
of what is better and worse for themselves and their children as most
non-poor households. They’re clear: It’s about access. It’s about afford-
ability. It’s about exerting control over their environments. They start
a community garden which, in turn, starts a small movement in low-
income neighbourhoods across the country. The garden, though, is only
minimally about the food. It is primarily about the capacity that it
creates: the empowering experience of negotiating successfully, and from
a position of agency, with all the authorities and individual professionals
whose ‘gaze’ of regulatory watchfulness has been so disabling in the past.
For some in the group, the garden is an organising tool best used to
mobilise more political activism against welfare retrenchment and
income inadequacies. For others, the sense of control and coherence so
important to the experience of health exists in the simple act of tending
1
2 Health Promotion in Action
their tomatoes. For the health promoters involved, their role is one of
opening the communicative channels between the women and the state
agencies that have the resources the women need, and supporting the
legitimacy of the women’s claims to these resources.
In a British city, a health promoter starts another community garden.
It is on the outskirts of the city where the relatively poor have been pushed
by the global inflation of inner-city property values. The garden is large,
requires a sizeable volunteer group to maintain, and produces a harvest
substantial enough to fill about half the participants’ food needs during
the growing season. Negotiating with state authorities for the space and
resources was less of a concern than developing the farming skills of the
volunteer group. With prescient foresight (this garden project took
place in the early 1990s) the health promoter’s concern with healthier
food knowledge and access was incidental. Her primary concerns were
with reducing the carbon footprint of the globalised food industry by
localising production on an expanding scale, and increasing the public
reservoir of food production knowledge. Growing one’s own, she sur-
mised, would soon become less of a hobby and more of a political and
survival imperative.
Two gardens. Two health promotion endeavours. Two quite different
frames in which very similar activities locate the contemporary health
promotion challenges of local empowerment in a globalising era.
The first approach works from the inside-out, seeking healthful
change one marginalised person and one harvest at a time. Its politics
are local, its interest in broader social movements incidental or, at best,
secondary. It embodies health promotion’s aphorism of health being
grounded in the environments (settings) in which ‘people live, work and
play’. It is successful, in part, because the local is where people meet face-
to-face and the power inequalities that underpin most health inequali-
ties can be met, eye-to-eye. Human decency is easier to honour when it
is a person next to you and not an abstracted category of ‘welfare recip-
ient’, ‘senior bureaucrat’ or ‘corporate executive’. It is successful, in other
part, because the local is largely irrelevant to the machinations of global
commerce, market integration and the national politics that both enable
and are constrained by it. Community development, described by one
South American health worker, was a favoured idea promoted by the
international financial institutions (the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund) during the worst days of structural adjustment they
imposed on that continent. Why? ‘It took attention away from what
our governments were being forced to do to get the loans to pay their
international debts’, the health worker explained, ‘that they had to cut
Introduction 3
public spending, sell off their assets, de-regulate their economies and
open themselves up to foreign trade and investors. The idea of commu-
nity development gave the impression that communities had both the
responsibility and the power to make things good for everyone. Perhaps
they should have the responsibility, but they do not have the power.’
(Personal communication, Pan-American Health Organisation Interna-
tional Conference on Health Promotion 1992).
Therein lays the seed of the second approach, one that works from the
outside-in. The outside is the health promoter’s analysis of contempo-
rary globalisation and its particular impact on both local economics and
local food. This analysis is well-founded. As economic globalisation con-
tinues its sweep and deepens across the planet, food insecurity is rising,
food control is monopolising and diets globally are in unhealthy transi-
tion. There is also a small but growing ‘glocalisation’ movement (‘think
globally, act locally’) promoting the importance of the 100-mile diet (to
consume food only produced within a 100-mile radius) – something
obviously much easier to achieve in environments conducive to long
growing and harvest seasons.
The first approach is inherently optimistic and utopian in reach,
assuming that small step-wise change can eventually build a future
most people desire. The second approach is intrinsically pessimistic and
dystopian in grasp, embedding within it the probability of an imminent
future of economic and ecological collapse. The first forecasts how the
world should be and works backwards to how we might get there. The
second extends present trends into a future and creates defensive strate-
gies to cope. Both are methods variously embraced by health promotion
and public health. Neither is right nor wrong.
Where both approaches falter is in their emphasis on the local. The
local remains vitally important to health and will continue to dominate
health promoters’ work. That is one reason why half of this book reviews
approaches to local empowerment that have been tried and tested, both
theoretically and empirically. But the local, whether seen as a world capa-
ble unto itself or as a small domain increasingly constrained by world-
wide forces, is an insufficient terrain for health promotion work. That is
why another half of this book assesses the state of knowledge about how
globalisation is affecting peoples’ health, and the possibilities for health
promotion’s engagement with it.
Where both approaches excel is in their emphasis on empowerment,
the development of peoples’ capacities to exercise greater control over
important aspects of their environments. Power, defined simply as the
capacity to create or resist change, but examined more critically in
Chapter 2, is a recurring theme in human life, from its expression in

interpersonal relationships to its various practices in political and eco-
nomic life. It is also one of the more important determinants of peoples’
health, whether regarded as the psychological experiences of control or
analysed as the social organisation of communities, societies and
economies which creates and distributes risks and vulnerabilities among
different population groups.
An overview of the book
Chapter 1. Health promotion: Concepts and context

In Chapter 1 we define the key concepts in health promotion including
health, equity and empowerment. We discuss the different roles that
health promotion practitioners have and the tensions that they face in
their everyday work. We help to set this within a historical context of the
development of health promotion up to the present.
Chapter 2. Health promotion practice: Power, empowerment and

the social determinants of health
Chapter 2 discusses how power and empowerment are central to health
promotion. We unpack the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘community
empowerment’ and discuss why these remain important to the role of
the health promotion practitioner. We discuss the competencies and
ethics health promoters require for empowering work, and review the
link between health promotion and the social determinants of health
and the politics of policies affecting health equity.
Chapter 3. Pathways to local empowerment

Chapter 3 provides clarity to the theme of local empowerment and its
strategic pathways. In particular, this chapter discusses the continuum
of empowerment as the key pathway through which individuals, groups
and communities can gain more power-over social and political influ-
ence. The discussion then goes further to examine the role of health
activism as a legitimate means of local empowerment.
Chapter 4. Working to build empowerment: The local challenge

Chapter 4 maintains our focus on the local level, and introduces five
key steps to build local empowerment within health promotion pro-
grammes using case study material to illustrate each area: engaging
communities, establishing partnerships, building capacity, influencing
health policy and evaluating empowerment.
Introduction 5
Chapter 5. Pathways from the local to the global

Chapter 5 brings to the discussion the link between the local and the
global. An explanation of globalisation within the context of health pro-
motion is developed, noting how processes of globalisation can impinge
on the health of people at the local level. We identify who are the ‘win-
ners and losers’ in an increasingly globalised world and what potential
roles exist for health promotion practitioners in reshaping globalisation
in a healthier direction.
Chapter 6. Working to build empowerment: The global challenge

In Chapter 6 we examine five different discourses in which globalisa-
tion and health have been framed and how they compete for political
influence. The five discourses are health as security, development, pub-
lic good, commodity and human right. Each health discourse has both
limitations and strategic use, but the greatest global challenge to each is
the imperative of a more equitable global resource distribution towards
health.
Chapter 7. Glocalisation: Health promotion’s next grand

challenge?
Chapter 7 brings together the key themes of the book in an assessment
of two competing ideas on how to create better global health and sus-
tainability: relocalising the economy and democratising global gover-
nance. We discuss the principles and policy-specific interventions that
could reframe a pathological economic globalisation to one premised
on promoting health, reducing poverty and preventing climate change
and natural resource depletion. We conclude with a reflection on the
implications for health promoters, and for their efforts to engage in an
empowering practice in the context of globalisation.
1
Health Promotion: Concepts and
Context
All diseases have two causes: one pathological, the

other political.
(Aphorism attributed to the nineteenth-century
public health activist Rudolf Virchow)
The meaning of health promotion remains dynamically ambiguous. In

the words of the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (World Health
Organization 1986), ‘health promotion is the process of enabling people
to increase control over, and to improve, their health.’ A recent content
analysis of the most influential health promotion definitions in the liter-
ature found that their major discriminating feature was indeed ‘the extent
to which it involves the process of enabling or empowering communities’
(Rootman et al. 2001). O’Neill and Stirling (2007) usefully characterise this
as health promotion’s discursive meaning, its broad penumbra of ‘the pro-
motion of health’ within which its more organised set of practices occurs.
These organised practices, in turn, are defined by Green and Kreuter as
‘any planned combination of educational, political, regulatory and orga-
nizational supports for actions and conditions of living conducive to the
health of individuals, groups or communities’ (Green & Kreuter 2005). If
the fulminating Ottawa Charter definition is the idealised ‘what’, the
more technocratic approach to planned change is the pragmatic ‘how’.
In the 20 years since the Ottawa Charter, no health promotion decla-
ration has as succinctly and evocatively laid out the field of practice.
The Charter identified five foci of the health promoter’s work:
1. Develop personal skills (whether traditional forms of lifestyle health

education or working with marginalised groups to increase their level
of political analysis)
6
Health Promotion: Concepts and Context 7
2. Create supportive environments (from the esteem-building support

of small groups to ‘making healthy choices the easy choices’ in the
numerous ‘settings’, such as schools and workplaces, in which peo-
ple spend much of their time)
3. Strengthen community action (a defining ethos of health promo-
tion, one already captured in our introductory garden stories)
4. Build healthy public policy (the locus of intersectoral or ‘whole of gov-
ernment’ work, the target of community and professional advocacy
initiatives and the lever through which health equity among groups is
achieved)
5. Reorient health services (to better balance the resources for health
promotion work with that of curative medicine, and to improve
health systems’ understanding of their roles to improve health)
These five foci, along with the Charter’s three strategies of ‘enable, medi-
ate and advocate’, have an almost iconic stature in health promotion
work in many parts of the world. Later chapters will review some simpli-
fied models that capture the panorama of practice the Charter portrays.
While these five health promotion foci are usually interpreted as local or,
at best, national responsibilities, we will also see how they apply at global
levels of action.
Health, equity (social justice) and empowerment
Of the many concepts that inform this book, three are basic: health,
equity (and its corollary, social justice) and empowerment. Below we offer
some initial thoughts on how we approach their meaning.
There is no shortage of attempts to define health, from the World
Health Organization’s classic, ‘a state of complete physical, mental and
social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity’
(World Health Organization 1946); to the Ottawa Charter’s emphasis on
its being ‘a resource for everyday life’ (World Health Organization 1986);
to the Bangkok Charter’s qualification of it as ‘a determinant of quality
of life . . . encompassing mental and spiritual well-being’ (World Health
Organization 2005). There are also the more traditional medical defini-
tions which emphasise normal physical functions. Astute readers will
notice circularity in all of these definitions: health is well-being, but what
is well-being if not also health? As for health being normal functioning,
who defines normal and how? These are troubling issues for the results-
based approach to ‘investing in health’, the title of the globally influen-
tial 1993 World Bank report on health sector reform (World Bank 1993)
which championed a selective approach to health care based on narrowly

prescribed cost–benefit analyses. This is also why so much of the account-
ing in health systems remains dominated by what can be counted: death
and disease (mortality and morbidity).
The important elements of the concept of health that we might take
from these definitions are (1) perception and meaning (health is as
much what is experienced as what can be measured), (2) social relations
(health is embedded in human networks and interactions), (3) capacities/
capabilities (health is a product of many intrinsic and extrinsic
resources) and (4) physical functioning (health is embodied and not
simply imagined).
Equity, in turn and as applied to health, is a normative judgement of
what is fair. It differs from equality, a measure of ‘sameness’, although the
terms are often used interchangeably. This is particularly so in the UK,
where health inequality has become synonymous with health inequity.
In stricter terms, a health inequity is a difference (an inequality) in
health (however measured) that is significant in size and number of
people affected, preventable through policy or other intervention and
not an effect of freely chosen risk. A major concern of health promoters
is social inequities that reside in the structures of society, creating system-
atic differences in health outcomes between different population groups.
Examples of these include gender differences that arise from patriarchal
norms or discrimination; class differences that arise from inequalities in
wealth, power and ownership/control of capital; and geographic differ-
ences that arise from higher exposures to risk or less access to remediable
care or preventive resources.
Underpinning the concept of equity is that of social justice. There are
several theories of social justice with different implications for equity. The
two major theories differ in their emphasis on means or ends: equality
of opportunity or equality of outcome. The first, and politically domi-
nant, theory holds to the importance of ensuring that everyone ‘plays by
the same rules’ – there is no discrimination. Fairness is judged by equal-
ity in process. The second, and politically challenging, theory holds to
the importance of ensuring that rules work to minimise preventable dif-
ferences in outcomes between the players. It discriminates positively in
favour of those groups that start the ‘game’ of social and economic life with
fewer resources, since equal rules for unequal players will always produce
unequal results. While fairness in process is important, health promotion’s
concern with preventable differences in health outcomes aligns its ethics
more closely to the second theory of justice (Labonté 2000; Laverack 2004).
Empowerment, in a related fashion, has two grammatical variants. The
first variant is the term’s use as a transitive verb, as in ‘we shall empower
this or that group’. This common use may be well intended. It also recog-
nises that there are real differences in certain forms of power that exist
between groups and that may contribute to health inequities. But there
are two limitations to this use of the word. The first limitation is that it
renders people as objects of the health promoter’s work, rather than as
people capable of acting in their own right. It also masks from view the
power that people might already possess. The second limitation is that it
implies a purpose: empower to do what? The ‘what’ is often whatever the
health promoter or her agency considers an important health problem.
Despite decades of acknowledging such social determinants of health as
poverty, unemployment or poor housing, health problems often end up
being defined as a behavioural risk: smoking, obesity, substance abuse.
This is not empowerment, but subtle coercion. The second variant of
empowerment’s use is as an intransitive verb. In this construction, peo-
ple cannot ‘be empowered’ by others; they can only empower themselves
by acquiring more of power’s different forms. This requires a careful
understanding of the different forms or practices of power, especially
those that health promoters and their agencies might possess and that
can be made available to be taken up and used by others (Labonté 1993a,
1998; Laverack 2003). The distinction in these two meanings is subtle yet
important; we return to it, with examples, in Chapter 2.
Health promotion roles
Health promotion has struggled to define itself as a discipline or profes-

sion. It continues to do so, with arguments advanced in favour (e.g.,
providing quality assurance, legitimacy within health systems, practice
standards) and against (e.g., limiting practice scope, professionalising
for self-interest). There are, certainly, skills or competencies demanded
of health promotion work, and useful efforts have been made to codify
some of these. But in most countries health remains more a ‘field of
practice’ than a distinct profession (O’Neill & Stirling 2007), the bound-
aries of which are not static. Neither are the issues, groups or institu-
tions within the field and with whom practitioners might engage.
This does not mean that the roles health promoters assume in this
field of practice are endless or complex. Their broad nomenclatures are
fairly straightforward and can be characterised as follows:
1. Educator/watchdog: A combination of increasing public awareness of

health determining behavioural, social and environmental condi-
tions, and monitoring those conditions for their effects on health
status.
2. Resource broker: Making internal resources (personnel, finances, mate-

rial goods) more readily available to groups working on health deter-
minants, whether or not these actions are undertaken in the name of
health.
3. Community developer: Supporting community group organisation
and action on health determinants, through dedicated community
development/empowerment and competent health promotion staff
and programmes.
4. Partnership development: Engaging in joint programming and policy
development work, locally, regionally and provincially, with those in
the public, private and civil society sectors with a ‘stake’ in health
determinants.
5. Advocate/catalyst: Developing and advocating statements on policy
options that influence health determinants, especially to more sen-
ior government levels (Labonté et al. 1998).
Health promotion tensions
Each of the above-mentioned roles is also riddled with tensions. This

should not be surprising if we accept health promotion as an empowering
practice aimed at reducing health inequities. The reason is simple: health
promoters usually work for state or state-funded agencies, a social location
of presumed neutrality in a far-from-neutral set of social power struggles.
Consider, first, the modern state. There are many competing theories:
libertarian or neoliberal theories of the state as intruding on individual
freedoms, critical theories of the state acting on behalf of elite-class inter-
ests, pluralist theories of the state as a neutral broker between competing
interest groups, institutionalism theories of the state as creating its own
organisational patterns of thought and behaviour and ossifying into
them and feminist theories of the state as embodying patriarchal norms
and practices. We are agnostic on which of these is most revelatory for
health promotion practice. All contain analytical elements of usefulness.
What remains an essential feature of the state, however rendered, is that
it bridges relationships that are shaped by economic markets (producer/
consumer, owner/worker, creditor/debtor) with those that are formed in
day-to-day living (our identities as parents, group members, hobbyists,
neighbours, churchgoers). These latter relations are often short-handed
as ‘community’ or, when more formally organised, as civil society,
which the London School of Economics (2006) usefully defines as
the arena of un-coerced collective action around shared interests, pur-

poses and values. In theory, its institutional forms are distinct from
those of the state, family and market, though in practice, the bound-
aries between state, civil society, family and market are often complex,
blurred and negotiated. Civil society commonly embraces a diversity
of spaces, actors and institutional forms, varying in their degree of
formality, autonomy and power. Civil societies are often populated
by organisations such as registered charities, development non-
governmental organisations, community groups, women’s organi-
sations, faith-based organisations, professional associations, trade
unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations,
coalitions and advocacy groups.
Markets, and the relationships they create, are inherently ‘disequalising’,

in that they create inequalities between groups in income, power and
health. States intervene in markets, in part, to reduce their level of
inequalities, preserve social order and smooth economic functioning.
Different countries, people and political parties hold differing beliefs
over the depth of such intervention and the degree of inequalities that
might still be considered ‘fair’, with implications for health equity, as
we will see in Chapter 2. People in civil society, as citizens, in turn, often
pressure states for different interventions into the market, either calling
for less or more depending on their particular ideology or position of
economic privilege. In sum, there are inherent tensions, or what social
theorists call contradictions, in the relationships between all three of
the principal domains – state, market, civil society – that condition our
social lives and, in large measure, our health. The German sociologist
Claus Offe (1984) usefully draws attention to the strained role these
contradictions create for the state. On the one hand, the state requires
the market to generate the wealth from which it derives the revenue
for its functioning. On the other, the state requires the legitimacy of
its citizenry in all their diverse voices and demands that cause it to
grate constantly against the interests of those prospering most from
the market. The citizenry itself is often contradictory: how often do we
hear demands for more public services and demands for lower taxes,
as if the two are unrelated? The crisis in governance that this contra-
diction creates has worsened in our modern era of globalisation.
For now, we explore how these inherent tensions in a more mundane
fashion affect each of the five simply cast health promotion roles.
Educator/watchdog
There are two tensions in this role. First, what do we watch? We’ve already
noted that despite years of acknowledging the importance of social deter-
minants of health, most health promotion attention remains devoted to
behavioural risk factors. Rather than change social structures, a risky

endeavour for those working in state organisations, we focus on changing
individuals. This is not unimportant work, merely insufficient. The ‘field
of practice’ has improved in this respect, with increasing attention given
to the contexts that shape peoples’ behaviours, for example, the tobacco
or food industry and not just smokers or unhealthy food choices. Health
systems now also give greater attention to monitoring and commenting
upon the social determinants of health. But, as this chapter concludes,
health promotion’s actual efforts on these determinants remain marginal.
This leads us to the second tension: what do we do with what we watch?
There remains a tendency in health promotion practice to default to what
we characterise as the ‘education and awareness paradigm’: To improve
health, create a pamphlet. To really improve health, create a poster and a
mobile information unit. To be digitally astute, use all the resources of the
Internet to tell people what they should do to keep healthy. Even as we
embrace in our work the sweep of social and environmental determinants,
we complain that the real reason there is so little action on them is that
‘people just don’t understand’. Our role is thus to teach the poor, the
unemployed, the marginalised, the discriminated or the underserved that
the conditions they experience are what are making them sick. We suggest
that most people know this already, even if their concern is not expressed
as an overwhelming desire to reduce their higher-than-population-average
burden of disease. If there is education to be done about the social deter-
minants of health, it is more likely to be with those who dominate eco-
nomic markets or manage public finances, and for whom some studies
show indifference, for example, towards using public policy levers to
reduce economic causes of health inequities (Lavis et al. 2003).
Resource broker
There are two key tensions that play out in the role of resource broker.
The first is having resources to broker, which requires that they be ring-
fenced or clearly segmented from those dealing with health care.
Otherwise, the seemingly ceaseless health care cost demands driven by
technology, aging, media and, in the case of drug therapies, globalised
patent rules could consume all of health systems’ budgets. The second
tension is the need to apply an equity stratifier to who gets the resources.
Even staff time constitutes a resource, inasmuch as a programme or serv-
ice made available at no private cost becomes an economic subsidy to
whoever receives it. The ‘inverse care law’ is as alive and well in health
promotion work as it is in utilisation of medical care. The inverse care
law, first formulated by Julian Tudor Hart (1971) to describe the UK
National Health Service, describes how those with least medical need
(the affluent) tend to use a disproportionately greater amount of public
health services than those with greatest medical need (the poor). In health
promotion, the inverse care law functions when wellness programmes
attract the more affluent or maternal/child health programmes fail to
attract the poorest, or when most of our investment goes into behaviour
change programmes that past research finds is much more successful with
the middle- and higher-income strata (Baum & Harris 2006). This does
not mean these efforts should cease. State programmes that are univer-
sally accessible (open to everyone) gain longer-term and broader cross-
class support than those that are targeted only to the most needy. Neither
is there a simple algorithm to determine how health promotion resources
should be allocated. But if we hold to the justice norm of greater equality
in outcome, the first question posed in any new resource decision should
be: How will this reduce the health gap between top and bottom, by rais-
ing the bottom nearer to the top?
Community developer
Tensions in community development as an empowering health pro-
motion practice are among the best known and most discussed in the
literature. We have already identified a key one in our Introduction’s
gardening stories: the localisation of political and economic determi-
nants of health inequities at a level of social organisation that lacks the
power and resources to tackle these effectively. Elsewhere we have
called this a form of ‘community-blaming’ and have been critical of the
simplistic idealisation of the community sometimes found in health
promotion writings (Labonté 1993b).
Another basic tension exists between community development as
community-based programming, where we regard the community as a
setting in which to launch our education and awareness activities aimed
at usually quantifiable programme outputs. And community develop-
ment as empowerment, in which we act on issues of group interest, and
an increase in their generic capacities is of greatest concern. There is a
sense, though, in which this is a false-practice dichotomy. A community-
based programme can be an entry into a community empowerment
project, and community empowerment projects often incorporate com-
munity-based programmes. Extending from the Introduction’s garden
stories, health promoters might start with a nutrition education pro-
gramme in a low-income community, because that is where greatest ini-
tial support lies, and then find themselves working with local coalitions
to change social assistance rules to make it easier for welfare recipients
to afford healthier foods. They might even participate in networks deal-

ing with inequitable aspects of the global food trade. But health pro-
moters could as easily start with such a coalition, or with community
gardens and food-buying clubs, if that is where organising momentum
lies. At some point they will likely find themselves invited to offer nutri-
tion education programmes. What remains of this practice tension is
how well the health systems support health promoters in their abilities
to move fluidly between these two working styles.
Partnership development
For some years health promotion has accepted the necessity of engag-
ing with other sectors, particularly if it is to influence actions on the
broader determinants of health. The legacy of Western rationalism and
evolution of the modern state have left it with a bewildering, and at
times multiplying, number of ‘sectors’. If we add to this the divergent
claims of civil society organisations and the influence of private busi-
ness interest groups, the tensions in partnership development are self-
apparent. A more specific complaint sometimes lodged against health
promotion’s efforts to engage in managing these partnership tensions
has been one of ‘public health imperialism’: a recasting of all social and
environmental concerns as health promotion issues in an effort to gather
diverse partners under the umbrella of ‘health’. Given the large size of
the public health sector in most high-income countries, relative to edu-
cation, welfare, housing, environment or justice, these colonising over-
tures have been viewed with distrust. The following story illustrates this
point: A few years ago a lecturer of health promotion teaching in a school
of social work complained that he had a hard time convincing his social
work students that they were really doing health promotion. His students
replied that they had an equally hard time convincing health promoters
they were really doing social work. The point here is simply that health
promotion is not the only practice, nor health the only sector, that has
discovered the need to collaborate with others. But we all share a rather
pre-Copernican view of the world in which we analyse and plan our
activities by placing ourselves at the centre and then orbiting everyone
else around us. The rich literature on effective partnerships identifies a
simple preventive: always place the problem in the centre and circle the
important sectors, disciplines and partners around it.
Advocate/catalyst
This brings us to the last and most problematic health promotion strategy:
that of advocacy. It is something health promoters frequently advocate
for doing more of, but not much else. For in becoming advocates
around policies for health and its determinants, we run straight into the
jaws of politics. While not without risk, it is still relatively safe for
health promoters and their state employers to challenge a single indus-
try such as tobacco, but not the disequalising logic of global market
capitalism itself. Why has the health-promoting cause of early child-
hood development captured governments’ agendas in ways that poverty
reduction has not? There are practical reasons: clarity of the policy mes-
sage and convenient and market-ready slogans. But perhaps most
importantly, early childhood development represents a health inequity
whose remedy is not deeply structural or challenging in the same way
as reducing income inequalities might be (Lavis 2002). Indeed, pro-
grammatic interventions often consist of an outpouring of small-scale
pilot projects that fail to deal with the political and economic policies
that lead to the family poverty that creates unhealthy development
environments in the first place. It is ironic that Canada, a country that
has played such a prominent role in the rhetoric of both health pro-
motion and early childhood development, has failed singularly to use
its tax/transfer programmes to reduce significantly child poverty rates,
despite resolving in its parliament repeatedly to do so.
International evidence suggests that policies known to reduce health
inequities are more likely to be supported by social democratic political
parties than by conservative or libertarian ones (Navarro et al. 2004).
This should not be surprising since such policies hinge more on a belief
in the importance of a strong, regulatory and redistributive state than
on the beneficence of the market’s invisible hand. The tense discomfort
this can create for health promoters is obvious. On the one hand, a
health promotion policy platform will only survive if it is consistently
lobbied on a non-partisan, all-party basis. On the other, health promo-
tion that ignores where partisan political support exists for its work is
unlikely to win any reforms in the policies that may matter most to
greater equity in health outcomes.
Setting the historical context
Given health promoters’ social position straddling state and civil soci-
ety, these tensions are unlikely to be resolved; they are merely being
grappled with. Their grappling is what provides much of the dynamism
of health promotion practice, although not always comfortably. Neither
are these tensions particularly new, including even the concern with
empowerment.
The concept of local empowerment as a means to improve health dates

back to at least the mid-nineteenth century in the UK. The political liber-
alism of the Victorian period led to the creation of many pressure groups,
such as the Health of Towns Association, which shared concerns of the
people about equity and social justice and acted as advocacy groups. These
concerns arose, in part, from the dramatic dislocations, inequalities and
appalling living and working conditions that accompanied rapid indus-
trialisation. These pressure groups, with the assistance of key reformers
within state institutions, mobilised broader middle-class support, which
in turn, influenced the press and the political arm of government. The
result was a series of new legislation aimed at curbing the worse of these
conditions and enabling, for the first time, specialised local health boards
to intervene to control the spread of disease. Often referred to as the ‘san-
itation phase’, this period marked the birth of public health. Much has
been written drawing similarities between this era of ‘old’ public health
and that of the ‘new’ public health of the past three decades (Baggot
2000). These parallels include a concern with the social and environmen-
tal determinants of disease, political activism on the part of health reform-
ers, the existence of social movements pressing for economic and social
reform,notably unions and women’s groups, and strategic linkages
between health reformers and these progressive social movements.
There is also evidence of tension. Edwin Chadwick, the ‘father’ of
public health whose 1848 Public Health Act ushered in local health
boards, was a staunch advocate of the miasma theory of illness, which
held that certain decaying matters in the air – created disease. The list
seems strange to us today and included corpses in water along with cof-
fee grinds and beached whales, though no reference was made to the
sickly dense fog of coal-fired industrialisation. At the time evidence
favouring the ‘germ’ theory was mounting, but this theory was opposed
by the merchant class from which Chadwick required political support
and among whom his own career had placed him (Ringen 1979). Had
the germ theory prevailed it would have meant more regulation, includ-
ing quarantine, on the global trade in goods upon which much of the
wealth of the merchant class relied. There is also evidence that some of
the local health boards were dominated by industrialists and merchants,
who ensured that nothing was done in the name of health that might
compromise their accumulation of wealth. This is a script now being
played out at a much grander scale in the politics of trade treaties and
the World Trade Organisation.
Other reformers took a more radical approach to grappling with the
tensions of their social position. As Chadwick was manoeuvring his
Public Health Act through British parliament, Rudolf Virchow, a pas-

sionate germ theorist, famously prescribed the ‘cure’ for a typhoid epi-
demic among Silesian coal miners: improved working conditions, free
education, food cooperatives, better pay, public works programmes for
temporarily unemployed miners, strengthened local government and,
to pay for these reforms, a tax on the nouveaux riche whose wealth
relied upon the miners’ labour. Unhealthy conditions, he argued, were
the breeding grounds for epidemics; he also noted that all diseases had
two causes: one pathological, the other political. Dissatisfied with his
proposals, the government officials dismissed him. He immediately
joined in street protests, ran successfully for local government and even-
tually became a powerful reformer within national government (Taylor
& Reiger 1985). A few years earlier, in the same tumultuous era, John
Snow undertook what today would be called a rudimentary cluster
analysis of a cholera outbreak in a poor London neighbourhood, deduc-
ing that it centred on a shared water pump in Broad Street. Lacking cer-
tainty of proof, Snow nonetheless one night simply banged the handle
off the pump, ending the cholera outbreak. Unlike Virchow he was
richly rewarded with a monetary prize for his public health risk-taking.
Reform actions by British and other European governments during the
mid-nineteenth century were not simply an effect of public health and
civil society activism. They were also motivated by a need to improve the
efficiency of their nation’s workforce. Public health reform was as much
due to the demands of economic production as it was due to a discourse
of empowerment and good governance. This recurs today when health
promotion or the costs of strategic medical or public health interven-
tions are defended, in part, for the economic savings or growth returns
they promise.
From biomedicine to health behaviourism
The germ theory eventually triumphed over competing explanatory

discourses. This triumph heralded the twentieth-century dominance of
biomedicine. Its close elision with industrial capitalism (body-as-
machine, medicine-as-business), the promise of cure reducing the need
to attend to economically meddlesome forms of prevention, helped
(Brown 1979): although it was the antibiotic era that clinched its status.
The biomedical era continued to dominate until the 1960s and 1970s,
when the growing costs of publicly funded health care collided with
one of capitalism’s cyclical crises of too much supply, too little demand
and a declining rate of profit. This led to market pressures on the state
Box 1.1 Health education or health promotion?
The debate about the overlap between health promotion and health
education began in the 1980s, when the range of activities involved
in promoting better health widened to overcome the narrow focus
on lifestyle and behaviour approaches. These activities involved
more than just giving information and aimed for strategies that
achieved political action and social mobilisation. Whereas health
education aims at informing people to influence their future decision
making, health promotion incorporates complementary social and
political actions. These include lobbying and community develop-
ment that facilitate political changes in peoples’ social, workplace
and community settings to enhance health (Green & Kreuter 1991).
Health education around obesity issues might include school-based
awareness programmes or exercise classes. Health promotion around
obesity extends to legislation on food advertising and restricting
access to unhealthy products in school shops. While in some coun-
tries, such as the USA, health education and health promotion still
tend to be used interchangeably, health promotion is generally
viewed as encompassing health education as one of its many roles.
to lessen taxation and liberalise the economy, which in turn fuelled

government interest to find ways to reduce the fiscal pressure of rising
medical care costs. At the same time, the ‘epidemiological transition’ in
high-income countries was complete: few infectious diseases remained
as threats, and chronic degenerative illnesses (heart disease, cancer,
autoimmune disorders) had become the major causes of morbidity and
mortality. These chronic diseases involve the interplay of different behav-
ioural risk factors over time such as smoking, lack of exercise and a poor
diet and have become synonymous with a ‘healthy lifestyle’. The search
for genetic explanation had yet to commence, and few were discussing
the role poverty or hazardous environments played in creating disease.
Health education to modify unhealthy behaviours became the principle
public health intervention, slowly expanding to a broader policy focus to
influence the economic and cultural forces that pattern unhealthy behav-
iours. As with the biomedical approach, however, there was little room
for concerns with local empowerment and social equity. Many critics of
this early phase in the transition from health education to health pro-
motion in the 1970s to 1980s (see Box 1.1) cited the tendency of practice
to focus on individuals in ways that became victim-blaming (Brown &

Margo 1978; Freudenberg 1978; Labonté & Penfold 1981). The conflu-
ence of state interests in medical cost containment, the rise of chronic
disease with more scope for prevention and the emergence of powerful
new social movements nonetheless created a fertile ground for a ‘new’
public health embrace of ‘old’ public health activism.
Health promotion on the ascendancy
The maturing of many of these progressive movements during the 1960s

and 1970s played a marked role in the reconceptualisation of health pro-
motion during the 1980s, at least in high-income countries. There are
differing theories of social movements. Some emphasise their discursive
role in changing how problems are framed and politics debated (Melucci
1989), while others emphasise their role in mobilising resources to
become political competitors in policy change (Freeman 1983); without
large organised civil society groups in these discursive fields, there would
be little pressure to change state–market relations. Differences in these
theories attest to new tensions: is empowerment a contest over meaning
or a struggle over material resources? It is both, of course, and finding a
balance between them is a central theme of this book. What is important
here is recognition of the role social movements played, and continue to
play, in challenging the medical and behavioural approaches to health
by raising concerns for equity, justice and environmental sustainability.
The most recent social movement reframing how we think about health,
and one of the reasons for this book, is the one erroneously labelled
‘anti-globalisation’ and which might better be called the ‘just globalisa-
tion’ movement.
The knowledge challenges created by social movements entered public
health and health promotion thinking through a process described by
Ron Eyerman, a sociologist, and Andrew Jamison, an academic interested
in social and political policy, as ‘cognitive praxis’ (Eyerman & Jamison
1991). Their argument is that the discursive reframing of societal images
and identities that forms part of social movement activism shifts fields of
practice via ‘movement intellectuals’. These movement intellectuals, in
the mode of activists like Virchow, drift from organisations to positions
within the state, taking with them their new movement ideas. Others
already in the state incorporate these new knowledge challenges in vari-
ous policies, declarations and state documents. Some movement intellec-
tuals shift into academia, influencing new generations of practitioners
and creating new practice theories. An early reflection on how the Ottawa
Charter came to be, and why it had the impact it did, found the ideas of
cognitive praxis and movement intellectuals compelling explanation
(Pederson et al. 1994; Labonté 1994a). For a period of time, the mid-1980s
to the mid-1990s, health promotion was on a discursive ascendancy.
While practice lagged behind its preaching, there was a powerful and
empowered sense of momentum and optimism.
This sense was not restricted to high-income countries alone, although
these were the first to embrace the Ottawa Charter. Internationally, the
World Health Assembly in 1977 set a target of ‘health for all by the year
2000’, a utopian quest that became operational in the following year’s
UNICEF/WHO conference in Alma Ata in the former USSR Kazak
Republic. The much higher burden of infectious disease in many of the
world’s poorer nations, and the spartan condition of many of their pub-
lic health systems, cast health activism at this conference under the
rubric of primary health care. Like the Ottawa Charter, the 1978 Alma
Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care arose in part as a response to the
limitations of a biomedical and technological approach to improving
health and as an affirmation of numerous experiences of community-
based health care (Cueto 2004). It recognised that the gross inequalities
in the health status between and within countries were ethically unac-
ceptable and identified the practice of primary health care as key to
attaining ‘health for all by the year 2000’. The three essential features of
Alma Ata–inspired primary health care resembled those of the Charter:
a recognition that equity in health depends fundamentally on improv-
ing socio-economic conditions and alleviating poverty and underdevel-
opment; in this process, people in their community/citizen roles should
be both major activists and the main beneficiaries; and health care sys-
tems should be restructured to support priority activities at the primary
level because these respond to the most urgent health needs of the peo-
ple (Werner et al. 1997; Magnussen et al. 2004). While not using the
term ‘empowerment’ explicitly, the Declaration went on to underscore
that ‘people have the right and duty to participate individually and col-
lectively in the planning and implementation of their health care’
(World Health Organization 1978).
Health promotion in decline
The Ottawa Charter and the Alma Ata Declaration did not dominate
global health discourse for long. Another movement was also afoot dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s, one with more powerful backers and greater
political reach: neo-liberalism. This movement has its intellectual roots
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British liberal theorists such as

Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Smith’s influential economic theories
maintained that when people acted in their own economic self-interest
in a free market, all would benefit. The logic of the market’s ‘invisible
hand’ was simple: when people wanted goods, other people would make
and sell them. If they became too greedy, no one would buy the goods or
other manufacturers would compete with lower prices. If prices fell too
low, the lack of profit would end production until people were prepared
to pay more. When peoples’ need changed, no one would buy, profits
would drop and manufacturers would shift to producing goods people
really wanted. Mill buttressed this argument with philosophical writings
on liberty, which contain ideas few in health promotion or the progres-
sive social movements that buoyed its 1980s activism would disagree
with: guaranteeing individual choice as long as it did not harm another
person and protecting free speech even if the opinions expressed may be
factually erroneous. These ideas are consistent with justice as equality of
opportunity. His economic writings, though, and like Smith’s, weighed
in against justice as equality of outcome. He argued against all but the
lightest of taxation, which he considered a form of robbery of those who
saved and benefited from their own efforts.
Classic liberalism, and the writings of these two influential theorists,
is of course more complex. Even Smith’s ‘free markets’ were deemed in
need of state intervention when markets failed to provide beneficial pub-
lic goods, infrastructures, services or other ‘public works and . . . public
institutions’, as Smith referred to them. How the market’s invisible hand
is supposed to work in an era of monopolies and cartels, mass media,
manufactured need and huge inequalities in economic wealth and
power between nations that did not exist at the time of Smith’s theoris-
ing remains the more contentious point. As for Mill, his defence of indi-
vidual choice and free speech weaken when we consider that choices are
conditioned and constrained by peoples’ living environments with rip-
pling effects on others that can be subtle yet substantial, and that the
boundaries between erroneous speech and hate-mongering are blurry
and politicised. Even so, the revival (‘neo-’) of their liberal theories in the
1970s and 1980s blunted the complexity of their sources’ own writings,
ignored the even greater complexities of social life two centuries on and,
in populist discourse, reduced the sound bite to free markets and indi-
vidual choice. Some argue that neoliberalism is a carefully managed
attack by elites on what they perceived as a ‘nanny state’ costing too
much money and encroaching too much on private wealth and privilege
(Coburn 2000; Teeple 2000). We would add that, unintentionally, many
of the progressive social movements may have aided in this, since most
of their activism was directed against the state and not the market.
This helped to delegitimate state authority. What few dispute is that
neo-liberalism became a direct assault on the interventionist welfare
state that had characterised much of the post-World War Two period.
Its story is basic to understanding how globalisation now affects
health, and is discussed in later chapters.
For now, we consider how some of neo-liberalism’s rolled-out ideas
undermined the progressive activism of the Ottawa Charter and Alma
Ata Declaration. Health systems became increasingly obsessed with new
forms of private sector management theories which emphasised quan-
tifiable results, short-term gains and ‘value for money’ (Baum & Sanders
1995; Barder & Birdsall 2006), rather than money for what is valued. In
Canada there was a short turf war between health promotion and a rem-
inted concept of population health. The issue was less about focus; like
the Ottawa Charter, the population health approach emphasised the
importance of the non-medical or social determinants of health. The
issue concerned the rationale: much of the early population health lit-
erature promised reductions in public expenditures in health and wel-
fare, characterised such spending as economically ‘non-productive’ and
avoided the importance of socio-economic inequalities (Coburn &
Poland 1996; Pindar 2007). Funding for health promotion, while not
evaporating, became more confined to activities such as behaviour
change and chronic disease prevention for which powerful cost-savings
arguments could be made (Bernier 2007).
The Alma Ata’s Declaration’s comprehensive vision of primary health
care similarly suffered. Policy makers, donor agencies and national lead-
ers realised the potentially liberating nature of primary health care’s
emphasis on citizen participation and socio-economic determinants.
Many, feeling threatened by this potential, became resistant to its imple-
mentation (Werner & Sanders 1997). Selective Primary Health Care
(SPHC) arose as a competing concept, in which only interventions that
contributed most to reducing child (⬍5 years) mortality were given pri-
ority. SPHC advocates argued that the comprehensive approach was too
idealistic, expensive and unachievable in its goals; greater and more
immediate gains would be made through a focus on growth monitor-
ing, oral rehydration therapy, breastfeeding and immunisation, the so-
called GOBI formula (Walsh & Warren 1979). This reasoning is true in
the short term. There have also been notable successes in SPHC such as
the low-cost Tanzanian Essential Health Interventions Project (TEHIP)
(de Savigny et al. 2005). But decision-making power and control in most
instances of SPHC rested increasingly with foreign consultants with

technical expertise, rather than flowing to community members
(Magnussen et al. 2004). SPHC, like lifestyle health promotion, proved
attractive to many political leaders: it promised easily quantifiable and
achievable results within a short time; it dealt with high-prevalence
health problems; and it was a simple and less resource-demanding alter-
native to establishing a network of permanent and equitably accessible
health services (Gangolli et al. 2005). It also shifted focus from the awk-
ward political issues of underlying health determinants rooted invari-
ably in pervasive poverty or inequality.
The new millennium
Practice fields and their discursive constructions are dynamic; in popu-

lar argot, pendulums swing. In more recent years the activist language
and social concerns of the ‘old’ public health and the ‘new’ health pro-
motion have been reinvigorated for an array of reasons, a few of which
we list below:
• The selective approach to primary health care has yet to show sus-
tainable long-term results. Evidence suggests that only when it is sup-
ported by a more comprehensive system do selective interventions
work effectively and efficiently (Knippenberg et al. 1997; Soucat et al.
1997).
• An outpouring and systematic gathering of research on the socio-
economic determinants of health began to suffuse throughout
health systems, notably, but not exclusively, in high-income coun-
tries. Conventional biomedical and behavioural explanations proved
increasingly inadequate to account for differences in death and dis-
ease rates between different populations, drawing attention to causes
in peoples’ living and working conditions.
• Civil society opposition to the neo-liberal retrenchment of the state
grew in many countries and coalesced globally in campaigns against
what was regarded as the unhealthy and inequitable economic prac-
tices of modern globalisation. Neo-liberalism was increasingly shown
to have failed on its promises of increased growth, trickle-down
poverty reduction and improved health (Labonté et al. 2007).
The activism inherent in these critiques, though, has yet to trickle down
to health promotion practice. In a provocative essay on health promo-
tion in Canada, a group of young and old health promotion scholars
argue that health promotion remains a marginal practice in most health

systems. Despite a decade of rhetoric on the social determinants of
health, this practice continues to be dominated by health behaviour
change programmes (Dupéré et al. 2007). Empowerment and social
change as the ‘defining elements’ of health promotion remain marginal
within its still marginalised field of practice.
But these defining elements still remain. They have also gained, if not
practice traction, at least a rebounded legitimacy. One could even argue
that health promotion as an empowering practice neither descended
nor rebounded. If we dig beneath the term to what it represents, health
through empowerment, justice through equity, social relations that are
respectful, political mobilisations that are effective, we find in it the
attempt to address the inequitable contradictions of capitalist moder-
nity that have characterised many of the world’s societies for at least
two centuries.
2
Health Promotion Practice: Power,
Empowerment and the Social
Determinants of Health
Failing to meet the fundamental human needs of

autonomy, empowerment and human freedom is a
potent cause of ill health.
Sir Michael Marmot 2006
In this chapter we provide an introduction to health promotion practice,

politics and ethics and link the three central themes of the book –
health, equity and empowerment – in a discussion of the social deter-
minants of health. We conclude with a reflection on what this means for
practitioner competencies and ethics.
Power: The capacity to create or resist change
At its simplest, power is the capacity to create or resist change (Kuyek &
Labonté 1995). But that is power’s simplest. It comes in different and
complex forms, some understanding of which is rudimentary to grasp-
ing the dynamics of local empowerment.
There are three basic types of power-over in which the person exer-
cising power attempts to have others behave according to his desires:
domination, exploitation and hegemony (Lukes 1974; Foucault 1980).
Domination, or the direct exercise of force, is rarer in democracies but
exists in institutions such as the police, the army and any legislation that
empowers some people to have authority over others. In health promo-
tion, we see this primarily in quarantine, infectious disease reporting and
other legislated powers of medical health officers, or in legislative ‘healthy
public policies’ such as those governing smoking and alcohol or envi-
ronmental protection. These practices of power-over are not necessarily
25
undesirable or wrong, although they must be recognised for the coer-

cion they represent.
Economic exploitation, the second type of power-over, is one cause of
social class, and speaks to how the neutral language of the market and
the economy work to obscure that, as economist Herman Daly (Daly &
Cobb 1989) expresses, the market is blind to distributive justice. Some
people gain only to the extent that others lose. Where this touches
health promotion practice directly is in the costs of our salaries, our insti-
tutions and our programmes. These costs represent a transfer of wealth
from poorer communities to wealthier professionals. John McKnight
(1987) talks of a study in a poor New York neighbourhood which found
that 2/3rds of all public spending went to professional service providers
and only 1/3 went in the form of direct income transfers to poor people.
He argues that if all public spending had gone directly to poor persons in
the neighbourhood, their lives may have been far healthier even with the
relative lack of professional services. We don’t entirely agree with this
analysis; at the least, no one knows the proper balance between public
service provision and individual or community group choice. But it is
important to know that every new programme or service dollar gained
by institutions represents a dollar that is not under the more direct con-
trol of less powerful individuals and groups.
It is the third type of power-over, hegemony, which may be the most
insidious. It speaks to how professional powers are sometimes used to
control how others come to see themselves: as powerful or as powerless.
Consider two prenatal assessments (Tables 2.1 and 2.2).
The first (Table 2.1) represents a typical assessment format that pur-
ports to be objective and professional, but which presents an over-
whelming burden of difficulties, many of which are actually power-over
judgments. ‘No apparent substance abuse’ implies that Marian could still
be a substance abuser; she’s simply clever enough to hide it. Imagine the
behaviours of the health worker who ‘constructs’ Marian in this way,
Table 2.1 Judgemental assessment
Marian:
• Low income, single mother.
• Inadequate protein, calcium and overall caloric intake.
• One-bedroom basement apartment.
• First child low birth weight.
• Insufficient weight gain.
• Fears labour and delivery.
• Does not speak or read English well.
• No apparent substance abuse.
Health Promotion Practice 27
and how these behaviours define Marian by her deficits and problems
only; and how Marian, when confronted by such institutions and prac-
tices time-in and time-out, begins to internalise these as being true
about herself. This internalisation of self-blame can create a learned
helplessness (Seligman 1975) or surplus powerlessness (Lerner 1986)
that accounts for part of the greater disease burden of the poor. In this
hegemonic power-over, Marian, as a person capable of acting with
agency, is completely absent. There is no evidence of her own capacity
or power; no reflexivity indicating whether the way the professional
assesses Marian resembles the way Marian sees herself.
In the second assessment (Table 2.2), a completely different way of
viewing Marian emerges.
Here we see her abilities and many more opportunities for actual
change, and for a health promoter’s role in helping that change, e.g.
obtain fridge, mediate with landlord, assist in marketing quilts, mediate
with national consulate office in Guatemala over release of husband,
meet with delivery room professionals in hospital over language con-
cerns. (These assessments were first developed and used as training tools
by community nutritionists working with the City of Toronto
Department of Public Health. Due credit for their insightfulness belongs
to those practitioners.)
If we fail to look for peoples’ gifts we simply reinforce or extend the
idea that people are powerless to make a difference. As another exam-
ple, and one commonly experienced by new émigrés: By focussing on
the presenting edges of their relative powerlessness (their poverty, their
lower status and the low-paid jobs in which they lack much authority),
we may not see the status and power they had in the countries they left,
or even the authorities they might still enjoy within their own local
Table 2.2 Empowering assessment
• Poor appetite due to stress and isolation; child’s father political prisoner in
Guatemala.
• Enjoys preparing traditional vegetable soups, bean dishes and corn bread.
• Would like more milk and meat but finds these too expensive.
• Healthy 3-year old daughter born with low birth weight, no complications.
• Worried about income and childcare when child comes; refugee status claim
still pending.
• Has cousins locally who can help financially, but not enough.
• Quilts and paints as hobbies; would like to sell her work.
• Spanish literacy, school-teacher in Guatemala; concerned poor English skills
will be interpreted as stupidity.
• Small, tidy apartment.
• Wants fridge; afraid to ask landlord as she can’t afford to be evicted.
communities. An African-born janitor in the UK may have been a uni-

versity teacher in her home country, and remains a respected leader
among her émigré community in her new one.
As professionals, our relationships with others always have different
elements of all types of power-over. Our education or training, the higher
incomes that we can earn, the types of jobs we occupy, can give us a
higher social status. The positions we occupy in institutions often give
us some decision-making authority or influence over resources, such as
grants or social service benefits, or simply access to goods and services
such as photocopiers, telephones, meeting spaces and so on. Other
times our control over access to these resources is more closely linked to
our social status. We have the professional ‘authority’ to give or withhold
legitimacy to the named concerns expressed by individuals or groups
with whom we work, and so affect their abilities to mobilise public
resources. Our social status and authority, in turn, also gives us consider-
able power to influence or persuade decision-makers further up the hier-
archy of power-over systems. We can help ‘set’ political agendas around
health, and it is in how we define these agendas that we either hege-
monise the relatively powerless, or transform that power-over by sharing
what power we possess.
There are other forms of power besides those associated with power-
over. ‘Power-to’ (Wartenberg 1990) or ‘power-from-within’ (Starhawk
1988) describe the sense of mastery or personal integrity that often
derives from philosophical, religious or spiritual sources (Labonté 1996).
Partly arising from this centered location is a third form: power-with. This
describes the use of certain forms of power-over for the specific intent of
increasing another person’s experience of power-to or power-from-within.
It is the transformative use of power-over. The classic examples often given
are those of parents or teachers whose exercise of authority over children
is often (though not always) with the intent of it disappearing as their
wards assume more of their own ‘power-from-within’ (Wartenberg 1990).
This discussion of some of the dynamics of power and empowerment
becomes the more pertinent when we consider power’s relationship to
health. Sir Michael Marmot, an internationally respected social epi-
demiologist and Chair of the World Health Organization’s Commission
on Social Determinants of Health (2005–08), recently reflected on the
evidence of the importance of a sense of control to one’s health
(Marmot 2006). Numerous studies now document that low perceived
control equates to greater disease risk, especially, but not exclusively, for
coronary heart disease. There is also a psycho-biological pathway: the
stress associated with low control creates a chronic, sub-acute response
with long-term damaging effects on the circulatory and immune sys-

tems. Improving one’s sense of control, which Marmot elides with the
Nobel economist, Amartya Sen’s, concept of ‘freedom’ as the ability to
lead a life one has reason to value (Sen 1999), leads to better health.
Even democracy, which holds a greater promise of control for more
people than might other political systems, appears to equate with bet-
ter average health, even when accounting for other social determinants
(Besley & Kudamatsu 2006). As Marmot continues, ‘power is key’ to bet-
ter health; and its unequal social distribution undermines many peo-
ples’ capabilities for leading healthy, valued lives.
Health promotion: Power, empowerment and the

practitioner
In the previous chapter we encountered two approaches to defining

health promotion: as an empowering practice aimed at social change, and
as a particular approach to programming. While striving for the former,
health promotion practice is most often delivered as the latter: a planned
set of activities within the design of an intervention or a project. As this
chapter shows, this does not prevent it from becoming empowering.
Consider, first, health promotion’s intention to help people to gain
more power by way of a cursory review of the five basic roles that we
identified in Chapter 1.
• Educator/watchdog: Health communication and health education pro-

grammes can increase peoples’ capacities to make informed choices
about their lives and health. The greater control that they may expe-
rience over decision-making is a form of power, provided the infor-
mation is timely, relevant, actionable and not the sole ‘health
messaging’ people receive.
• Resource broker: Training, role-play, work experience and counselling
are examples of how health promoters provide resources that can help
people to develop or enhance different skills. These skills improve peo-
ples’ abilities to exercise control over many situations in their lives,
which can improve their health. Health promoters also often help
individuals and groups to mobilise financial and material resources to
aid them in their work.
• Community developer: Organising new groups, increasing community
members’ participation in activities aimed at personal or social health
change and strengthening community capacities are all forms of
development work that can reduce inequalities in the distribution of
power. Health promoters can use these approaches to increase the

assets and attributes which a community is able to draw upon to exer-
cise more control over the conditions affecting its members’ lives.
• Partnership development: Individuals and communities do not exist in
isolation. Just as health promotion programming must increasingly
work across sectors, local communities need to link with others to
learn from shared experiences and build a broader and more power-
ful base for political campaigning. Health promoters often become
useful conduits through which these linkages are formed.
• Advocate/catalyst: Policy change that affects the determinants of health
inevitably requires advocacy to counter resistance by those who might
oppose the change. Citizens/communities in many countries have
democratic rights to influence policy decision-making through a variety
of advocacy means. Even in non-democratic states, people have the
right to participate in decisions that affect them under internationally
ratified and legally binding human rights covenants. General Comment
25 on Article 25 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, for exam-
ple, states (amongst other rights) that ‘Citizens also take part in the
conduct of public affairs by exerting influence through public debate
and dialogue with their representatives or through their capacity to
organize themselves. This participation is supported by ensuring free-
dom of expression, assembly and association’ (Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights 1996). Health promoters can assist
people in this advocacy work in many ways: through the ‘inside’ knowl-
edge they have about government policy priorities, with health research
to support their claims and, through their professional associations or
in their own role as citizens, as fellow advocates (Labonté 1998).
These roles do not apply only to those persons specifically designated as

health promoters within their state or NGO employment. Many other
practitioners, such as nurses, social workers, educators, community devel-
opment workers and physicians, are likely to engage in health promotion
activities as part of their duties. What we say about health promotion and
the health promoter can apply to any person attempting to work in an
empowering way to improve peoples’ abilities to control their health and
the social and environmental conditions that shape it.
The ‘domains’ of empowerment
Empowerment in the broadest sense is seen as a process by which peo-

ple work together at a ‘local’ or ‘community’ level to increase the power
(control) they have over events that influence their lives. Several authors
have attempted to identify empowerment’s areas of influence at the local
or community level in order to provide a guide to planning, implemen-
tation and evaluation of health promotion programmes (Gibbon et al.
2002; Laverack 2001). In particular, recent work (Laverack 2001) has
identified a set of nine robust ‘domains’ of community empowerment
(see Table 2.3).
Table 2.3 The empowerment domains
Domain Description
Participation Only by participating in small groups or larger organisations can

individual community members act on issues of general concern
to the broader community.
Leadership Participation and leadership are closely connected. Leadership

requires a strong participant base just as participation requires
the direction and structure of strong leadership.
Organisational Organisational structures in a community represent the ways

structures in which people come together in order to socialise and to address
their concerns and problems.
Problem Empowerment presumes that the identification of problems,

assessment solutions to the problems and actions to resolve the problems
are carried out by the community.
Resource The ability of the community to mobilise resources both from

mobilisation within and the ability to negotiate resources from beyond itself
is an important factor in its ability to achieve successes in its
efforts.
‘Asking why’ The ability of the community to critically assess the causes of its
own inequalities.
Links with Links with people and organisations, including partnerships,

others coalitions and voluntary alliances between the community and
others, can assist the community in addressing its issues.
Role of the The outside agent increasingly transforms power relationships

outside agents such that the community assumes increasing programme
authority.
Programme Programme management that empowers the community

management includes the control by the primary stakeholders over decisions
on planning, implementation, evaluation, finances, reporting
and conflict resolution.
Source: (Laverack 2001).

These domains function as a ‘parallel track’ to conventional forms of

health promotion programming. Whatever the health issue (health
behaviour or social determinant) the basic question for health promot-
ers is: How has the programme, from its planning through its imple-
mentation, through its evaluation, intentionally sought to enhance
community empowerment through each domain? This is not simply an
instrumentally important question. It may be true that a more empow-
ered community is better able to participate in health promotion pro-
grammes, sustain efforts past the funding period and ‘take ownership’
of the health issue. But improvements in many of these domains can be
intrinsically health promoting in their own right (Laverack 2007), as
discussed in Table 2.3.
Participation
Individuals have a better chance of achieving their health goals if they
can participate with other people who are affected by the same or sim-
ilar circumstances to build interpersonal trust and trust in public insti-
tutions (Brehm & Rahn 1997). Trust is a key element as it helps to foster
cohesive relationships and to build capacity by devolving responsibili-
ties. Participation in groups that share interests can help individuals to
compete for limited resources and to increase the sense of personal con-
trol in their lives. For example, the use of participatory learning exer-
cises in women’s groups in a poor rural population in Nepal led to a
reduction in neonatal and maternal mortality (Manandhar et al. 2004).
The women in the intervention clusters were found to have better ante-
natal care, higher rates of institutional delivery and greater trained birth
attendance and more hygienic care, which together led to improved
birth outcomes. By participating in groups the women were better able
to define, analyse and, through the support of others, articulate and act
on their concerns around childbirth. The advantage of participation was
that it strengthened social networks and improved social support
between the women and also between the women and the providers of
health services delivery. Increases in social support and social networks
can be health-enhancing in its own right, as is the decreased isolation
and the experience of increased control or mastery it brings (Labonté &
Laverack 2001; Marmot 2006).
Leadership
Leaders themselves often experience personal health gains from their
increased sense of control/authority (positional leaders) or self/social
esteem and social networks (reputational leaders). Leaders nurtured
through organising efforts gain materially and psychologically from the

experience, often taking advantage of the broader opportunity networks
in which they find themselves. For the group itself, leaders contribute
to its effective functioning both internally (relationships) and exter-
nally (mobilising resources). This improves the members’ abilities to
speak their voice with authority, and to influence health-determining
policy debates and decisions. There are many forms of leadership, all of
which need to be respected. In La Casa Dona Juana, a social space for
Latin American women in Toronto, participants identify the different
leadership skills or ‘gifts’ that individual members bring to the collec-
tive and to its activities. Women skilled in writing prepare the grant
applications. Those skilled in cooking take a leadership role in the col-
lective kitchen. Others skilled in budgeting plan the menus or purchases
for the collectives, while those knowledgeable in sewing techniques
take leadership in the sewing collective. In the ‘outside’ world, budget-
ing and grant-writing skills are often more highly valued, and those
who have them may be given more social status and power-over others.
But in La Casa Dona Juana, due partly to the feminist organising beliefs
of the health promoters who provided the space and resources to start
it, budgeting and grant-writing are merely one set of leadership skills no
more or less important than those involved in cooking, menu-planning
or sewing (Labonté 1998).
Organisational structures
Community organisations provide the opportunity for their members
to gain the skills and competencies that are necessary to allow them to
move towards achieving health outcomes. On an individual basis this
includes self-help groups that provide knowledge, skills and social sup-
port around issues such as smoking cessation, dieting and exercise
classes. On a collective and organisational basis these skills include
planning and strategy development, team building, networking, nego-
tiation, fund-raising, marketing and proposal writing. Organisational
structures are the ‘hardware’ (infrastructure) that runs the ‘software’
(interactions) of good public participation (Labonté & Edwards 1995).
They constitute the bedrock of social capital. Organisations can be
healthy or unhealthy for their members, depending on their levels of
hierarchy, decision-making styles, development of cliques and manage-
ment of conflicts, i.e. on the type of interpersonal ‘software’ they allow
to ‘run’. Generally, though, areas with few or ineffective internal organ-
isations will be less able to mobilise internal or access external resources,
provide opportunities for social support or network development or
otherwise influence decisions affecting health-determining conditions

(Labonté & Laverack 2001).
Problem assessment
Problem assessment is an aspect of capacity that is closely related to
learning. In broad terms, people with higher education enjoy better
health through a variety of pathways: more affluence or material secu-
rity (whether or not through more competitive labour market partici-
pation), healthier personal behaviours (though not always), better
self/social esteem and efficacy, greater social network access, more expe-
rience of control and, perhaps through improved sense of coherence,
less self-blame and a greater ability to influence decision-makers and
mobilise personal and extrinsic resources. Internationally, investments
in education, particularly for girls, are more strongly associated with
improved population health than economic growth or labour market
development per se (Labonté & Laverack 2001). Increased community
capacities in problem assessment often lead to new forms of health-
promoting interventions. For example, a health programme in India,
working to improve the lives of rural women in Gujarat, worked with
women to assess the most immediate health needs in their daily lives.
The women firstly requested and then received cooking stoves that
would reduce the level of smoke in their small airless huts. Their
involvement in assessing and finding a solution to this initial problem
led the women to go on and identify other health-related problems in
their community including poor maternal and child-health facilities
and the gynaecological training of health workers (Rifkin 2003).
Resource mobilisation
There is evidence to suggest that resource mobilisation, together with
improved literacy and education, particularly for women, can lead to
improved health outcomes in developing countries (Bratt et al. 2002;
Pokhrel & Sauerborn 2004). An example of the link between resource
mobilisation and improved health is the use of swimming pools in
remote Aboriginal communities in Australia. These were found to reduce
ear, nose and throat infections (Carapetis et al. 1995) and to provide an
overall improvement in the well-being of the community (Peart &
Szoeke 1998). The public swimming pools invariably operated at a loss
and costs were borne or subsidised by the government because it was
seen as a recreational facility which promoted the health of the popula-
tion. The people living in the communities had low incomes and access
to only limited resources. They were expected by the local government
to raise finances to maintain the pool. The communities started to raise

additional internal resources on a small scale through fund-raising and
pool entrance fees and to raise external resources through other funding
sources. In this way the ability of the community to mobilise resources
had an effect on its health through the continued use of the swimming
pool (Laverack 2005).
Asking why
Asking why is the ability of the community to be able to critically assess
the contextual causes of their disempowerment and to be able to
develop strategies to bring about personal, social and political change
based on their heightened awareness. Asking ‘why’ can be described as
‘the ability to reflect on the assumptions underlying our and others’
ideas and actions and to contemplate alternative ways of living’
(Goodman et al. 1998). This cycle of discussion, reflection and action is
a process of emancipation through learning or education developed by
the educationalist Paulo Freire (1973), the roots of which lie in libera-
tion pedagogy (‘freedom through education’) (Carey 2000). An example
of this is the work by Nina Wallerstein and Ed Bernstein (1988) and
their analysis of the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention (ASAP)
Programme which operated through the University of New Mexico. The
Programme brought small groups of high school students together in
the settings of a hospital emergency centre and a county detention cen-
tre to interact with patients and detainees who had drug-related prob-
lems. Youth were able to share experiences directly with the inmates and
learn through asking questions and exploring problems at different lev-
els. Gradually the students took leadership roles and organised meetings
and events to raise the issues of drug abuse and drink driving in village
meetings. While an evaluation study did not track behaviours, risk per-
ception was much higher in students participating in the Programme as
compared to a control group (Wallerstein & Bernstein 1988).
Links with others

Links with others demonstrates the ability to develop relationships out-
side of the community, often based on mutual interests. The develop-
ment of partnerships is an important step towards empowerment and
can also lead to an improvement in health outcomes through the pool-
ing of limited resources and collective action. The Asian Health Forum
in Liverpool, England identified a large number of cases of depression
and isolation amongst Asian women in the area. A health worker with
the local Asian women held discussions with them and then approached
a leisure centre to arrange swimming lessons. This arrangement would

ensure privacy, for example, windows would be blacked out and the les-
sons run by other women. The alliance between the Asian women and
the leisure centre was able to organise weekly lessons and to secure fund-
ing for a female instructor. The lessons were very popular and timings
had to be reorganised to avoid conflict with other pool activities and to
accommodate the young children of the Asian swimmers. The lessons
had a health benefit to the women by helping to reduce weight but
mostly through an improved feeling of well-being brought about by the
regular exercise. Eventually the health worker was able to delegate some
of the responsibility for the lessons to the alliance and slowly their inter-
est moved to other sports activities and an increase in the choices avail-
able to Asian women ( Jones & Sidell 1997).
The role of the outside agents and programme management

Health promotion programming is traditionally professionally led. It is
the practitioner or her agency that chooses the individuals, groups and
communities that she will work with and the methods to be used. The
initiation of the empowerment process and the enthusiasm for its direc-
tion and progress in the programme is also often professionally led.
Practitioners, who are in a position of relative power, work to help oth-
ers who are in a less powerful position to gain more control. Individual
control, in part a consequence of the position of people in structural
and social hierarchies, has been shown to have an influence on their
health and well-being. In a programme context the issue becomes how
much control the outside agent (the practitioner or agency) allows the
community to take in programme design, implementation, manage-
ment, evaluation, finances and administration.
An example of this is provided by the Health Authority in Oldham,
England which established a ‘local voices’ steering group with the pur-
pose of involving local people in health activities. The group was made
up of representatives from different departments, community trusts and
government agencies in a poor housing area. The group decided to
employ an independent consultant to carry out a participatory needs
assessment. The community members were invited to attend meetings to
express their concerns. Child care facilities and transport were arranged
and meetings were held at times that would be convenient to the com-
munity. Large meetings were often followed by small group discussions
to elicit further information from the community about what they felt
affected their health. These initial discussions led to the development of
a questionnaire which was administered on a door-to-door basis by
trained interviewers. This process involved a relationship between differ-

ent representatives working and living in the community to co-ordinate
the activities of an outside agent, the consultants, to provide a specific
technical input (Smithies & Webster 1998). The important issue is that
the outside agents were able to collect information in a way that was
acceptable to all representatives and that allowed the community to take
the necessary action to effect change.
The concept of ‘community’
If the domains above describe attributes of an empowered community,

who or what do we mean by community? Much has been written about
this term, which we will not belabour here. Of importance to health pro-
moters is that they think beyond the customary view of a community as
a place where people live, for example, cities or neighbourhoods, because
these are often just aggregates of non-connected people. Communities
have both social and geographic characteristics. In practice, geographic
communities consist of heterogeneous individuals with dynamic social
relations who may organise into groups to take action towards achiev-
ing shared goals. In practice a community will have the following
characteristics:
1. A spatial dimension, that is, a place or locale. Even though the

Internet is creating new virtual communities without bounded geog-
raphies, connections made this way often lead to desires to meet
face-to-face which requires some geographic proximity.
2. Non-spatial dimensions (interests, issues, identities) that involve
people who otherwise make up heterogeneous and disparate groups.
A definition of community developed by one of us earlier was simply
that of a group, membership in which was important enough to per-
sons belonging to it and that it was one of the ways in which they
identified themselves (Toronto Department of Public Health 1994;
Labonté 1996).
3. Social interactions that are dynamic and that bind people into rela-
tionships.
4. Identification of shared needs and concerns (Laverack 2004).
Within the geographic dimensions of community, multiple non-spatial

communities exist and individuals may belong to several different such
communities at the same time. Interest groups, those communities that
organise around issues, exist as a legitimate means by which individuals
can find a ‘voice’, increasing their abilities to participate in more formal

and effective ways to achieve their goals. Interest groups can be organised
around easy-to-implement concerns such as social activities or localised
issues (which is often where community organising starts); or they can
target more deeply structured social, economic or environmental prob-
lems (which is where some initially local groups wind up).
The diversity of individuals and groups within a geographic commu-
nity can create problems with regard to the selection of groups with
whom to work (Labonté 1998) as well as representation of that group by
its members (Zakus & Lysack 1998). In ideal terms, health promoters
work with those in greatest need or facing greatest disadvantage
(inequity), and strive to avoid the establishment of a dominant minor-
ity that might dictate community issues. This requires some judgment
that people coming forward as spokespersons or representatives of a
community are in fact supported by its members and that they are not
simply acting out of self-interest. During health promotion’s 1990s
surge, community health workers in Toronto attempted to define more
specifically some of the criteria for selecting and working with groups,
based on empowerment and social justice principles and their own
extensive experience (see Box 2.1).
Health promotion choices such as these invariably require practi-
tioner competencies and involve ethics, two issues to which this chap-
ter now briefly turns.
Health promotion competencies and ethics
In Chapter 1 we commented that health promotion is still struggling to

define itself as a unique discipline or profession. We believe that the
risks of professionalisation outweigh any benefits. Legitimacy, the pri-
mary benefit for a practitioner and an empowering practice alike, can be
acquired through other means besides a claim to unique status. This
does not mean that health promotion should avoid some codification
of the competencies required of its practitioners. Defining requisite
norms and skills is not only an incomplete claim to a unique scope of
practice; it is, and should be, primarily ensuring an ethically informed
and capable set of behaviours in relation to the people being served.
Competencies are a combination of attributes that enable an individ-
ual to perform a set of tasks to an appropriate standard. Core compe-
tencies for health promotion include not only practical knowledge and
skills but also the values and principles that shape the professional prac-
tice. In an earlier work, Laverack (2007), drawing on the literature on
Box 2.1 Some criteria for selecting groups to organise or

support
1. The group has unmet needs

• the unorganised.
• groups that are neglected by other service providers, politicians,
the media.
• groups experiencing serious disadvantages.
• groups who don’t know how to ‘use’ the ‘system’.
2. Our support will have an impact
• the group is able to identify its goals and objectives and to
focus on an issue.
• the group becomes able to organise itself and its own activities,
and to act upon its issue.
• leadership arises within the group.
• there is a sufficient membership within the groups that some
success will be likely.
• the group is able to achieve some short-term, visible successes.
• there is a sizeable number of people whose health will be affected
positively by the group’s success.
3. A new group needs to be organised
• there are no other agencies better able to do the organising.
• there is a critical mass of individuals who express interest in
meeting as a group.
• there is health institution support and clear decision-making to
do the organising.
• there is positive movement in group dynamics; the group will
not become stuck in an unproductive rut.
• the group develops a sense of responsibility for its own actions.
4. I have knowledge or skills relevant to the group’s issue
5. The group will grow and become autonomous
• the group knows or learns its rights, privileges and responsibil-
ities.
• the group is or can become independent of the health promoter
and community agencies, able to negotiate its own terms of
relationships with those workers and agencies.
• the group learns how to look for, and use, resources from within
its own community, and from government.
( Continued )
Box 2.1 ( Continued )
6. The group is open in membership and accountable to those it

claims to represent
Groups might be inclusive (open to anyone who wants to join) or
exclusive (closed except to those who meet its own criteria, e.g.
single mothers, black youth, gay or lesbian, etc.). Being open in
membership does not mean that the group is inclusive. But if it is
exclusive, it must be able to clarify who it represents (its criteria
for membership), and to be open to all those who meet these cri-
teria. The group should also be able to develop some means to be
accountable to those whom it claims to represent. This accounta-
bility ensures that the group does not become a small gathering of
elites whose own sense of power is improved, but at the expense
of a larger number of persons.
7. The group is internally democratic
The group should not be authoritarian in its internal decision-
making style. Authoritarianism is distinguished by:
• unilateral decision-making.
• censoring opposition within the group.
• controlling information.
• excluding others from leadership positions.
• favouring hierarchical forms of organisation, not because they
may be more efficient for certain tasks, but because they allow
a few persons to control the whole group.
Source : adapted from Labonté 1998.
health promotion competencies and his own reflections on health pro-

motion as an empowering practice, developed a reasonably short list of
such competencies:
1. Programme design, management and implementation.

This involves an understanding of programme cycles, budgeting, the
planning and evaluation and how and when community members
should be engaged in these different programme steps.
2. The planning and delivery of effective communication strategies.
Communication strategies are an integral part of many health pro-
motion programmes. A high level of competence is needed for com-
munication strategies that differently target individuals, groups and
communities, including one-to-one communication, the design of
print materials, the use of the mass media (including the Internet)
and engaging with journalists.
3. Facilitating skills.
Training, usually within a workshop setting, is a key part of many
health promotion programmes. Good facilitation skills are essential
for health promoters and are an important part of programme design.
4. Research skills.
Health promotion programme design and evaluation is based on
sound research including the use of participatory techniques, quali-
tative and quantitative methods and systematic reviews.
5. Community capacity building skills.
This is a process of capacity building and health promoters should be
competent in a range of strategies (described in Chapter 3) that they
can use to help individuals, groups and communities to gain more
power.
6. Ability to influence policy and practice.
Health promoters have the opportunity to influence policy and prac-
tice in their everyday work, for example, through technical advisory
groups and through helping communities to mobilise and organise
themselves towards gaining power. Health promoters must develop
competence in the use of strategies to influence policy, developing
partnerships and sound working relationships.
But what drives the application of these competencies? Laverack

(2007) speaks of values of equity and compassion. Labonté (1993a) earlier
wrote of the importance of practitioners’ ethical stance, based on respect
(which demands efforts to learn why others have come to different opin-
ions or judgments than ourselves), generosity (which, as the Sufi tradi-
tion defines the term, means doing justice without requiring it) and
service to (caring for) others. These are all claims to ethics or moral prin-
ciples. They are not dissimilar to those that traditionally have guided
most other health professionals:
• Beneficence – a practitioner should act in the best interest of the

person
• Non-maleficence – ‘first, do no harm’
• Autonomy – the person has the right to refuse or choose their
treatment
• Justice – equity in the distribution of scarce health resources
• Dignity – the person and practitioner both have to the right to be
treated with dignity
• Truthfulness and honesty – informed consent
All of these have some pertinence to health promotion, most of which are
obvious. Some are not; for example, health promoters who extend their
practice into community organising activities (described in Chapter 3)
have sometimes done so with little prior training or competency with
potentially harmful effects. Do we seek the empowerment of all
equally? Even equity in scarce health resources tends to become a ques-
tion of who gets what and omits the issue of why such resources might
be scarce in the first place. And scare to whom? The reason for these
limitations is simply that traditional ethics, reflecting Western individ-
ualism, are based on individual level of ethical responsibility.
The application of ethics to health promotion has been written about
more extensively, including some of its community change ideals. In a
lively (and largely deserved) critical disassembling of health promotion
definitions and models that suffused the 1980s and 1990s, David
Seedhouse (1997), a health promoter-turned-philosopher, posits a ‘foun-
dational’ theory of health promotion built on a short series of logically
linked propositions:
• a core respect for the autonomy of individuals

• a focus on central conditions in people’s lives that support such
autonomy
• prevention of disease, illness, injury and disability as legitimate health
promotion ‘targets’
• prevention of obstacles in the way of achieving the previous three
His reasoning combines a blend of liberalism (provision of core resources

but not a guarantee of full equality), utilitarianism (improve these core
conditions for all rather than for particular ‘groups’) and egalitarianism
(make this improvement a social priority for all). His reasoning is simi-
lar to the more elaborated arguments for a social ethic based on ‘capa-
bilities’ advanced by Nobel economist, Amartya Sen (1999), and
philosopher, Martha Nussbaum (2000), both of whom claim that soci-
eties have an obligation to ensure that all its members have access to the
minimum resources required for them to live a valued life.
While these writers’ foci on autonomy and core resources are important
counter-balances to the social engineering for which health promotion
has been criticised, what remains missing is recognition of the institutions
that create and sustain poverty and other social inequalities, especially at
a time of great global wealth. We return to this point in Chapter 7; to close
this discussion for the moment, we present an intentionally provocative
scenario that cuts to the quick of contemporary health promotion ethics.
The history of most civilizations, as writers Jared Diamond (2005) and

Ronald Wright (2004) inform us, has been one of ruining their ecologies.
This despoliation underpins their collapse, fuels population movements
and, where there have been contiguous land masses or the technologies
to cross oceans, gives rise to the next rising empire. This is clearly illus-
trated in the story of the Easter Islanders, whose ideological enslavement
to a belief in the ancients led to the erection of huge stone monuments,
whose movement required skids of timber which, as competition among
the families for more and bigger monuments accelerated, denuded the
island of every last tree. No trees, no birds, no insects, no mammals, no
fresh water, no food. And by the time the Europeans bumped into the
island, almost no people. The tragedy is that they likely knew what would
happen even as they cut the last tree.
Just as we know what will likely happen as we continue to fish our
oceans to extinction; as early as 2048, by one recent estimate, we would
eliminate our carbon sinks and biodiversity, contaminate our sources of
fresh water, grow our economies with toxic fossil fuels and blind our-
selves to the consequences with an ideological enslavement to growth
as the only marker of progress. This time, however, the collapse will not
be confined to a single island. It will be global, and the toll will be in
the multiple millions; if for no other reason than, a few years ago, we
surpassed the brown rat in becoming the most populous mammalian
species on the planet.
Therein lays the ethical affront. For promoting the physical and men-
tal health of individuals whose well-being rests, in part, on economic
practices that are today’s equivalent of logging, the last Easter Island
tree is, we contend, morally unacceptable and, from an intergenera-
tional health vantage, indefensible.
Health promotion and the social determinants of health
Our discussion now turns to another of health promotion’s empower-

ing axioms: working on the underlying social determinants of health,
and not merely on their more visible manifestations as disease or behav-
iour. The reason for this imperative is simple. While medical care has
been important in prolonging life expectancy during the twentieth cen-
tury, inequalities in health persist, and recently have increased globally,
between people from different social classes, ethnic groups and genders.
This is because the common causes of ill health are shaped by social,
political and economic forces that differ by nation, region and ‘commu-
nity’, and the effects on power these forces create. The Ottawa Charter
identified these causes in its list of ‘basic prerequisites for health’: peace,
shelter, education, food, income, stable ecosystem, sustainable resources,
social justice and equity. This list has been more rigorously refined by
researchers into different compilations of what are now referred to as the
‘non-medical determinants of health’ or, more recently, the ‘social deter-
minants of health’ (SDH). These determinants encompass the economic
and social conditions that influence the health of individuals, commu-
nities and whole jurisdictions. They are influences that may seem distant
to an individual or community, but they nonetheless exert enormous
influence over their everyday lives.
Table 2.4 provides one such listing of the SDH, based on the work of
Wilkinson and Marmot (2003). The factors influencing these determi-
nants of health often involve public policy decisions concerning the
distribution of income, social security and the quality and availability
of education, food and housing.
Ten years ago, the federal Canadian government established a similar
list of population health determinants, using slightly different headings
and categorisations. Because this list has been used as a guide for health
promotion practice within Canada (albeit primarily at the local or pro-
gramme level), it offers some initial insights into how health promotion
practice can address the SDH for each of the list’s determinants
(Adapted from Labonté 2003).
Social determinants of health in health promotion practice
Income and social status

This is the single most important determinant of health. Health status
improves at each step of the income and social hierarchy. Higher
income levels affect living conditions such as safe housing and the abil-
ity to buy sufficient good food. But money isn’t everything. How peo-
ple feel about the adequacy of their income, how it compares to a
broader social standard is also important. It is a measure of one’s social
status or rank. The psychological impacts of being low on a social hier-
archy can be as health-damaging as lack of money itself. It links directly
into people’s sense of their own self-worth, their self/social-esteem.
Health promotion programme contributions:
• Hiring programme participants and other low-income people.

• Providing or brokering free services (e.g., free clothing, laundry facil-
ities, office equipment or resources, transportation).
• Providing individual advocacy around welfare entitlements, sub-
sidised housing, bank or other debts.
Table 2.4 The social determinants of health
Social Description
Determinant
of Health
The social Life expectancy is shorter for people further down the social
gradient ladder and who are likely to experience twice as much
disease and ill health as those nearer the top in society. This
influence also affects people across society, for example,
within middle-class office workers those with lower ranking
jobs experience more disease.
Stress People that are worried, anxious and unable to psychologi-
cally cope suffer from stress that over long periods of time
can damage their health, for example, high blood pressure,
stroke, depression, and may lead to premature death. Stress
can result from many different circumstances in a person’s
life but the lower people are in the social gradient the
more common are these problems.
Early life Slow physical growth and poor emotional support can
result in a lifetime of poor health and a reduced psycholog-
ical functioning in adulthood. Poor fetal development,
linked to, for example, stress, addiction and poor prenatal
care, is a risk for health in later life.
Social exclusion Poverty, discrimination and racism can all contribute to
social exclusion. These processes all prevent people from
participating in health and education services, are psycholog-
ically damaging and can lead to illness and premature death.
Work While having a job is generally healthier than not having a
job, stress in the workplace increases the risk of ill health,
for example, back pain, sickness absence and cardio-vascular
disease. This is more pronounced when people have little
opportunity to use their skills and have low decision-making
authority.
Unemployment Job security increases health; unemployment or the insecu-
rity of losing one’s job causes more illness and premature
death. The health effects of unemployment are linked to
psychological factors such as anxiety brought on by prob-
lems of debt.
Social support Having friends, good social relationships and supportive
networks can improve health. People have better health
when they feel cared for, loved, esteemed and valued.
Conversely, people who do not have these factors in their
lives suffer from poorer health and premature death.
Addiction Alcohol dependence, illicit drug use and smoking are not
only markers of social and economic disadvantage but are
(Continued)
Table 2.4 (Continued)
Social Description
Determinant
of Health
also important factors in worsening health. People can enter
into addictive relationships to provide a temporary release
from the pain of harsh social and economic conditions and
stress but as a result their long-term health is damaged.
Food A good diet and an adequate supply of food are important
to health and well-being. A poor diet can cause malnutri-
tion and a variety of deficiencies that can contribute to, for
example, cancer and diabetes and can also lead to obesity.
Poor diet is often associated with people who are lower on
the social gradient.
Transport The reliance on mechanised transport has resulted in peo-
ple taking less exercise, increased fatal accidents and pollu-
tion. Other forms of transport such as cycling and walking
increases the level of exercise and helps people to reduce
obesity and diseases such as diabetes and strokes.
Source: (Wilkinson 2003).
• Assisting in community economic development initiatives.

• Anywhere programme activities generates new income for partici-
pants, or reduces the income they would otherwise have had to
spend on privately provided activities.
Social support networks

Support from families, friends and communities is associated with bet-
ter health. The support of family and friends who provide a caring and
supportive relationship may be as important to health as risk factors
such as smoking, physical activity, obesity, and high blood pressure.
Social networks describe what is now more commonly called social cap-
ital, the web of relations and ties that bind people together into com-
munities. Networks are different from friendships or relationships. They
are more impersonal. People can move in and out of them with reason-
able ease. They are the larger pot from which friendships and relation-
ships might be ladled. They are also the range of groups, affiliations and
loose connections through which potential opportunities and resources
flow. Connecting participants to other groups, organisations and neigh-
bourhoods are all ways in which programmes can broaden participants’
social networks.
• Opportunities the programme creates for informal conversation and

friendship formation.
• Peer-support initiatives.
• Intentionally created support groups for people with shared issues.
• Increase participants’ access to broader social networks.
Education
Health status improves with level of education. Education increases
opportunities for income and job security and gives people a sense of
control over their lives. These are key factors which influence health.
The content and style of education is based upon increasing all persons’
understanding of how health issues and concerns arise, how these are
shaped personally and socially, and what can be done about them.
• Opportunities for critical learning.

• On-site education facilities (something many children’s programmes
or shelters already offer).
• Opportunities for participants to improve their own reading, numer-
acy and other literacy skills in the context of programme work.
Employment and working conditions

Unemployment, underemployment and stressful work are associated
with poorer health. Those with more control over their work and fewer
stress-related demands on the job are healthier.
• Providing opportunities for employment to programme participants.

• Offering services or referrals that improve participants’ employabil-
ity, for example, providing skills training, interview assistance, access
to information on employment opportunities.
• Providing training in health-promoting workplaces for participants
who have jobs, and helping them to make sure their workplaces are
healthy.
• ‘Practicing what we preach’ internally, by increasing income equity
and control over conditions experienced by people working in our
programmes, creating a flat hierarchy in decision-making levels and
reducing workplace stress.
Social environments
The values and rules of a society affect the health and well-being of indi-
viduals and populations. Social stability, recognition of diversity, safety,
good relationships and cohesive communities provide a supportive soci-
ety which reduces or removes many risks to good health. There are, how-
ever, differing social values, some of which are more health-promoting
than others. Discriminatory prejudices (the ‘-isms’ of racism, sexism,
ageism, heterosexism and so on) can be internalised by people creating
poorer health.
• Advocating for health-promoting changes in the social environment.

• Helping participants increase their own policy advocacy skills.
• As staff and organisations, participating in broader coalitions or other
collective efforts to influence policy.
• Increasing public understanding of the needs and capacities of peo-
ple whose health is compromised by their social and economic mar-
ginalisation.
• Improving people’s abilities to interact more effectively with their
existing social environments.
Physical environment
Physical factors in the natural environment (e.g., air, water quality) are
key influences on health. Factors in the human-built environment such
as housing, workplace safety and community and road design are also
important influences.
• Reducing environmental threats to human health.

• Reducing exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS).
• Reducing toxics and toxins in the home environment.
• Lobbying for more equitable access to recreational green space for
people in poorer neighbourhoods, reduced traffic risks and so on.
• Increasing access to healthy, affordable housing.
Personal health practices and coping skills

Social environments that enable and support healthy choices and
lifestyles, as well as people’s knowledge, behaviours and coping skills for
dealing with life in healthy ways are key influences on health.
• Tangible supports for behaviour change, such as free food, physical

fitness classes, stress reduction/management sessions, smoking cessa-
tion courses.
Healthy child development

The effect of prenatal and early childhood experiences on subsequent
health, well-being, coping skills and competence is very powerful. A low
weight at birth links with health and social problems throughout a per-
son’s life. Children live in families, and families live in communities.
The challenge for many programmes where the primary focus is healthy
child development is developing activities on other health determi-
nants at a broader community level.
• Nutrition, home visiting and parenting programmes.

• Peer supports for parents.
• Infant stimulation programmes.
• Recreational programmes for parents and children.
Culture
Culture and ethnicity come from both personal history and wider social,
political, geographic and economic factors. Culture is a determinant of
health to the extent that cultural roles shape health-promoting (or damag-
ing) behaviours, cultural biases create stereotypes that influence physical
and mental well-being or access to health-promoting services, and cultural
discrimination (racism) prevents equitable access to other health determi-
nants (income, social status, education, employment and working condi-
tions) on the basis of one’s ancestry. Multicultural health issues
demonstrate how necessary it is to consider the interrelationships of phys-
ical, mental, spiritual, social and economic well-being at the same time.
• Incorporation of concepts from non-dominant (non-European) ethno-

racial cultures into programme content.
• Staff training in cultural sensitivity and anti-racism.
• Providing culturally appropriate content to newcomers (immigrants,
refugees).
• Offering interpretive services when required.
• Recognising positive indigenous identity as both pluralist (there is no

singular aboriginal identity) and health-promoting in its own right.
Gender
Gender refers to the many different roles, personality traits, attitudes,
behaviours, values, relative powers and influences which society assigns
to the two sexes. Gender is a determinant of health to the extent that
gender roles shape health-promoting (or damaging) behaviours, gender
biases create stereotypes that influence physical and mental well-being
or access to health-promoting services and gender discrimination pre-
vents equitable access to other health determinants (income, social sta-
tus, education, employment and working conditions) on the basis of
sex. Each gender has specific health issues or may be affected in differ-
ent ways by the same issues.
• How does the programme support healthful gender roles and chal-
lenge those that are not?
• How does the programme break down damaging gender stereotypes?
• How does the programme contribute to overcoming systemic gender
discrimination?
• How does the programme ensure it is gender-sensitive in its own
design, content and implementation?
Health services
Health services, particularly those which are publicly funded and uni-
versally accessible, such that the rich or healthy subsidise the poor or
sick, contribute to population health.
• Ensuring participants have access to required medical and primary

health care.
• Educating health care providers on the issues or concerns particular
to programme participants about which they may be unaware.
• Participating in community discussions on health-system reform.
Biology and genetic endowment

The basic biology and organic make-up of the human body are funda-
mental determinants of health. Inherited predispositions influence the
ways individuals are affected by particular diseases or health problems.
Few health promotion programmes are involved directly in changing
biological or genetic health determinants. Indirectly, any programme

that improves other health determinants in this list is improving a bio-
logical pathway to health. Programmes improving prenatal and post-
natal health are more clearly helping to shape a healthier biological
pathway for children. Other programmes aimed at reducing tobacco or
drug use also affect biological pathways to health.
The politics of policies affecting the social determinants of

health
Many health promoters now recognise the importance of a social deter-

minants approach in their work, one that moves beyond the individual
behavioural model. This requires, in part, an approach that moves their
work towards a model that posits health as being determined by how
societies themselves are structured (Mouy & Barr 2006).
There are four useful and empirically supported ways in which to
model how social structures create health inequities:
• Social stratification: where people are located in a social gradient (by

economic, gender, racial status), which affects . . .
• Differential exposure: to risks or hazards in the workplace, the com-
munity, the broader social and physical environments; the response
to which is influenced by pre-existing . . .
• Differential vulnerability: which increases the likelihood of morbid-
ity or mortality when exposed to risks or hazards, leading to . . .
• Differential consequences: both in terms of access to remedial health
or other social services, length of time recovering from illness and the
impact of illness on their position in a social gradient (Diderichsen
et al. 2001).
The degree of stratification and differential exposure, vulnerability and

consequences is very much a function of economic and political poli-
cies chosen by different states. Among high-income states, those favour-
ing a more ‘liberal’ (or neoliberal) political economy (primarily the
‘Anglo-American’ nations of the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia
and Aotearoa/New Zealand) have given lower priority to policies aimed
at social spending than have social democratic states. As Raphael and
Bryant (2006) point out:
These differences among nations help explain variations in population

health. [N]ations predominantly governed from 1945–1980 by social
democratic political parties show greater union density, social security

expenditures, and employment levels . . . They had the largest public
expenditures in health care from 1960–1990, and greatest coverage of
citizens by health care. These nations had high rates of female
employment, and lowest income inequalities and poverty rates. On a
key indicator of population health – infant mortality – they had the
lowest rates from 1960–1996. Recent work extends these findings to
life expectancy with similar advantages associated with [social demo-
cratic] nations.
Until recently, much of the literature on the SDH has focussed only on
specific living and working conditions that create health inequities. This
has led to efforts to consider how health promotion programmes can
take greater account of the SDH in their more routine programme work.
But, as Raphael and others argue, unless health promotion recognises the
political context of the SDH it will be largely ineffectual in reducing
health inequities. This requires engagement in partisan politics. Bryant
(2006), for example, found that there are particular political forces that
are more likely to produce equitable health-promoting policy change:
• The presence of ‘left’ political parties to influence government

decision-making.
• Proportional representation electoral systems that increase the likeli-
hood of such a presence.
• High union density and effective labour powers to negotiate
favourable wage and employment conditions.
• A historic state commitment to active labour policy, support for
women’s employment, adequate spending to support families, assis-
tance for the unemployed and those with disabilities, provision of
educational and recreational opportunities and efforts to reduce social
exclusion and promote democratic participation.
To these we would add the presence of strong civil society organisations

with similar commitments and the caution: modern globalisation is
reducing the policy space of even the most committed governments to
act on the SDH. The implication this has for health promoters concerned
with an empowering practice is straightforward if discomfiting: support
for those political parties, labour groups and civil society organisations
that hold to these aims. This is not to the exclusion of working across
political spectra. But if we hold to the new mantra of ‘evidence-based’ or
‘evidence-informed’ practice, the evidence of where support for health
promoting policies lies is unambiguously clear.
3
Pathways to Local Empowerment
A small group of thoughtful people could change the

world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead, Anthropologist
In this chapter we examine empowerment’s strategic pathways. These

pathways are viewed as a five-point continuum that identify the
organisational characteristics by which people move from individual
experiences of power towards more collective forms of social and
political action. The end result of such action may be a change in pol-
icy, legislation or even societal norms. We focus in this chapter on
local empowerment, the identification of a community concern about
which people share their ideas and experiences and engage in bring-
ing about some form of personal, political and social change. As we
move along the continuum of strategies, however, local empower-
ment’s translocal links to global issues and networks start to become
apparent.
Why a continuum? A brief history
The continuum model was first introduced to explain how unequal

power relationships can be transformed as people progress from per-
sonal empowerment to more politicised forms of mobilisation. As a
model it arose from reflections on health promotion practice. Labonté
was preparing a series of training workshops for health and social serv-
ice workers to be delivered in several Australian states in 1988. He devel-
oped his continuum of strategies based on community health workers’
53
experiences during a particularly activist phase of the Toronto public

health department. His five-point continuum comprised:
1. Personal empowerment
2. Small group development
3. Community organisation
4. Coalition advocacy
5. Political action (Labonté 1990)
When presenting this model to the group of community workers in

Sydney, he was surprised and delighted when they presented back to
him a model they had developed independently around the same time.
Their five-point continuum was based on their community develop-
ment work in the Fitzroy Community Health Centre in Australia. Their
five-point continuum comprised:
1. Developmental casework
2. Mutual support
3. Issues identification and campaigns
4. Participation and control of services
5. Social movements ( Jackson et al. 1989)
The close parallels between the two are obvious, and were later adapted
to explain how psychological empowerment relates to the process of
local empowerment (Rissel 1994). The three sets of authors use slightly
different terminology that essentially hold the same meaning and repre-
sent the same conceptual design: the potential of people to progress from
individual to collective action. The version we present modifies some-
what earlier renditions, and comprises five elements (see Figure 3.1).
1. Personal action
2. Small groups
3. Community organisations
4. Partnerships
5. Social and political action (Laverack 2004)
The empowerment continuum
The continuum model we present has been written about extensively

(e.g. Labonté 1990, 1993a, 1998; Laverack 2004, 2007; Rissel 1994). While
some readers may already have encountered variations on the continuum,
Pathways to Local Empowerment 55
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
>
Personal Small Community Partnerships Social and
action groups organisations political
action
Figure 3.1 The local empowerment continuum

Source: (Laverack 2004, 48).
for many it remains a new tool. It is also one that has been unchallenged
in the literature for more than a decade and a half. The continuum iden-
tifies various levels of empowerment, from personal to organisational to
the collective. The strength of its modelling is also its weakness: the con-
tinuum offers a simple, linear interpretation of what is actually a more
fluid and complex process. There are several points here worth noting.
First, groups and organisations as they move their activism further
along the continuum will have their own dynamics. They may flourish
for a time and then fade away for reasons as much to do with changes
in the people as with a lack of broader political or financial support, or
changes in the importance of the issues they confront. Sometimes their
success becomes their undoing: Local struggles over service provision
and new resources for marginalised populations can lead to the creation
of new service organisations with staffing and state-funding, gradually
eroding the need for volunteers and leading to a decline in active citi-
zen participation (Labonté 1998). Such is the dialectic of radicalism and
reform, something practitioners need to bear in mind when they work
with community groups but one that is not necessarily to be mourned.
New service organisations fill a function, albeit a politically less chal-
lenging one. They also often become a local employment structure
offering new locations from which practitioners can identify the next
issues around which community mobilisation and empowerment
might proceed. There is no endpoint to empowerment: it is a continu-
ous feature of social organisation and change.
Second, interpreters of the continuum emphasise the importance of
each of its five points. Unless all members of a group individually expe-
rience some sense of greater power or control (partly through the self/
social-esteem accorded one another) the risk of cliques and unhealthy
power dynamics within a group or organisation increases. Similarly,
unless organisations that engage in partnerships and advocacy work
have a larger community constituency to fall back upon, they risk their
own marginalisation in political discourse.
Third, building the self-confidence of individuals and strengthening

the skills of small groups, the first two points on the continuum, are
insufficient in themselves as empowering strategies. These points
embody ‘power to’ or ‘power-from-within’, the sense of control or mas-
tery that individuals experience. Yet it is precisely these two continuum
points that many health promoters emphasise (Labonté 1996) because,
as Buchanan (2000) writes, the ‘power to’ experienced by individuals
‘appears ethically unproblematic, since it does not have the connota-
tions of domination, coercion, and manipulation’. In our experience
the reason is less philosophical than pragmatic: such forms of power
appear to relieve practitioners of the discomfort of engaging in organ-
ised forms of political activism aimed at gaining more power-over for
some (the community) by limiting the power-over of others (elite
groups). Buchanan poses a further challenging question: ‘To what
extent is it possible to have “power to” do something without exerting
“power over” others?’ (2000).
Fourth, and our reply to Buchanan, the continuum model works
simultaneously from both an interpersonal and a structural perspective.
The interpersonal perspective describes the network of support through
which people interact to organise and mobilise themselves: personal
action and participation in small groups. The structural perspective
addresses more the role of the market, state, its government depart-
ments and those who hold political and economic power-over others.
The continuum model addresses the structural perspective through the
politically orientated activities of partnerships, alliances, coalitions and
social movements. Significantly placed on the continuum between the
interpersonal and structural perspectives is the role of organisations based
in local communities. Community organisations are pivotal because it is
the point at which groups either progress to having a wider influence or
else remain focussed on issues of more local or relational concerns. The
tension between inward and outward looking interests sometimes
requires groups themselves to separate. In our Introduction’s first gar-
den story, some members wanted to concentrate on tending their har-
vest while others saw the garden as a tool for mobilising a campaign to
challenge welfare and social housing reform. This eventually led to cre-
ation of two distinct groups.
Our point here is simply that more practice attention needs to go
towards helping community-based organisations to build their capaci-
ties, establish sound organisational structures and increase their partic-
ipation in broader coalitions or alliances. A recurring theme in this book
is that local, while necessary, is insufficient; as Alan Durning (1989) of
the Worldwatch Institute once opined, paraphrasing the title of econo-

mist E.F. Schumacher’s popular 1973 book, ‘Small may be beautiful, but
it can also be insignificant’.
Personal action
All forms of social and political activism that change the conditions of
peoples’ lives inevitably start with the actions of discrete individuals.
History doesn’t just happen; it is made, and often by the efforts of peo-
ple who remain invisible in the chronicles of change. In everyday life
the first step onto the continuum is often a triggered response to an
emotional or symbolic experience in a person’s life. Experiencing a
neighbourhood traffic accident, for example, can lead persons to become
active in organisations dealing with road safety. There is a long history of
individuals beginning to organise when confronted by a perceived threat,
whether it be a new environmental risk, an unwanted neighbourhood
development or the closing of local sources of employment. An entire
theoretical tradition explaining collective action starts with the assump-
tion that it is motivated first and foremost by self-interest (Olson 1965),
a derivation of Adam Smith’s idea that acting from self-interest via free
markets works to mutual benefit. Others object to this ‘rational actor
model’ of empowerment, noting that there are multiple motivations that
cause individuals to engage in group mobilisation, including a desire to
care for others, love, strong political or religious beliefs, even idealism
(Knoke 1988). Just as communities are multiple in their identities, so too
are people multiple in their motivations for creating them.
Participation in groups of others affected by the same or similar cir-
cumstances increases individuals’ chances of achieving their goals
(Brehm & Rahn 1997). This leaves unresolved whether these goals are
ethically defensible in terms of a broader understanding of the condi-
tions that create health equity. The sparks of personal action at local lev-
els can often be reactionary and health inequitable.
For many people living in unhealthy environments, personal action
often starts with mobilisation for access to useful services and resources,
or simply with the existence of caring services that provide relief and
compassion. Studies of effective primary health care further find that
services and programmes have a better chance of achieving their pur-
pose if they involve people in the process of problem assessment, design
and decision making (Confederation of British Industry 2006). Perhaps
most importantly, services cannot be segmented from other forms of
intervention that drive movement along the continuum.
Small groups
Small groups provide an opportunity for individuals to progress on the

continuum by meeting to share their common experiences and concerns.
Generally these small groups only focus inwards on the immediate needs
of their members and may not have a well-established structure; there is
some evidence that self-help groups deliberately avoid contextualising
their issues in broader social conditions or policies (Labonté 1998).
Different variations of small groups have become popular sources of
government funding, for example through
1. ‘Self-help’ groups organised around a specific problem (e.g. weight

control, diabetes, addiction, disease recovery) or consumers wanting
to find suppliers for organically grown produce. Members who usu-
ally have a shared knowledge and interest in the problem, are partic-
ipatory and supportive and the groups are often set-up and managed
by the participants;
2. ‘Community health’ groups which usually come together to cam-
paign on a specific local health issue, for example, better facilities for
socially excluded groups such as people with disabilities. People are
motivated to come together usually for only short-term periods of
time in regard to issues that influence the group; and
3. ‘Community development health projects’ such as neighbourhood-
based initiatives set up to address broader issues of local concern
such as poor housing, often with an appointed and paid government
community worker ( Jones & Sidell 1997).
This last example begins to take us to the next continuum point of build-
ing new community organisations, but before arriving there it is helpful
to consider a few practitioner issues in small group development. The
first is the need for a high degree of competence in group facilitation.
A professional role is often integral to the success of building these sup-
port groups and moving them into a more outward-looking stance. But
it can also sometimes be confounded by poor facilitation imbued with
too much of the professional’s own agenda. A fatal fire in a rooming
house in Toronto, Canada, led to renewed efforts by many community
service agencies to mobilise roomers around housing issues and tenants’
rights. Early organising efforts, intent on creating tenants’ unions, rent
strikes and other forms of political activism, failed. Some organisers were
even told to leave the groups of roomers they had attempted to mobilise.
Roomers felt that their own concerns weren’t being respected in the rush
towards social action. Many felt pitted against landlords. At the same
time, public health nurses and other direct service providers were wel-
comed for the less intimidating forms of individual and group support
they brought. As one nurse described her work: ‘We cannot expect peo-
ple to do this “social action” process just because we can see a need for
social change . . . But we can help people build some small base amongst
themselves, and support them in going as far along an empowerment
process as they are willing and able to go’ (Labonté 1996).
This story captures the truism that choice, the ability to exercise con-
trol over decisions, is the simplest form of power. It also illustrates the
basic ethical axiom of respect for the autonomy of individuals, provided
that autonomy is not exercised in ways that denies it to others. Health
promoters cannot enforce an empowering activism; the very idea is an
oxymoron. But they can, and should, pay close heed to where the
potentials for a broader social engagement exist within the communi-
ties with which they work. This requires identifying those groups that
are ready to strike outwards to the conditions contributing to their mar-
ginalisation and poorer health. Jones and Laverack (2003) found that
such groups share a number of identifiable organisational features:
A membership of elected representatives, an agreed membership struc-
ture, participation by a majority of members in regular meetings and
properly kept meeting and financial records. The most successful groups
were those able to identify their own problems, solutions to resolve
them and where resources could be found to initiate their work.
Community organisations
Community organisations occupy a pivotal point on the continuum,

the junction at which groups either move towards exerting greater
influence over the policies and politics that affect their lives or remain
focussed on local issues and actions only. But which groups? Which
policies? Which politics? These questions announced themselves in our
arguments about empowerment and health from the very start of this
book. We have so far offered some thoughts about criteria for selecting
groups and urged a nuanced approach to non-partisan advocacy while
ensuring support to those partisan interests most closely aligned with
actions on the social determinants of health.
Political scientists offer another useful tool for decision-making in
their distinction between ‘sectional’ and ‘promotional’ interest groups.
Sectional groups are those that organise to protect primarily the eco-
nomic or partisan interests of their members. This includes business
groups (sometimes referred to as ‘bingos’ for ‘business interest non-

governmental organisations’); trade unions; or political parties seeking
elected office. Promotional groups (sometimes referred to as ‘pingos’
for ‘public interest non-governmental organisations’) are those that are
organised to promote value-based causes such as human and animal
rights or environmental issues such as climate change. Membership
is open to anyone interested in the particular value-based cause of
the group (Tenbensel 2006). While self-interest (the ‘rational actor’)
undoubtedly plays some role in promotional interest groups the dis-
tinction rests largely on whether the interests being pursued accrue
only to group members, or are available to a larger polity.
Authors such as David Truman (1951) have long argued that interest
groups promote a healthy democracy by providing viable routes for peo-
ple to have direct political influence. At the same time, interest groups
that ‘shout the loudest’ are often given the most attention. Even if such
groups are urging policies that will benefit large sweeps of marginalised
people, this effectively gives more advantage and power to those who are
more capable at organising themselves and who are the most articulate.
The dilemma this creates for the practitioner is the trade-off between
efficiency and empowerment. On the one hand, a small number of loud
interest groups may be better able to influence policy change than a
large number of interest groups of varying volume. There may even be
greater equality in outcome as a result. On the other hand, equality in
opportunity suffers, since those with less voice remain comparatively
voiceless and arguably burdened with fewer experiences of capabilities to
control their own lives and conditions. There is no resolution to this
dilemma, apart from recognising its existence and making a judgement
suitable to the moment: increasing voice, or winning a policy change.
A crucial stage in the development of community organisations is an
increase in members’ abilities to think outwards to the environment
that creates their needs in the first place. In chapter 2 we referred to this
as the capacity of ‘Asking “why”’, which others have described as ‘. . . the
ability to reflect critically on the assumptions underlying our and oth-
ers’ ideas and actions and to contemplate alternative ways of living’
(Goodman et al. 1998). ‘Asking why’ captures a process often charac-
terised as a ceaseless spiral of assessment, analysis, action and reflection.
The key term here, though, is ‘critical’, wherein community members
take a long, hard look at their situation to determine the social, political
and economic reasons for their relative powerlessness and poorer health.
Much has been written on the many techniques that health promoters
can use in this process, which begins to fuse their role of facilitator in
small groups with that of developer in community-based organisations

(Wallerstein & Bernstein 1988; Wang et al. 1998). Most of these tech-
niques owe their provenance to the work of Paulo Freire and his concept
of conscientisation (critical consciousness) or, more popularly, ‘popular
education’ (Freire 1968; Freire & Macedo 1987). At the local level of prac-
tice, conscientisation is unlikely to lead to major political mobilisations,
but often succeeds in small-scale improvements. In a small slum in
Nairobi, Kenya, for example, a project aimed at improving maternal/child
health worked with resident women to assess and map their community
using cooperatively designed questionnaires, photography and narra-
tives. Results were shared in an open forum that prioritised creation of a
day-care centre, working with a youth group on environmental cleanli-
ness and employment opportunities, and increasing skills among com-
munity members. A centre was successfully built and managed by the
community; funding to support the work of the youth group is being
sought; and women have been trained in making toys and management
skills to supply and maintain the day care centre (Metzler et al. 2007).
Partnerships
Partnerships are an increasingly invoked strategy in health promotion;

we thus take some time discussing two examples of partnership forms
for what advice they hold for this strategic point.
Our first example is the Voluntary Health Association of India (VHAI),
an alliance of over 4000 health and development agencies. Fifteen years
ago, VHAI, with the financial support of a German foundation, initiated
a linked series of projects to improve community health-related prob-
lems in remote areas. This required creating partnerships between local
health officials, development organisations, the private sector and com-
munity members. One hundred and sixty villages were involved in 17
different projects. One project linked together 20 particularly remote
villages. Based on their expressed interests, village members were
trained in numerous income-generating areas. Particular emphasis was
placed on gender empowerment, through such activities as kitchen gar-
dening, livestock farming and women’s savings clubs. With support
from existing government and NGO resources and infrastructures,
access to most forms of primary care, notably prenatal care, improved,
as did local sanitation systems. Some 64 self-help groups were created,
and each village established its own women’s saving club and develop-
ment committee. Over a ten-year period of study (1993–2003) school
attendance increased, housing improved, environmental conditions were
cleaned up, infant mortality rates dropped from 124/1000 to 50/1000,

and annual maternal mortality deaths decreased from 15 to 0 (Metzler
et al. 2007). These successes are attributed to themes already encoun-
tered: working on community-identified issues and increasing relevant
capacities amongst community members. But equally important was
drawing in the partnership support (both financial/material resources
and knowledge resources) of local NGOs and government.
Similar examples emanate from high-income countries, often as
efforts to create partnerships across different sectors. Referred to by the
Ottawa Charter as building ‘healthy public policy’, these more bureau-
cratic partnerships generally seek to make the broader array of govern-
ment policies and programmes more supportive of health equity goals
(Public Health Agency of Canada 2007). Often a response to outside
pressures from interest groups or coalitions, these ‘intersectoral’ part-
nerships can be horizontal (different jurisdictions, same level), vertical
(same jurisdiction, different levels) or both.
Our second example comes from the Canadian province of
Saskatchewan which since 1999 has maintained a ‘Human Services
Integration Forum’ (HSIF) comprising the highest level civil servants
from seven government ministries. Like the VHAI example, the HSIF goal
is to create more responsive and better-integrated services to communi-
ties in need. This horizontal partnership is linked vertically through a
number of ‘Regional Intersectoral Committees’ (RICS). These local part-
nerships ensure that resolution of integration problems at the level of
direct contact with communities is either enabled, or at least not con-
strained by, policies at the higher governance level. Local partnerships
also involve polyphonies of NGOs and community groups, and work to
broker new resources for new initiatives identified by partnership partic-
ipants. The HSIF in turn is explicitly committed to a community devel-
opment approach to new service delivery. While no formal evaluation of
the impacts of this combined horizontal and vertical partnership has
been undertaken, it is credited with changing how government workers
and NGO service providers plan their future activities. The first question
posed when any of them confront a new problem is: What other sectors,
including community organisations, need to be present to help take new
action on it? (Chomik 2007).
The constellation of health promotion partnerships that have been cre-
ated over the past 20 years is sizable: it includes Healthy Cities/Healthy
Communities projects; initiatives built around different settings such as
schools, workplaces, prisons; and scores of local pilot projects such as the
UK’s and Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Health Action Zones. The literature on
these partnerships is almost as large, and will not be recounted here.

A few generic lessons, though, seem to recur. Based on the authors’ expe-
riences and a recent synthesis of published literature on intersectoral
action on health determinants (Public Health Agency of Canada 2007),
these can be summarised as:
• A problem that can’t be fixed by any one group or sector. This should
seem obvious, but it often is not. Many partnership forums are sim-
ply information exchanging networks which, while helpful in a lim-
ited way, are a questionable use of both government and community
resources. The financial, logistical and time costs of effective part-
nerships can be quite large; engaging across sectors should be done
with careful forethought and clarity of purpose.
• Partners with compatible motives for action. Ensuring that partners have
overlapping interests in the problem is basic to establishing some
principled action. While an argument can be made that fundamental
values must also be shared, extending even to those partisan social
democratic policies that cohere most with empowerment and health
equity, partnerships can sometimes be narrowly strategic. This brings
together groups that may not hold to the same core social vision.
Susan George, a political scientist and longstanding campaigner for a
just globalisation, writes of the importance of building alliances with
small business people. She defends this as an important strategy in
efforts to restrain the incursion of global retail chains, such as anti-
union, human rights offending Wal-Mart (George 2004); although for
different reasons, there is a confluence of shared interest in the single-
issue campaign. Similarly, anti-poverty activists involved in a cam-
paign to improve welfare benefits in a Canadian province successfully
sought the support of some small businesses by commenting on how
many of these ‘ma and pa’ shops relied upon poorer families for their
customer base. Improving income transfers would also improve their
local business. Interestingly, the personal values of individuals may be
more important to well-functioning partnerships than the stated val-
ues of the organisations they represent. When people meet to plan
new partnership activities the innate dynamics of small groups and
interpersonal relations begin to intersect with any formal negotia-
tions or agreements that might be driven by the goals espoused by
their respective groups.
• Partners with the resources necessary to resolve the problem. Resources do
not always have to be financial; for many community participants in
partnerships that involve state sectors and NGOs, the resources they
bring to the table are primarily intimate knowledge of the causes and
consequences of the ‘problem’ the partnership formed to resolve. But
money matters. Indeed, for some, a defining feature of partnerships
is the willingness of members to pool resources for new initiatives
that no longer bear the imprimatur of any one of them: its identity
becomes that of the partnership.
Such is the case with the ‘Vancouver Agreement’, a partnership
involving three government levels, a regional health authority and
several community organisations that has been working with some
success since 2000 to improve housing, health and quality of life in
four inner city neighbourhoods facing urban decay. The partnership
began with a focus on harm reduction for the large population of IV
drug users in the area who were ‘sleeping rough’ or in exploitative
single-occupancy room hotels; and whose drug-related petty crimes
had created a loss of safety for other residents. The health authority
diverted funds from its tertiary care budget and challenged other gov-
ernment levels to match them. The intent was to develop cooperative
housing for IV drug users, along with needle-exchange programmes
and a safe-injection site. This would not only reduce the health risks
faced by such persons; it would also reduce the risk of crime. A paral-
lel project helped to revitalise the arts in the neighbourhoods, essen-
tially reclaiming them as desirable and safe places in which to live.
While the continued existence of the safe-injection house is precari-
ous, given Canada’s current ‘tough on drugs’ rather than a harm
reduction approach, three levels of government have each committed
$10 million to continue the partnership activities over the next five
years (Labonté 2006; Chomik 2007).
• Strong champions within each partnering group/sector. The resource costs
of partnership work can cause organisational leaders to balk at the
commitments. Pooling resources can be risky and face internal oppo-
sition. In the early days of the Vancouver Agreement the reallocation
of tertiary care funds to housing and programmes for IV drug users
was not met kindly by medical specialists, some of whom mounted
a counter-campaign. Committed and forceful leaders within the part-
nering groups helped to deflect this campaign. The role played by
community groups representing citizens (rather than professionals or
government agencies) was pivotal since they were ‘pingos’ (public-
interest NGOs) and not ‘bingos’ (business-interest NGOs).
How do partnerships become empowering for community groups them-

selves? The answer depends partly on a reflection on what groups are
being asked to partner for. There is a risk in many partnership activi-

ties, especially those where new service provision is one of the driving
outcomes, of unintentionally transforming community/citizen activists
into volunteer bureaucrats. A stylised tale illustrating this point con-
cerns a health promoter’s desire to work with community groups on
their self-identified issue of inadequate housing. A committee was
formed. Research syntheses were undertaken. The groups, seduced by the
expectation of local government action, even participated in a new sur-
vey of residents to document the health consequences of poor housing.
A report was written and moved slowly up the health promoter’s
bureaucratic ladder. Twice it was rejected because the recommendations
were too strident, too much in the tone of the community groups.
Twice it was rewritten to become more acceptable to a system whose
principle role is to maintain a peaceful status quo and manage any
required change in ways that absolutely avoid conflict. The community
groups drifted away from the partnership, feeling slightly cynical and
used; while the health promoter felt dejected and wondered what had
gone wrong. In simple terms, the mistake was to involve community
groups in a bureaucratic planning process. Instead, partnerships with
community organisations need to be thought of more as strategic
alliances than merged identities. Community groups pursue their own
interests using their rights as citizens to make claims upon the state;
health promoters buttress their claims ‘inside the system’ in the politically
neutral style of statistical reports and policy analyses (Labonté 1993b).
We might extract two other points from these examples. First, and
attested to by the available literature, partnerships around the determi-
nants of health have so far worked best at local levels. To some observers
this is because policy decision-making at higher levels of governance is
much more complex (Public Health Agency of Canada 2007). Second,
the likelihood of successfully ‘winning’ policy gains at the local level,
and certainly at any higher governance level, usually demands some
form of direct action. While our discussion of the empowerment con-
tinuum so far has offered reasons why each point is important in itself,
creating or supporting different forms of social and political action must
be taken as a requisite outcome.
Social and political action and beyond
Addressing inequalities in the distribution of power requires collective

action; but such action must also be of sufficient force if those with power-
over decision-making in the markets or government that determine the
allocation of wealth, resources and legitimacy are to take notice. A key

difference between local empowerment and the types of actions envi-
sioned by this continuum point is that efforts here are aimed explicitly
at changing deeper structural practices of our politics and economics.
Table 3.1 provides examples of the types of indirect and direct actions
that people can use and have used to influence policy. Essentially, peo-
ple use their own decision-making power to create or resist change in
political or economic policies in two ways:
1. Indirectly, such as registering a complaint to government authorities,

writing a letter to their elected representatives about their concerns
or mobilising what is now called ‘shareholder activism’;
2. Directly, such as taking legal action, funding an aggressive publicity
campaign or actively lobbying people in positions of power. For
example, the environment movement, to gain a seat in the corporate-
government boardrooms where environmental policies were being
formed, engaged in ‘direct action’ campaigns that blocked effluent
pipes, stopped polluting activities or prevented whaling, logging or
other forms of unsustainable resource extraction (Gray 1989).
Stated simply, social action means that people use their collective capac-
ity to cause trouble. The ‘anti-globalisation’ protests at the World Trade
Organisation meeting in 1999 is partly credited with that meeting’s col-
lapse and heightened international attention on the negative effects of
economic globalisation. The disruption such protests create and the level
of subsequent public participation in these groups becomes the basis for
their social and political influence. But once invited to the ‘roundtables’
of policy discussion with more elite group members such as the World
Economic Forum’s annual global meeting, their radicalism and legiti-
macy stays current only so long as part of their allied groups maintain
the pressures of direct action.
An interesting example of recent indirect ‘shareholder’ activism, a
strategy that targets the market rather than the state, was launched by an
American nun over 30 years ago. Recognising that faith-based organisa-
tions in the metro New York area had stock investments worth over
US$110 billion, Sister Patricia Daly formed the Tri-State Coalition for
Responsible Investment to pressure multinationals to decrease pollution,
improve working conditions and practice more ethical forms of global
sourcing. Her coalition puts forward hundreds of shareholder motions
each year, while she meets and cajoles senior executives around the
issues of social justice and environmental sustainability. The economic
Table 3.1 Direct and indirect actions towards empowerment
Indirect Attend a local planning meeting.

Actions Vote at a local or national election.
Lobby, such as sign a petition.
Assuming a moral superiority.
Send a letter, email or text to a local MP or newspaper.
Deliver promotional campaign material house to house.
Non-Violent Peaceful civil protests and demonstrations such as ‘sit-ins’.
actions Refusal to pay taxes or bills.
Infiltrate a meeting such as one being held by shareholders.
Take part in a boycott or strike action.
Direct Create a media event such as climbing a public building to
Actions deploy a banner.
Engage in an aggressive publicity campaign.
Instigate legal action against someone else.
Hack into another computer (‘Hacktivism’) to obtain infor-
mation or to insert a virus package.
Violent actions Physically alter something to prevent action such as ‘spiking’
(physical action trees with metal pins.
against people Place oneself in a position of manufactured vulnerability
or property) to prevent action such as building and occupying a tunnel
under a road or a tree house, squatting in a house detailed
for demolition.
Take part in a riot or revolt with the intention to carry out
physical damage on property or persons.
weight of the faith-based portfolios her Coalition pools is her empower-

ing entrance key. It has also been effective in forcing major US automak-
ers to require better working conditions in the developing world factories
from which they source many of their parts. Shareholder activism, of
course, can work regardless of ideology or belief systems. Conservative
evangelists have created investment funds for their faithful that carefully
exclude companies or groups supporting gay/lesbian rights, sex educa-
tion, abortion rights or any other issue they find religiously repugnant
(Wray 2007). Empowerment strategies discussed in this chapter are ethi-
cally neutral; only when they are linked to explicit goals of justice and
health equity do they become health-promoting strategies.
The list of representative actions in Table 3.1 helps to convey the
importance of persistence in social action. A former federal Canadian
cabinet minister once noted that during all her time in government, the
only groups that won their policy point, when such point was not con-
sistent with the government’s own platform, were those that came back
again, and again, and again. This does not mean that persistence is a guar-
antee of success. One of the more durable social action campaigns of
recent decades that arose from community need and health promotion
activism monitors compliance with the World Health Organization’s
‘International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes’. Introduced
at the World Health Assembly in 1981, this voluntary Code restricts a
number of marketing mechanisms used by infant formula manufacturers
to persuade mothers not to breastfeed and to purchase their products
instead. Some countries have since written provisions of the Code into
their own legislation (though few developing nations have), and abuses
of the Code are not as widespread as they were in the 1980s. Violations
do continue, however, as does the ‘naming and shaming’ work of the
Infant Baby Formula Action Network (IBFAN), a global organisation of
national and local groups that tracks the actions of formula manufac-
turers (IBFAN 2007). Our point here is that the work to constrain the
practices of power-over, especially those instantiated in economic inter-
ests, is a lifelong commitment.
Health activism
Sister Daly’s work, and that of the hundreds of anonymous staff and
members of IBFAN, embodies such a commitment. They are health
activists, engaged in intentional acts to bring about social or political
change. Such change can be slow and gradual so that it is barely notice-
able, the incrementalism of reform. But change can also be radical, sud-
den and revolutionary. The term ‘popular activism’ is often associated
with direct and fast actions, both violent and non-violent, such as civil
protests ( Jordan 2002).
For many health activists, their concern is principally the policy devel-
opment cycle. We discuss the policy cycle in more detail in Chapter 4
and conclude this chapter with two examples of such activism, both of
which employed a range of empowerment strategies leading up to social
and political action. Box 3.1 describes how women who were concerned
by the lack of access to Herceptin®, a drug used to treat breast cancer,
used both indirect and direct actions to influence government policy.
Box 3.2 tells the story of the Treatment Action Campaign in South
Africa, which challenged the drug patent rules of pharmaceutical multi-
national companies that were restricting access to antiretroviral drugs.
The high cost of Herceptin® owes partly to the expense of research
leading to its development, but also to the recent extension of intellec-
tual property rights under international trade treaties that prevents the
Box 3.1 The case for and against Herceptin® in the UK
Herceptin® is one of a new group of cancer drugs called monoclonal

antibodies. Herceptin® works by interfering with the way breast can-
cer cells divide and grow when a protein that naturally occurs in the
body, known as human epidermal growth factor, attaches itself to
another protein, known as HER2. Herceptin® blocks this process by
attaching itself to the HER2 protein so that the epidermal growth fac-
tor cannot reach the breast cancer cells. This stops the cells from
dividing and growing. Only about one in five women with breast
cancer have tumours that are sensitive to Herceptin®.
Women’s groups campaigned for NHS trusts in the UK to fund the
use of Herceptin® more widely to treat breast cancer. The minimum
cost to pay for the treatment is well beyond the means of most women
who have breast cancer. However, the trusts refused to fund the drug
until it was licensed for use in the early stages of the condition because
of safety concerns and the absence of a product licence for the drug’s
use. The trusts indicated that they would wait for a published decision
from the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
This decision outraged many women who established local groups
to organise and mobilise themselves to try and bring about a change
in the decision made by local trusts. The groups consisting of ordi-
nary people such as mothers and housewives organised indirect and
direct actions such as local demonstrations outside hospitals, peti-
tions, sit-in protests and wrote to their MP. At a national level the
women established a website to support others and embarked on an
aggressive publicity campaign against the government.
As a result the NICE was put under pressure to make a quick decision
on the use of the drug and the government and local trusts were put
under intense pressure to provide Herceptin®. Eventually, the success of
a high-profile court case ensured that Herceptin® was approved for use
on the National Health Service. This was largely because of the deter-
mined action of women to individually and collectively take action.
This action started at a local level but soon developed collectively at the
national level in order to have a wider influence on the redistribution
of resources and decisions (power) regarding Herceptin®. The other side
to this case is that thousands of patients could be denied medicines if
hospitals have to pay for the few women who need Herceptin®. Their
treatment will be borne by other patients whose own cancer treatment
will be withheld to balance the account books (Boseley 2006).
Box 3.2 Treatment Action Campaign
The South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) first mobilised

around HIV treatment access in 1998, building from a number of self-
help groups to become a national organisation with branches in all
South African provinces and most major cities. It was started by two
individuals who were angered by their countries’ lack of response to
the HIV pandemic and who realised that few self-help groups existed
for blacks, or brought both blacks and whites together around the
issue of AIDS treatment. As it grew from a small group to a formal
organisation, it included services to its members: health care, educa-
tion about HIV and treatment. Through services, it also sought to
broaden a base of local community activism and, through its educa-
tional work, to increase the number of people working on its multiple
advocacy strategies, some of which were polite and indirect, others of
which were polite and direct, and still others of which included delib-
erate acts of civil disobedience (Friedmann & Motiar 2005).
Being involved in the TAC has given activists a feeling of purpose
and direction, which they use not only in their private personal lives
but also in public. Thuli, who never had the courage to speak up in
school, described how her involvement in the TAC has ‘taught me
how to talk in front of people. I attend meetings, I hold workshops’.
This new confidence was evident when she addressed a meeting of
about 500 people very articulately. How did she learn this? ‘Another
comrade showed me how to do this and I followed him around all
the time while I was new to TAC’ (Endresen & von Kotze 2005).
While TAC is only one of several popular social movements that
arose in post-apartheid South Africa, it is credited with being the first
‘to enjoy huge popular support’ (Endresen & van Kotze 2005). It is
also credited with galvanising opposition to the court challenge
brought by multinational drug firms against the South African gov-
ernment’s attempts to import cheaper versions of antiretroviral
treatments (ARTs) (a challenge later dropped due to mobilised global
outrage galvanised by TAC’s globally broadcast protests in South
Africa); and with prodding its own government to move away from
HIV-denialism to a belated (though still inadequate) ART roll-out.
TAC consistently framed its advocacy as:
• A matter of human rights (the right to health is part of the South

African Constitution, and was used by TAC in a successful court case
(Continued)
Box 3.2 (Continued)
that forced the government to dispense mother-to-child HIV trans-

mission treatment).
• Part of a larger struggle for redistribution of wealth and resources
(many of TAC’s member organisations are involved in labour
unions, anti-poverty movements and groups seeking to prevent
poor people being cut off from access to water or electricity).
• A member of the ‘anti-globalisation’ global movement.
In 2005 TAC commissioned an extensive independent evaluation

of its work (Boulle & Avafia 2005). It recommended a number of
strategies that, if acted upon, would see TAC shift from being a social
movement with fluid organisation and a campaign-driven focus to a
bureaucratic civil society organisation with specified projects and
outputs. This type of transition in ‘grassroots’ community health-
organising is well known and documented in the health promotion
literature, along with the potential loss of advocacy edge it might
bring. However, unlike many social movement groups in Africa, TAC
has attracted significant external funding and operates with a multi-
million dollar budget and over 40 full time staff (Friedmann &
Motiar 2005). Its attributed successes include the treatment court
challenges in which it participated, the destigmatisation of HIV in
South Africa (and beyond), and becoming a model for other move-
ments defending socio-economic rights and monitoring government
accountability. On this last account, however, there is some dis-
agreement. A non-commissioned evaluation of TAC (Friedmann &
Motiar 2005) added a theoretical analysis of new social movement
theory. TAC’s reluctance to engage actively in a critique of the neolib-
eral economic contexts accepted by South Africa’s government, and
its willingness to use legal challenges to win single-issue campaigns,
de facto legitimised what other activist groups perceived as an illegit-
imate political order.
manufacture of cheaper ‘generic’ equivalents. It was this ironic form of

increased protectionism wrapped up in trade deals promoting liberali-
sation that created the South African Treatment Action Campaign.
There are three limiting implications that can also be drawn from both
the Herceptin® and TAC experiences. First, it is often easier to mobilise
action around single, simple issues than around multiple, complex prob-
lems. Second, it is often easier to win policy change on medically defined
problems than on those residing in the social determinants of health.

Third, despite the powerful vested interests represented by pharmaceutical
multinationals, moral and political challenges to one sector of neoliberal
globalisation does not necessarily question the basic structure or rules by
which it works. The same lesson can be drawn from the quarter-century
experience of, first national and now global, campaigns against tobacco.
Fourth, the numbers of active campaigners in both organised actions is
relatively small; TAC has a membership roster of just over 10,000 out of
5 million HIV-infected South Africans. A broader base is important
when there are particular mobilising moments, but the strength of
social action groups lies less in their numbers than in other assets:
strong leaders, evidence-backed positions, good media contacts, links
with multiple other groups willing to support their positions, ability to
use multiple campaign strategies, a capable organisation and sufficient
financial resources to ‘stay in business’.
These limitations do not preclude a health activism that is more chal-
lenging of state/market conditions and social structures that impede the
goal of greater health equity. They do give us pause, however, to con-
sider how such health-determining conditions, and campaigns to
change them, have slipped beyond national borders to become inher-
ently global.
4
Working to Build Empowerment:
The Local Challenge
Before examining how the global now suffuses the local, Chapter 4 dis-
cusses the empowerment challenges that are faced at a local level. Many
of these challenges apply to global mobilising as much as they do local
empowerment. Five key steps that health promotion programmes should
take into consideration are addressed: (1) engaging with people to
address local concerns; (2) building local partnerships; (3) building com-
munity capacity; (4) influencing health policy; and (5) evaluating local
empowerment.
The local empowerment challenge is to initially create sufficient sup-
port for a particular concern in order to form a ‘community of interest’ or
‘interest group’. This community and its members then embark on a
process (referred to as an empowerment continuum in Chapter 3) towards
gaining more control over the decisions that influence their concern. This
may be in regard to resource allocation such as the award of a grant, or to
decision-making such as the development of policy or legislation.
Engaging with people to address local concerns
Engaging with people is a collaborative process, often between an out-

side agency and a ‘community’, a term we use in quotes to remind read-
ers of its plural meanings and dimensions discussed in Chapter 2. This
is not a straightforward process. For example, research in the UK has
shown that of 55 per cent of local residents who wanted to be involved
in a programme, only 2 per cent actually participated; and of 80 per
cent of people who claimed to want to get involved in public services,
only 25 per cent were actually prepared to give up their time when fur-
ther questioned (Confederation of British Industry 2006). Successfully
engaging with the community is often a crucial first step towards local
73
empowerment; but it is one that requires careful attention to the barri-

ers to and enablers of engagement. Barriers, such as time, financial
costs, meeting on agency terms rather than in a community space and
tokenism, are well known. Below we focus on a few key enablers: effec-
tive communication, participation opportunities and needs assessment.
Effective communication
Community engagement begins with people becoming better informed
of issues that meet their own concerns and how they can become per-
sonally involved in addressing them. A lack of understanding can be
addressed by having clearer and more accurately targeted information.
Effective communication, however, is more than just informing com-
munity members about issues. Within a context of gaining people’s par-
ticipation in health-promotion programming, communication advice
that aids the process of their engagement include
1. A single point of communication or person as a reference;

2. Clear information especially about the planning process of a pro-
gramme;
3. Opportunities to consult with and provide feedback to the outside
agency;
4. Opportunities to have an influence on the programme, for example,
to be involved in the decision-making processes regarding policy
change;
5. Systems that ensure that all stakeholders are accountable to a con-
stituency (Confederation of British Industry 2006).
A common problem facing health promotion (and other social) pro-

gramming, however, is the assumption that knowledge in itself is
sufficient to change practice. Instead there is substantial evidence of
a gap between what people know and what they do. Recent work in
Viet Nam, for example, found that the knowledge of school pupils
about the proper use of latrines (98%), safe water supplies (98%) and
the prevention of worm infection (95%) was very high (Trinh et al.
1999). However, a study of worm infection in adults and children
found rates for round-worm, thread-worm and hook-worm to be 83%,
94% and 59% respectively (Needham et al. 1998). Worm infection
rates are felt to be a reliable indicator of hygiene practice and sanitary
conditions.
Working to Build Empowerment 75
This gap between knowledge and practice can be exacerbated by health

promotion programmes that tend towards
• Reliance on top-down programming using largely didactic styles of

communication;
• Communicators lacking the knowledge and skills to effectively use
participatory methods and materials;
• Communication interventions lacking adequate research;
• Proper audience segmentation not being included in programme
design, resulting in inappropriate message content and the exclusion
of specific groups;
• Demand generated by the message content not being matched by
supply, for example, the supply of condoms, latrines or hand-washing
facilities (UNICEF 2001).
To bridge this ‘know-do’ gap, as it is now short-handed, requires that

health promoters be very skilled communicators. They must know who
else it may be important for community members to speak with about
their concerns; and be able to facilitate effective intracommunity com-
munication from the outset. Here it is useful to consider the theoretical
arguments for communication put forward by the German social philoso-
pher, Jurgen Habermas (1984). Habermas identifies two types of rational-
ity that co-exist and frame every act of communication: a strategic or
purposive rationality, in which we try to maximise self- or even collective
material gain, that is, it is tied to the material world; and a communica-
tive rationality, in which we try to maximise our understandings with
one another. He argues that strategic rationality, by itself, is irrational,
since in the absence of understanding what one’s strategic behaviours
mean to others, something only accomplished through communicative
rationality, one cannot ensure that they will accomplish the desired
results. Where this arises in groups, especially in their initial forming peri-
ods, is the balance between task (strategic rationality) and process (com-
municative rationality). But the more specific contribution Habermas
makes to those trying to create empowering (or what Habermas would
call ‘emancipating’) forms of community engagement is his four norms
of ‘ideal’ communication:
1. What people speak is comprehensible; others understand its mean-

ing because speakers have mastered logical argument and have
expressive and interactive competence.
2. The propositional content (what people are proposing) is true; it is

not logically or rationally false. This means that it can be defended
by argument or evidence, a point we make later in our discussion of
evaluating empowerment.
3. The propositional content is appropriate; it is justifiable on the basis
of moral or ethical argument or theory. That is why this book opened
with a brief discussion of equity, justice and ethics.
4. It is spoken with sincerity; the speaker more or less ‘walks the talk’.
Remembering these basic norms can help to improve all forms of com-
munication which, in turn, can help to build local trust, community
participation and community confidence.
Participation opportunities
Ensuring opportunities for participation is also important to commu-
nity engagement; it allows people to become collectively involved in
activities which influence their lives and health. Participation has both
instrumental and constitutive health effects. Instrumentally, it allows
for greater programme effectiveness; constitutively, communities with
greater rates of citizen participation also have comparatively better
health, likely for the psychological sense of empowerment and control
it creates (Labonté & Laverack 2001). Participation is a process that con-
tinuously changes and unfolds as individual actors and their varying
group or organisational constituencies negotiate the terms of their rela-
tionships. In simplest terms, participation describes the attempts to
bring different stakeholders together around problem-posing, problem-
solving and decision-making. By stakeholder we mean:
1. someone with decision-making authority over the programme or

policy;
2. someone significantly affected by the decision (this requires a judge-
ment call over what ‘significantly’ means, but this should serve as a
screen to limit the size of the eventual group);
3. someone who can make a key contribution to decision resolution
(they may possess knowledge resources or material resources, and
knowledge in this case is both the formal knowledge of researchers
and academics and the informal knowledge of community members);
4. someone otherwise able to prevent or enable decision-making (such
as a specific lobby or interest group).
It is also important to distinguish participation from other forms of

engagement between governments, institutions and communities to
avoid the constant threat of tokenism (public involvement without

authority). We can do this by defining three terms, often and incorrectly
used synonymously: consult, involve and participate. Consultation is
straightforward: We ask, but do not dialogue. Involve and participate
are more complex. Their dictionary meanings are quite revealing.
Involve means to ‘wrap (a thing in another) wind spirally, entangle (per-
son, thing, in difficulties, mystery, etc.); implicate (person in charge, in
crime, etc.).make complicated in thought or form’. Participate means to
‘have share, take part (in thing, with person); have something of . . .
entitling to share . . . taking part.’ The essential and significant differ-
ence between involvement and participation is the moment when
others (individuals, groups) are invited to join in the problem-posing,
problem-solving process. Involvement invites others after the problem
has been named in quite specific ways; participation invites others to
name problems in the specific ways most useful to the largest number.
Involvement, like community-based programming, is often a useful and
healthful action. The conundrum arises when the problem-naming
(language, frames of reference) of the institution does not cohere with
that of the community group and the latter attempts to respond on
the terms set by the expert, becoming ‘involved’ in (wrapped up in,
made more complicated by) these terms. This is sometimes the case
when communities are asked to become ‘involved’ in health coalitions
where the outcomes (e.g., CVD or cancer rates) have already been
defined by the health agency, often accompanied by epidemiological
data and arguments that use concepts and language foreign to citizens’
day-to-day experiences. At the same time, an institutional demand for
constant participation can be just as disempowering as involvement
that masquerades as participation. It may represent a wasteful expen-
diture of citizen time, and excuse the failure of politicians to make
difficult policy decisions. For public participation also carries oppor-
tunity costs (time, energy) and may not even represent how citizens
wish to engage with institutions and professionals (Labonté 1997).
Table 4.1 provides a simple aide mémoire for these different types of
engagement.
One essential opportunity for people to participate is through meet-
ings or forums to discuss concerns that are important to them. Such
meetings typically begin with a brief introduction to the purpose fol-
lowed by an introduction of the participants. The meeting is a facili-
tated group discussion to focus on a particular local concern such as
public transport, unemployment and sub-standard housing. The meet-
ing can be supported by audio-visual materials such as a poster or a
Table 4.1 Fundamental characteristics of participation, involvement and

consultation
Participation:
• Negotiated, formalised relationships
• Open frame of ‘problem-naming’
• Shared decision-making authority
• Full stakeholder identification
• Resources for stakeholder participation (‘levelling the playing field’)
• Stakeholder accountability to a larger constituency (the group they
represent)
Involvement:
• Citizens treated as individuals rather than as organised constituencies
• Terms of engagement are ultimately in control of the agency sponsor
• Structure is advisory; it may have some, but very limited, decision-making
autonomy
• Tendency to non-formalised agreements in which agency sponsor retains
more invisible power
Consultation:
• Information from citizens sought on specific plans or projects
• Little or no structures for ongoing engagement between agency sponsors
and its publics
Source: (Labonté 1997).
video to generate discussion, and can also be used to plan for actions,
identify resources, identify potential partners and for people to openly
express their views.
Susan George, an activist scholar associated with many local and inter-
national organisations, considers meetings the lifeblood of citizen and
community empowerment. Many of us take for granted meetings and so
use them less effectively and efficiently than we might. Over years of
experience, George distils the important essence of such meetings to
seven ‘commandments’ (George 2004), which we have embellished with
some of our own insights:
1. Create a single page handout with a clearly written analysis, goals,

strategies, accomplishments so far. Earlier meetings may be needed to
develop this. The handout will need to be revisited from time to
time, but amounts to a ‘mission statement’ for the group.
2. Welcome everyone at the start, asking for newcomers to identify
themselves. Others at the meeting should be prepared to talk to new-
comers at breaks or afterwards, to elicit their input in a more per-
sonalised way and to encourage them to return.
3. Set up a table where other information around the goals of the group
is available. Someone should staff the table. This is where people can
sign up to participate again in future meetings or activities.
4. Set up another table where other literature on related issues or com-
munity struggles can be placed. This allows people attending to make
links between their concerns and those of other groups.
5. Make sure to plan, or announce an already planned, activity. There
is a cliché: Communities thrive in action but die in committee.
Meetings may be the lifeblood of empowerment, but empowerment
is for a purpose and that purpose is fulfilled in actions besides simply
meetings.
6. Ask for resources, financial or human (volunteer time). This is the
test of relevance of the issues to people in communities. If it is suffi-
ciently important, community members, even in the poorest of cir-
cumstances, will often be willing and able to give money, time or
other in-kind support. Some progressive community funding agencies
actually use a requirement of in-kind contribution as a way of ensur-
ing that the activities they support have a reasonably broad base of
community ‘buy-in’.
7. Do all of this at the start of the meeting, not at the end when the
noisy break-up begins and everyone is more interested in getting
ready to leave than committing to new activities.
Needs assessment
Needs assessment provides another specific opportunity for community
engagement. The question of who identifies the concerns to be
addressed and how this will be taken forward is basic to empowerment.
For practitioners, a key step is the identification of, support for and
commitment to those concerns ‘close to the heart’ of communities. If
practitioners are not willing to address the local concerns of communi-
ties the programmes they then help to implement are much less likely
to succeed.
In practice, a compromise often has to be met between what the local
concerns are and what the implementing agency wants to achieve. Health
promotion is most often delivered through top-down programmes con-
trolled by government agencies or government-funded NGOs. It is gov-
ernment policy (and resources) that sets the health promotion agenda,
and the difficulty begins when this does not meet local concerns. Health
promotion practitioners are employed to design and deliver programmes
that promote health within the parameters set by government policy. So
even when those in the ‘top’ structures agree with those at the local level
about the main concerns, the way in which the agenda is determined
can still result in these issues not being addressed.
However, there are many practitioners who remain passionate about
using empowering approaches even within the context of bureaucratic,
top-down styles of health-promotion programming. These practitioners
are adept at merging the boundary between local concerns and govern-
ment agendas and have become imaginative at how to accommodate
empowering approaches within top-down programmes – though, as
Chapter 1 cautioned, their abilities to do so rest partly on the under-
standing and support they receive from their employing agency.
Engaging people to address local concerns can be facilitated by the prac-
titioner through building partnerships and alliances with community
members. The purpose is to facilitate the sharing of his/her power in a way
that involves the provision of both services and resources, at the request
of the community. Box 4.1 provides an example of how one local council
engaged with communities to improve the delivery of public services.
Box 4.1 Improving the delivery of local services
Slough Borough Council in the UK set up a citizen’s jury to decide

how to improve their ‘street-scene’ services in response to concerns
primarily from local residents. This included road maintenance and
street cleaning. This was a new initiative to create a partnership
between the Council and local residents and other stakeholders.
A new delivery strategy was devised to bring refuse collection and dis-
posal, recycling, street cleaning, grounds and highways maintenance
into a single partnership. At that time these contracts were split
between different contractors. The Slough Borough council was given
a mandate to increase Council Tax to improve the service, so long as
the benefits could be guaranteed.
A consultative board met every six months to help set service pri-
orities, solve delivery problems and take forward campaigning and
educational work. As a consequence local services improved rapidly
and Slough is now one of the cleanest towns in the South of England.
The ‘Keep Slough green and tidy’ campaign motivates the public to
be actively engaged in the effort to increase recycling and decrease
litter. The partnership has given local residents more of a ‘voice’ and
has included them in the decision-making process to improve the
environment in Slough.
(Confederation of British Industry 2006)
Building local partnerships
In a health promotion programme, one practitioner role is to provide

leadership, enthusiasm and the resources necessary to move participa-
tion forward. However, this role expectation can soon change to one of
more ‘equal’ partnership between the practitioner and the community.
Partnerships demonstrate the ability of the community to develop rela-
tionships with outside agents such as local authorities based on the
recognition of mutual interests and respect. The partnership may involve
an exchange of services, the pursuit of a joint venture based on a shared
goal or an initiative to take action to the benefit of all parties.
Local empowerment is about the redistribution of power (control of
resources and decisions) often through devolution. Central bodies
devolve, and support, local authorities who in turn devolve responsibil-
ity to, and support, other organisations and local people. We cautioned
earlier that devolution without access to and authority over necessary
resources is a form of ‘community-blaming’ rather than empowerment,
and a strategy often used by conservative governments rolling back pub-
lic entitlements to health, education or welfare benefits. As well, without
strengthening community management capacities and ensuring that
devolved services and programmes are not captured by local elites,
decentralisation can actually work against the aim of improving health
equity (Collins & Green 1994).
But even when devolution includes both resources and authority,
many practitioners find it difficult to relinquish the control that they
have over the design and implementation of a programme. Accepting
the expertise offered by local people and sharing professional expertise
so that the members can build their own empowering capacities can
be difficult for some outside agents (a term we use to describe both
individual practitioners and the government agency or NGO for which
they work). Partnerships offer a framework in which the relationship
between the practitioner and their clients can become more equal. Box 4.2
provides an example of engaging a community to take responsibility
on some of the tough questions in regard to a local road maintenance
project.
Health promotion practitioners have an important role in providing
information, resources and technical assistance, but this role must sup-
port the concerns that have been identified by the community as being
relevant and important to them. The provision of resources and techni-
cal support often provides the basis for partnerships to develop between
the outside agent and the community.
Box 4.2 Improving local involvement in road

maintenance
A private company was asked by the Oxfordshire County Council to

develop a solution to increase the life of a major road in Oxford, UK
including junctions, access and traffic calming. The work was planned
to interfere as little as possible with local businesses and residents, by
avoiding busy seasons and working when premises were closed. Road-
user groups, local businesses and the police were involved from the
design phase through regular public meetings. Residents were asked to
choose from a series of options for the difficult decisions, such as when
to work at busy junctions. The work itself was broken down into sec-
tions covering 200m of road and residents were told dates in advance
and businesses were allowed to continue deliveries. The road mainte-
nance was planned around the convenience of local residents and
businesses who were also involved in making decisions on an ongoing
basis. This type of an arrangement can become formalised as a ‘neigh-
bourhood charter’ or a two-way partnership between communities
and a service provider such as a construction contractor.
Maintenance of this sort does not usually involve such intensive
and continuous public consultation, but it helped to ensure that the
work started and finished on time by helping to identify problems in
advance, and resulted in a higher level of local participation and
client satisfaction. Other projects have employed a watchman-in-
chief who engages with business, service users, parish councils, the
Highways Agency and local representatives. Other watchmen iden-
tify issues across the area and provide feedback to the watchman-in-
chief. The watch-keeper role provides a non-bureaucratic, informal
method through which the outside agency can keep in touch with a
range of stakeholders when appropriate, enabling a feedback and
communication. The information provided is realistic and accurate
and always allows local residents to provide their opinions and, if
necessary, to be involved with the decision-making processes
(Confederation of British Industry 2006).
Building community capacity
Sometimes communities know what they want but do not know how to
achieve it. In other instances, communities may not know what they
want; express concerns more influenced by local media than critical

reflection; or are constrained in identifying their concerns by internal
conflict. The practitioner has an important role to play, especially at the
early stages of a programme when community capacity has yet to be
strengthened or developed, to support communities in identifying
and/or addressing their concerns. This is often a temporary role and
over the longer term the practitioner will be working towards reducing
her initial leadership in the programme.
The programme design should clearly define how it will build the
capacity of the community from planning, through implementation and
management, to evaluation. Without this focus, the community can
become dependent on the outside agent to provide support during the
lifecycle of the programme without themselves building the necessary
capacities.
Addressing community capacity is an important issue that is often
overlooked in programming. Capacity building includes two key areas:
1. Firstly, the capacity of the community is strengthened so that mem-

bers can better resolve their own concerns. This involves the devel-
opment of specific skills and competencies which contribute to their
overall capacity, and which are captured in the empowerment
domains described in Chapter 2. These skills may be used later in a
variety of circumstances; for example, the organisational skills that
are developed to address a local concern such as flooding may be
used again to address the siting of child-care facilities. Building com-
munity capacity therefore has a generic characteristic and is not lim-
ited to one issue only.
2. Secondly, the capacity of the community to take more control of the
programme is enhanced. This often involves skills development
based on programme management such as financial control, report
writing and evaluation. These are skills that the community can use
when it is involved in managing the programme.
The key practitioner point here is to provide the appropriate level of

support at the request of the community. This means that the outside
agent should not commit all the resources at the programme planning
stage as new resource inputs will be identified as the strategic plan
of the community is implemented. To meet this demand the outside
agent should be flexible in the type and timing of resources that he is
prepared to provide to support the community. In a programme, context
resources are often designated to a specific budget category, for example,
travel costs, training and equipment. However, the resources requested

by the community may not fit neatly into one of these categories. There
are activities that may be difficult to justify as being strictly health pro-
motion but that nonetheless build the social dimension of communities
through a sense of belonging, connectedness and personal relation-
ships. Examples of these types of activities include
• Organising a community event such as a sports or arts festival;

• Providing food and drink to encourage people in the community to
meet;
• Providing transport to allow people to travel and take part in an
event;
• Arranging child-care facilities to allow mothers to meet;
• Providing a ‘petty cash’ account to cover incidentals such as refresh-
ments at meetings, gift vouchers and refunding individual travel
costs.
In these instances, the practitioner’s role is one of lobbying the funding

body (which may even be her own employing organisation) to amend its
budgetary or accountability requirements to be more conducive to pro-
grammes working from a community empowerment/capacity-building
approach.
Influencing health policy
Having a policy in place does not guarantee that it will be followed, or

that a community’s health conditions will improve. But failing to have
a policy in place that incorporates community health concerns and
solutions will guarantee little or no change. Influencing public health
policy remains fundamental to empowering health promotion work.
The public health policy process, however, is complex because it is dif-
ficult to sometimes define the causal links between a policy intervention
and an improvement in health. There are powerful interests at stake
such as the tobacco industry, pharmaceutical industry and the medical
professions. There are shifting ideas about how best to deliver public
health’s ever-changing demands, and challenges posed by demo-
graphic changes and emergent health concerns such as obesity, SARS,
multiple/extreme drug resistant infections (such as TB) and the persist-
ing threat of a global influenza pandemic. The causes of many public
health problems are due to poor nutrition, poverty, smoking and the
environment; and there can be large differences in policy-relevant health
concerns between different social and ethnic groups, often within the
same community. Developing policy solutions therefore involves the
use of a range of intersectoral strategies (Gauld 2006), and a sensitivity
to its intrinsic political nature. (Yeatman 1998). The people who control
the political process (governments and governmental stakeholders at the
national, municipal, regional and local levels) may or may not involve
those who are influenced by the policy outcome in its development.
The policy process can therefore be used as a ‘power tool’ to further exert
control-over people resources and decision-making, or to shape policies
in the interests of elite social groups with greater access to, and influence
over, the political decision-making process.
People influenced by the policy, however, may not necessarily agree
with it and may want to change its formulation or stop its delivery.
Communities can influence the policy process by persuading or forcing
those who control its development to change its design or delivery. Public
participation in policy change can take the form of ‘direct democracy’
such as a referendum that can be prospective and government initiated,
or more rarely, reactive and citizen initiated. This is large-scale voting on
specific questions most commonly regarding constitutional issues about
how people should live together and be governed, such as compulsory
military service and changes in legislation (Parkinson 2006). Evidence sug-
gests that people are reluctant to take direct forms of participation. For
example, in New Zealand a study showed that of the 89 per cent of respon-
dents to a petition only 19 per cent attended a demonstration, 17 per cent
joined a boycott, 4 per cent joined in a strike and only 1 per cent were will-
ing to occupy a building (Perry & Webster 1999) to try and influence a pol-
icy issue. There is also a pattern to poor public participation that includes
young people, members of ethnic and other minorities and those with the
lowest level of education and income who are the least likely to be
involved; although some of these groups may be opting to use other forms
of participation such as the Internet forums (Hayward 2006). Ironically, it
is these groups who are most likely to be affected by policy decisions
because they have less of an economic or social ‘buffer’ to protect them
from changes in, for example, employment, housing or welfare policies.
Influencing policy is an important form of participation that can be a
direct expression of local empowerment. But more often, public partic-
ipation takes a passive form such as voting, signing a petition or writing
a letter to someone in the political system. Marginalised groups often
lack the resources or level of organisation necessary to have a strong
‘voice’ through, for example, a boycott or legal action. It is therefore
essential that they are assisted to become more active in influencing the
policy process at its different stages of development. This is possible

because, far from being predictable, the policy process is reliant on the
ability of the different stakeholders in civil society and in government
to negotiate a compromise.
Models of the policy process

Several useful frameworks have been developed to conceptualise how
people can act to change the ‘prevailing paradigm’ of policy develop-
ment. In particular Lindquist (2001) offers an interesting view, provided
in Table 4.2, of a framework to influence policy.
In addition, to Lindquist’s framework a number of models have been
developed that can guide the analysis of influence in the policy process.
It should be noted that these models primarily reflect processes in the
developed world and assume a democratic political system. The models
provide in-depth conceptualisations about how this process works
within two broad paradigms: rationalist and political (Neilson 2001).
The rationalist paradigm includes linear, incrementalist and interactive
models as representations of the policy process. It originates from clas-
sical economic theory which presumes that actors have full information
and are then able to establish priorities to achieve a desired and largely
uncontested goal. It is driven by the production and consideration of
different forms of evidence such as public health research, and the input
Table 4.2 A framework to influence policy
Types of Policy Influence:
1. Expanding Policy Capacities

• Improving the knowledge/data of certain actors
• Supporting recipients to develop innovative ideas
• Improving capabilities to communicate idea
• Developing new talent for research and analysis
2. Broadening Policy Horizons
• Providing opportunities for networking/learning within the jurisdiction
or with colleagues elsewhere
• Introducing new concepts to frame debates, putting ideas on the agenda,
or stimulating public debate
• Educating researchers and others who take up new positions with
broader understanding of issues
• Stimulating quiet dialogue among decision-makers
3. Affecting Policy Regimes
• Modification of existing programmes or policies
• Fundamental redesign of programmes or policies
from experts and academics is a valued part of the process. Tim

Tenbensel and Peter Davis (in press) provide as an example of the ratio-
nalist model, government decisions on the purchase of pharmaceutical
products for health service delivery. In developed countries these are
rational decisions made on the basis of a ‘cost-benefit’ analysis and avail-
able information. If, however, insufficient or incorrect information is
available or the policy goal is highly contested, the rationalist paradigm
offers limited guidance to how policy can be planned or influenced.
The political paradigm generates policy models adapted from political
economy theory and derived from comparative politics and international
relations. These theories stress the important of agenda setting, policy net-
works, policy narratives and the policy transfer in shaping final decisions
(Neilson 2001). Policy decisions, in turn, are made on the basis of bar-
gaining and negotiation between the many different stakeholders who
employ a range of approaches to have an influence on each stage of the
policy process, discussed below. From the vantage of health policymakers,
the most effective approach to policy combines elements from both the
rational and political paradigms. For example, the introduction of policy
to ban smoking in public places was initially based on strong epidemio-
logical evidence regarding second hand smoke. However, the best strategy
to reduce death and illness from second hand smoke would be a total ban
on smoking, including in homes. Obviously such a policy would be very
difficult to police as well as would create opposition from civil libertarian
groups. The policy decision was therefore a compromise based on the
available evidence and the opposing interests of different stakeholders to
reach an achievable goal rather than an optimal goal (Tenbensel & Davis
in press). From the vantage of those aiming to influence the policymak-
ing process, similar compromises may be necessary, with each stage in the
process, offering opportunity for input or advocacy.
The steps to influencing health policy
At a practice level, the policy process can be defined as a framework

that has six steps: (1) Identify issues, (2) Policy analysis, (3) Undertake
consultation, (4) Move towards decisions, (5) Implementation and (6)
Evaluation (Edwards et al. 2001). All these steps are subject to internal
politics as well as to the politics of the state and the apparatus of admin-
istration and management that it employs. What follows is an explana-
tion of how the policy development cycle can be influenced by people
in civil society, community groups and advocacy groups often assisted
by health promotion practitioners.
Identify issues
Initially the problem has to be defined and articulated before it can be
properly considered and a decision be made as to whether to include it
on the policy agenda. Government policy agendas are often crowded
and so issues that are to be selected are in competition with one
another. It is useful if those people proposing the problem can demon-
strate that it is an undesirable situation and one that is getting worse. In
particular, they need to show that some public harm will result unless
action is taken and that this harm is able to be expressed in terms of
social and economic aggregates or health outcomes. For example, pol-
icy actions on obesity or smoking are more likely to be considered when
the longer-term social and economic effects, such as increased health
expenditure and loss in worker productivity, can be shown. Similarly,
the threat of litigation for economic costs, a strategy frequently used
in the USA, has been used effectively to change the production, mar-
keting and retail practices of tobacco companies (smoking-related dam-
ages) and food oligopolies involved in the processed/fast food industry
(obesity-related damages). Finally, as we noted in Chapter 3, the prob-
lem has a greater chance of being recognised as a policy issue if there is
a simple solution to resolve the situation and if government interven-
tion is justified (Tenbensel & Davis in press); for example, to promote
an increase in physical activity and smoking cessation in the popula-
tion, or to provide access to essential medicines.
The responsibility to place a policy issue on the government agenda
usually rests with the appropriate minister. The minister has to ensure
that there is a broad enough understanding and acceptance of the issue
so that it has a good chance of moving forward in the policy cycle. This
provides an opportunity to influence the policy cycle through indirect
actions such as lobbying the responsible minister, for example, by send-
ing a letter, email or text message, signing a petition or meeting with
the minister and other politicians. It is also an opportunity to influence
the policy cycle through non-violent direct actions, for example, by tak-
ing part in peaceful demonstrations and public protests. The media can
also play a significant role and people can engage in a publicity cam-
paign to try and influence the decisions made by the minister in select-
ing the policy agenda, for example, an issue that is obviously widely
unpopular with the public may have less chance of being selected.
But to what extent can public action have an effect on defining the pol-
icy concerns of government? Government action on policy can be seen
as a democratic enterprise that, in theory, reflects the needs or wants of a
significant proportion of the public. The public can express what they
want through indirect and direct actions discussed earlier, and can chal-
lenge the government arguments put forward for defining a particular
policy ‘problem’. The basis of these counter-arguments may be supported
by science and research which in turn can be contested on the value basis
of the problem definition. For example, activists in the USA have suc-
cessfully reframed the obesity problem from one of health to one of ‘the
right to be fat’ based on the role of diversity and acceptance in society
(Tenbensel & Davis in press). Inevitably, the success of one group’s argu-
ment over another group’s counter argument may be based more on
access to the resources that enable them to put forward a more aggressive
and convincing campaign than the positioning of the issue in relation to
the value of matters of public health and safety or individual rights. An
important element of such a campaign is the media as it has the poten-
tial to widely influence public opinion. An advocacy truism is that hav-
ing media coverage of an issue does not guarantee it will receive political
attention; but a lack of media coverage does not guarantee it political
attention. If governments are shown to be unresponsive to public
demands for action this can create the opportunity for others who do
support the issue to step in and to carry the issue forward.
Policy analysis
Policy analysis commonly involves at least three elements: collecting the
relevant data; clarifying the objectives and resolving the key questions
that have been raised, and identifying the options and proposals that
will form basis of the policy reform. An important factor is the level of
investment made at this stage to ensure a thorough analysis of the issues
and to provide sufficient clarity so that decisions can be quickly made to
devise solutions to problems. But even when a policy solution exists it
may have to wait for a correct political climate such as in the case of pas-
sive smoking. The scientific evidence against the causal link of passive
smoking and ill health had existed for some time before it became a pol-
icy priority that was motivated from a position of moral and personal
rights. This is when the ‘window of opportunity’ presented itself to act
to introduce policy with the support of the public (Berridge 1999).
Public health advocates, researchers and academics can play an impor-
tant role in helping to identify and provide the evidence necessary to
resolve any issues arising during the analysis. This can be an opportunity
to use lobbying tactics to try and influence staff working in government
‘policy shops’ who are often looking for evidence to support one or more
Box 4.3 The role of media: Advocacy that changes the

frame
There are several truisms about health advocacy:
1. Without advocacy we cannot improve health. This attests to the

importance of social determinants in influencing health, and the
need to use policy levers to affect these determinants.
2. Health advocacy often conflicts with market liberalism. This
speaks to the fact that these policies (regulatory and redistributive)
often challenge elite interests vested in ‘free market’ ideology.
3. Advocacy requires taking a position where there is controversy.
This simply notes that, when there are no competing interests in
a policy area, there is no need for advocacy.
4. Advocacy involves risk-taking. This reminds us of Virchow’s advo-
cacy experience recounted in Chapter 1.
One key strategy frequently used by health advocates has been

dubbed ‘media advocacy’, using mass media to shift the frame in
which policy issues are defined. Media advocacy differs from social
marketing, which attempts to persuade changes in personal behav-
iours. Media advocacy targets policies, policymakers and the ways in
which issues come to be regarded as newsworthy or important. As
Lawrence Wallack, one of media advocacy’s founding scholars, com-
ments, [T]he media agenda determines the public agenda: what’s on
people’s minds reflects what is in the media (Wallack, 2005). Most
mass media continue to frame health issues as medical cure or treat-
ment, difficulties in getting access to treatment (waiting lists, unin-
sured new treatments) or the need to change unhealthy behaviours
(most recently, fitness, nutrition and obesity). Since medical and
behavioural health issues dominate news coverage (Gasher et al.
2007), this is what gets most attention by policymakers. Media advo-
cacy attempts to challenge this dominance by changing the frame.
This is easier to do with individual-level stories or issues than with
broader social determinants. Media advocates, for example, success-
fully shifted tobacco control policy away from targeting smokers
to targeting the tobacco and advertising industries. Similar media-
targeted campaigns, increasingly with global reach, have been used to
focus attention on access to antiretroviral drugs in developing coun-
tries. But social determinants ‘stories’ are inevitably policy analyses
(Continued)
Box 4.3 (Continued)
pieces, which require more depth and detail, and are less frequently
covered by mass media than so-called ‘hard news’ stories (Gasher et
al. 2007). A perennial challenge to media advocates concerned with
the social determinants of health is how to capture media attention
and reframe the health debate. Some examples culled from our own
experiences: Staging a public event where an actual over-sized pie was
sliced according to quintiles to show the increasing inequalities in
wealth distribution over time; countering stories of surgery wait-times
with tales of waiting lists for subsidised housing for low-income fam-
ilies; organising large-scale demonstrations or marches that drew
attention to deepening poverty rates and the need for welfare
reforms. While media coverage of these more profound health deter-
minants, and the policy changes needed to address them, remains a
distant third to medicine and lifestyles, it appears to be growing. With
its slow rise comes another challenge: framing the policy debate in
ways that do not stigmatise the poor or rob them of dignity or agency.
The increasing role of the Internet in political campaigning, and the
opportunities it presents for multiple creative ways of framing and
reframing issues, is rapidly changing the entire frontier for media
advocacy and policy engagement.
of the range of policy options they are exploring. But as the policy analy-
sis is mostly undertaken internally and in confidence, the level of public
influence may be difficult.
Undertake consultation
Consultation can be formal or informal and may occur at any stage of
the policy process. Consultation is often facilitated by the issue of a dis-
cussion paper which outlines the policy intentions and allows feedback
from individuals, groups and civil society. People may be formally asked
for a response to the discussion paper or it may be placed in the public
arena to stimulate an open debate on the issues. The purpose is that the
consultation stage will lead to a refinement of the policy and a wider
public acceptance of its intentions.
It is at this stage that there is the greatest opportunity for ‘legitimate’
public engagement in the policy process. A number of indirect actions can
be taken to influence the policy process such as local meetings to discuss
the draft policy paper, signing a petition for or against the policy paper,
sending an email, fax, text or letter to a minister or local government offi-

cer or delivering promotional material to other people. A number of direct
actions can also be taken to influence the policy process such as partici-
pating in public protests or by supporting a publicity campaign. The pur-
pose of these actions is to ensure that the people involved in making the
decisions are aware of their opinions and support for or against the pol-
icy, especially important when policy choices are strongly contested.
Since health promoters are often in a position to help draft policy, and to
convene consultations, they must also be critically reflective on when
such consultation (or a fuller form of participation, as we distinguished
earlier in this chapter) is appropriate. While the move to community par-
ticipation by many governments is a potentially healthy step towards a
more civil society, it is not always clear whose interests are being served
most. Participation may have become a ritual, devoid of critical reflection
on how it might be more or less empowering for the communities
affected. In the end, bureaucrats become more empowered because they
can say, ‘I’ve consulted with the community, and therefore my conclu-
sions have more politically correct weight.’ If these conclusions truly do
benefit local community groups, this is not necessarily a bad outcome.
But that may not always be the case; and unless health promoters are clear
on the reasons why they are engaging with communities on policy issues,
they risk draining the energies of community groups in meetings or dis-
cussions of more importance to their institution than to the community.
Move towards decisions

Following analysis, debate and policy refinement the necessary decisions
can begin to emerge. Firstly, the decision will be made by the appropri-
ate person and then the policy proposal will be put forward for approval
by the government or the necessary body with authority. In spite of the
earlier analysis and consultation the final decision will have to consider
issues of economy, efficiency and equity. A compromise may have to be
reached, for example, one in which the policy is phased-in over a period
of time to allow sufficient funds to be made available. Alternatively, the
policy reforms may be introduced as a package alongside other meas-
ures, assistance and benefits. The purpose is to publicly introduce the
policy reform with a minimum of opposition and criticism.
At this stage of the policy process if people are opposed to the decisions,
they can continue to use a range of direct and indirect actions: the threat
of collectively withdrawing their votes for those making the decision,
engaging in an aggressive publicity campaign against the policy decision
or instigating legal action against those making the policy decision. The
purpose of these actions is to try and force those making the decision to
agree upon a compromise in favour of the opinions of those against it.
Implementation
Once the decisions have been made and approved, the policy enters a
period of implementation towards the desired outcomes. If the policy
reform is clearly defined, has general support and is well resourced then
the implementation should be successful. However, the implementa-
tion of new policy invariably entails some modification to the existing
policies (Burris 1997). Unless the implementation is delivered well and
sensitively, it can result in problems and even failures.
Evidence from policy implementation has found a number of causes
for a failure at the implementation stage including ambiguity in the pol-
icy itself, conflict with other policies, having low political priority or
engendering conflict with significant stakeholders (Edwards et al. 2001).
In particular, ‘bad publicity’ can have a detrimental affect on the imple-
mentation of the policy especially as decision makers often lose interest
at this stage and insufficient resources are given to promote the reforms.
On the other hand, the greatest likelihood of implementation success is
when the policy is technically simple, necessitates only marginal
changes in existing policy, is delivered by one agency, has clear objec-
tives and a short duration (Walt 1994).
Policies can actually be reformulated at the implementation stage and
this provides the opportunity to interfere with and possibly stall the
process of implementation by opposing stakeholders. The best chance of
success they have is if the effect of ‘bad publicity’ can be harnessed against
the policy reform. To do this they may have to use radical actions such as
staging protests with the intention of attracting publicity or creating an
outrageous media stunt such as climbing a public building to deploy a
banner advertising a message against the policy reform. Another tactic is
by placing oneself in a position of ‘manufactured vulnerability’ to prevent
implementation such as squatting in a building to be demolished or liv-
ing in a tree to be cut down. Some people may decide to take violent and
illegal forms of direct action such as ‘hacktivism’ by accessing a computer
to obtain information or placing a virus to sabotage a database or by phys-
ically altering something to prevent implementation such as ‘spiking’
tress with metal pins or blocking vehicles by ‘sit-ins’ on roads.
Evaluation
The monitoring and evaluation of the policy can lead to incremental
revisions if reforms are not being met, or met efficiently. For example, if
the purpose of the reform was to increase equity and participation in

child support but this was shown not to have happened, the policy may
be changed and reimplemented. The evaluation can be influenced by a
broader political agenda which may also have changed since the original
policy decision had been made. It may then be more difficult to justify
a continuation of the policy if, for example, it now has a lower priority
in the political agenda. Policy evaluation gives further hope to those
who, if their actions and tactics to influence it have been unsuccessful,
can use the revision process as a means to reintroduce changes to, or to
stop, the reforms. Ultimately, the evaluation, influenced by the actions
of others, can recommend that the policy reform be revised or cancelled,
although evidence of this is rare. Unfortunately, the evaluation of policy
is invariably never attempted except for small-scale programmes or ini-
tiatives. This could be because policy is ‘owned’ and implemented by
more than one stakeholder and objectives may be too diverse or ambigu-
ous to allow a clear evaluation (Tenbensel & Davis in press).
Evaluating local empowerment
Evaluation is important in health-promotion programmes, as well as in

the policies that shape them. Evaluation in a health-promotion pro-
gramme context has many purposes. These include providing inputs to
ongoing activities, information for future programme design, evidence
of effectiveness (have I met my targets?) and efficiency (the outputs in
relation to the inputs), accountability to funders and participants, and
the potential for sustainability over time. But evaluation that empowers
also ensures that it addresses people’s local concerns and provides the
information that they need to make better-informed decisions that go
beyond the programme’s own goals. Evaluation that empowers, further
emphasises the participation by people actively involved in the pro-
gramme in the evaluation process. The evaluation itself ideally becomes
an empowering experience by building skills and competencies of com-
munity members.
The key characteristics of an empowering evaluation

Certain commitments have been identified by Labonté and Robertson
(1996) and Wadsworth & McGuiness (1992) as good ideals for an ‘evalu-
ation that empowers’:
1. Respect for all parties as equal yet possessing different values, con-
cerns and meanings, all of which are all equally important.
2. A determination to seek all parties’ perceptions.

3. An opportunity for all to discuss and interpret the findings in order
to reach a consensus on the best explanation.
The key characteristics for the evaluation of local empowerment also

include considerations for the design and implementation of the
approach:
Design
• Applies principles of rigour that are technically sound, theoretically
underpinned and field-tested.
• Uses appropriate methods.
• Addresses programme effectiveness and efficiency.
• Addresses programme achievements and inputs.
• Addresses ethical concerns.
Implementation
• Clearly defines the roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders.
• Use participatory, self-evaluation approaches.
• Information provided can be interpreted by all stakeholders.
Outcomes
• Provides information that is accurate and feasible.
• Ensures that the stakeholders can use the information to make deci-
sions and to take actions.
• Findings use a mix of interpretation, for example, textual and visual
(Laverack 2007).
Measurable indicators of local empowerment

Apart from evaluation of specific health-promotion programme goals or
objectives, on which much has been written that will not be recounted
here, there is the matter of tracking change in empowerment itself.
Empowerment is a complex concept. While empowerment approaches
have an explicit purpose to bring about social and political change
embodied in their sense of action and political activism (Laverack
2007), other approaches provide a focus on the individual (Zimmerman
& Rappaport 1988), the organisation (Israel et al. 1994), the family
(Haynes & Singh 1993) and the community (Wallerstein & Bernstein
1994). But of the different levels of empowerment it has been the psy-
chological level and the use of predetermined outcome indicators
which have received the most attention in terms of measurement (Rissel

et al. 1996; Zimmerman & Rappaport 1988; Labonté 1994b).
At a psychological level, people experience an immediate and per-
sonal form of empowerment, such as an increase in self-esteem or self-
confidence (Labonté 1998). Though partially measured as self-esteem or
self-efficacy, psychological empowerment is a construct which incorpo-
rates the person’s perceptions and actions within their social context
(Zimmerman 1990). Empowerment can therefore mean different things
to different people as a personal experience and it is likely to be incre-
mental and often relative to the interpersonal relationships of the per-
son concerned as the subjective elements of empowerment.
Empowerment can also be viewed as both a process and an outcome.
Outcome indicators cover the level of control gained over a range of
social, political and economic factors. Empowerment has a long time
frame, at least in terms of significant social and political change, for
example, a change in government policy or legislation. Health promo-
tion programmes typically have a shorter time frame and the measure-
ment of outcome might not take into account processes such as capacity
building and the development of new competencies and skills. It may
not therefore be possible to measure empowerment outcomes during a
programme period. However, by measuring empowerment as a process,
it is possible to monitor the interaction between capacities, skills and
resources during the timeframe of a programme.
The process of local empowerment can be measured by reference to
the nine distinct ‘domains’ discussed in Chapter 2, that is, tracking how
a health promotion programme (1) Improves participation, (2) Develops
local leadership, (3) Builds empowering organisational structures,
(4) Increases problem-assessment capacities, (5) Improves resource
mobilisation, (6) Enhances the ability of the community to ‘ask why’
(critical awareness), (7) Strengthens links to other organisations and peo-
ple, (8) Creates an equitable relationship with the outside agents and (9)
Increases control over programme management. There are many poten-
tial ways in which local empowerment, and changes in the nine empow-
erment domains, might be evaluated. The approach outlined below is
one that has been applied in different programme and cultural contexts.
The approach is robust and reliable and the experiences of its application
are discussed in detail elsewhere (Laverack 2003).
Measuring local empowerment

The approach uses a ‘workshop’ style setting. The workshop design
should be flexible and needs to consider some basic elements such as
the homogeneity of the group, its dynamics, size and the time frame for
the exercises. It typically takes one day to complete the baseline assess-
ment. The participants of the workshop are representatives of a ‘local
community’ that share the same interests and needs.
Setting the baseline

The community representatives firstly make an assessment of each
domain. To do this they are provided with five statements for each
‘empowerment domain’, each written on a separate sheet of paper. The
five statements for each domain have been published elsewhere
(Laverack 2005, 2007) and are summarised in Table 4.3. The five state-
ments represent a description of the various levels of empowerment
related to that domain. Taking one domain at a time the participants are
asked to select the statement which most closely describes the present sit-
uation in their community. The statements are not numbered or marked
in any way and each is read out loud by the participants to encourage
group discussion. The descriptions may be amended by the participants
or a new description may be provided to describe the situation for a par-
ticular domain. In this way the participants make their own assessment
for each domain by comparing their experiences and opinions.
Recording the reasons why

Recording the reasons why the assessment has been made for each
‘domain’ is important so that this information can be taken into account
during subsequent assessments. It also provides some defensible or
empirically observable criteria for the selection. This overcomes one of
the weaknesses in the use of qualitative statements, that of reliability
over time or across different participants making the assessment (Uphoff
1991). The justification needs to include verifiable examples of the actual
experiences of the participants taken from their community to illustrate
in more detail the reasoning behind the selection of the statement; recall
that this is one of Habermas’ norms for ‘ideal’ communication.
The visual representation of local empowerment

Finally, the measurement of local empowerment can be visually repre-
sented to provide a means by which to share the analysis and interpre-
tation of the evaluation with all the stakeholders. Visual representation
allows information to be compared over a specific time frame, between
the different components within a programme and between pro-
grammes. Visual representations do not have to use text and are there-
fore useful in a cross-cultural context or when stakeholders are not
Table 4.3 Five representative statements for each empowerment domain
98
Domain 1 2 3 4 5
Community Not all commu- Community mem- Community members Community members Participation in
participation nity members bers are attending involved in discussions involved in decisions decision-making has
and groups are meetings but not but not in decisions on on planning and been maintained.
participating in involved in discus- planning and implemen- implementation. Community members
community sion and helping. tation. Limited to activi- Mechanism exists to involved in activities
activities and ties such as voluntary share information outside the commu-
meetings, such labour and financial between members. nity.
as women, donations.
youth, men.
Problem No problem Community lacks Community has skills. Community identi- Community contin-
assessment assessment skills and aware- Problems and priorities fied problems, solu- ues to identify and is
capacities undertaken by ness to carry out identified by the com- tions and actions. the owner of prob-
the community. an assessment. munity. Did not involve Assessment used to lems, solutions and
participation of all sec- strengthen commu- actions.
tors of the community. nity planning.
Local Some commu- Leaders exist for all Community organisa- Leaders are taking Leaders taking full
leadership nity organisa- community organ- tions functioning under initiative with sup- initiative.
tions without a isations. Some leaders. Some port from their organ- Organisations in full
leader. organisations not Organisations do not isations. support. Leaders work
functioning under have the support of Leaders require skills with outside groups
their leaders. leaders outside the com- training. to gain resources.
munity.
Organisational Community Organisations have More than one organisa- Many organisations Organisations actively
structures has no been established tion which are active. have established links involved in and outside
organisational by the community Organisations have with each other the community.
structures such but are not active. mechanism to allow its within the commu- Community commit-
as committees. members to provide nity. ted to its own and to
meaningful participation. other organisations.
Resource Resources are Only rich and Community has increas- Resources raised are Considerable
mobilisation not being influential people ingly supplied resources, also used for activities resources raised and
mobilised by mobilise resources but no collective deci- outside the commu- community decides
the commu- raised by commu- sion about distribution. nity. Discussion by on distribution.
nity. nity. Community Resources raised have community on distri- Resources fairly dis-
members are made had limited benefits. bution but not fairly tributed.
to give resources. distributed.
Links to None. Community has Community has agreed Links inter depen- Links generating
others informal links with links but not involved in dant, defined and resources, finances and
other organisations community activities and involved in commu- recruiting new mem-
and people. development. nity development. bers. Decisions result-
Does not have a Based on mutual ing in improvements
well-defined pur- respect. for the community.
pose.
Ability to ‘ask No group dis- Small group dis- Groups held to listen Dialogue between Community groups
why’ cussions held cussions are being about community issues. community groups to have ability to self-
to ask why held to ask ‘why’ These have the ability to identify solutions, analyse and improve
about commu- about community reflect on assumptions self- test and analyse. its efforts overtime.
nity issues. issues and to chal- underlying their ideas Some experience of This is leading
lenge received and actions. Are able to testing solutions. towards collective
wisdom. challenge received wis- change.
dom.
(Continued)
100
Domain 1 2 3 4 5
Programme By agent. By agent in discus- By community super- By community in Community self-
management sion with commu- vised by agent. Decision- planning, policy and manages independent
nity. making mechanisms evaluation with lim- of agent.
mutually agreed. Roles ited assistance from Management is
and responsibility clearly agent. Developing accountable.
defined. Community has sense of community
not received skills train- ownership.
ing in programme man-
agement.
Relationship Agents in con- Agents in control Agents and community Community makes Agents facilitate
with outside trol of policy, but discuss with make joint decisions. decisions with sup- change at request of
agent finances, community. No Role of agent mutually port from agents. community which
resources and decision-making agreed. Agent facilitates makes the decisions.
evaluation of by community. change by training Agent acts on behalf
the Agent acting on and support. of the community to
programme. behalf of agency to build capacity.
produce outputs.
Source: Laverack 1999.

literate (Laverack 2005). Graphing differences over time allows conclu-

sions to be drawn about the effectiveness of building community
empowerment in a programme context. The community members and
the outside agent can provide a textual analysis to accompany the visual
representation to explain why some domains are strong and others are
not. The visual and textual analysis can be used to develop strategies to
build community empowerment during a specific period such as
between programme reporting cycles. The visual representation pro-
vides a ‘snapshot’ of the strengths and weaknesses of community
empowerment as a whole.
Not surprisingly, several authors have used visual representations as a
tool to compare changes that can influence the process of community
empowerment. For example, John Roughan (1986), a community devel-
opment practitioner, developed a wheel configuration and used rating
scales to measure three areas – personal growth, material growth and
social growth – for village development in the Solomon Islands. The rat-
ing scale had ten points that radiated outwards like the spokes of a
wheel for each indicator of the three growth areas. Each scale was plot-
ted following an evaluation by the village members to provide a visual
representation of growth and development. The approach used a total
of 18 complex, interrelated indicators such as equity and solidarity to
evaluate village development. Rifkin et al. (1988) in Nepal and later
Bjaras et al. (1991) in Sweden, were the first commentators on the use
of the ‘spider web’ configuration for the visual representation of com-
munity participation. Their approach identifies five factors: leadership,
needs evaluation, management, organisation and resource mobilisation
and uses a similar simple rating scale. Marion Gibbon (1999), a com-
munity development practitioner, in her measurement of community
capacity in Nepal utilised a set of eight factors and a set of indicators
with a rank assigned from 1 (low) to 4 (high). The rankings were then
plotted onto a spider web configuration similar to the approach used by
Rifkin et al. (1988).
Evaluation information, however presented, is especially important
to compare progress within a community and between communities in
the same programme. It is a useful means to promote the free flow of
information and allow all stakeholders to visualise, to better articulate
and share their ideas on the building of community capacity towards
local empowerment. Importantly, evaluation provides link between
measurement and tangible community actions through participation
and strategic planning (Laverack 2006).
As important as meeting these local challenges, and measuring progress

towards community empowerment goals remains, our health and what
determines it is increasingly embedded in global economic, political and
social processes. Globalisation is no longer an abstract idea that health
promoters, in their measured pursuit of local empowerment, can ignore.
5
Pathways from the Local to the
Global
We no longer inhabit, if we ever did, a world of dis-

crete national communities. [T]he very nature of
everyday living – of work and money and beliefs, as
well as of trade, communications and finance . . . con-
nects us all in multiple ways with increasing intensity.
(Held 2004)
This chapter focusses the discussion on the link between the local and
the global. An explanation of globalisation within the context of health
promotion is developed, noting how processes of globalisation can
impinge on the health of people. We identify who are the ‘winners and
losers’ in an increasingly globalised world and what the implications are
for health-promotion practitioners in reshaping globalisation in a
healthier direction.
Unhealthy contradictions: The emergence of global

production chains
How is the local inherently global? And how did it become so? To begin
answering these questions the following fictionalised accounts, based
on published research and testimony, are given:
Bangladesh: The high cost of cheap clothes

In Bangladesh, Bilkis considers herself lucky to have work in one of
that country’s many export clothing factories. In her conservative
Muslim village, she would not have been allowed work at all. Having
a job in Dhaka, in one of the factories, is a small yet important
improvement for her. But she wonders how long she will be able to
103
last. She works 10 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week; more if there is a

sudden rush order from a large chain store in the USA or UK. Many of
these companies have signed a voluntary agreement for ethical trade.
Workers are not supposed to work more than 48 hours a week, with no
more than 12 hours of compulsory overtime. But pressures from the
buyers force her factory to push aside even the 60-hour work week
rules. They are told that if they can’t produce so much for a set price,
the buyers will move to China where things are even cheaper. If she
refuses the overtime, she risks being beaten or fired. She is owed a lot
in back wages, too, and hopes that if she keeps quiet she will eventu-
ally get paid. She cannot live on the 8 cents an hour she does receive.
But she is afraid to ask for her money. One of her co-workers did and
was promptly dismissed. Bilkis is especially concerned for the young
girls who are appearing again in the factory. Child labour disappeared
in the factories after global campaigns in the 1990s, and is against the
law. But when the pressures to produce so cheaply are so strong, and
so many families are still too poor to feed or educate properly their
children, laws, too, have a way of disappearing.
(Alam & Hearson 2006; Hearson & Morser 2007;
Kabeer & Mahmud 2004a, 2004b; Kernaghan 2007)
China: Toys may be fun, making them is not

In China, Jia is one of the millions of rural young women migrating
each year to the coastal cities from the poverty and the collapse of
health and social infrastructures following that country’s embrace of
market reforms in the 1970s. She works in a toy factory in one of the
many ‘free trade’ export-processing zones that produce manufactured
goods for much of the world. The toys she decorates using cheap
lead-based paints that make her nauseous are for the world’s best-
known brands, for which she feels proud. But the work is tedious and
never-ending. Her day starts at 8 am. She gets a 90-minute break mid-
day, but then works continuously until 6 pm. After an hour for dinner,
she works until 10:30 pm or later before going to the company-supplied
barracks where she sleeps in a tiny room with fifteen other women.
She doesn’t work Sunday nights, and gets one day off a month. But
that isn’t enough time to visit her family or plan a life outside the
factory walls. She isn’t paid the minimum wage the law guarantees
her, must give most of it back to the factory owners for her dormi-
tory bunk and the cafeteria food, and has no health or social bene-
fits. She feels trapped: she cannot return to the countryside, she
cannot work much longer in the factory before she will collapse
Pathways from the Local to the Global 105
and she cannot afford to move into the city where she wishes she
could be.
(Labonté et al. 2005; China Labor Watch 2007)
Bilkis and Jia are but two of the hundreds of millions of new workers now
employed in an economy that trade and financial market liberalisation
has rendered global. Many of these (over 66 million in 2006) work in spe-
cial ‘Export Processing Zones’ (EPZs) located in low-income Asian, Latin
American, Caribbean and African countries. Described as the ‘vehicles of
globalization’ by the International Labour Organization (Labonté et al.
2005), EPZs are often credited for offering women in poorer, less emanci-
pated countries a step up on the ladder of employment and financial
autonomy. As Bilkis’ and Jia’s stories reveal, and they are far from unique,
the step is not a big one. It is also one riddled with risk and insecurity.
To reduce costs, EPZs favour the employment of women because they
are seen as more compliant and cheaper to hire. Because such factories
are located in countries with a large, and largely, unemployed labour
force, wages and working conditions are rarely improved (International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions 2003). Some countries explicitly
forbid unions from EPZs and require wages to be lower than the outside
minimum, causing a downward pressure on all wages. To attract foreign
investment in EPZs, countries often offer extensive tax holidays
(International Labour Organization 1998). By definition, these special
zones do not levy tariffs on imported materials, further limiting the tax
benefits a country might receive for redistribution as health, education
and other development investments. Few locally produced goods are
used in the EPZs. In 30 years of maquiladoras (as EPZs are called in
Mexico), only 2 per cent of the raw materials processed into manufac-
tured goods by EPZs came from within the country (International
Labour Organization 1998). Apart from the jobs created, some of which
have since departed to China, the EPZs have had little impact on
Mexico’s development (Wade 2002).
EPZs and similar ‘sweatshops’ could help provide a lift out of poverty
for many workers, but only if they sourced their materials domestically
and transferred technology back to local firms. They do not. Instead,
most have simply become part of a globalising economy in which private
manufacturers ‘slice up the value chain’ (Krugman 1995), locating each
step of production where it contributes most to overall returns. Instead of
transnational companies setting up branch plants in other nations, as
they once did, liberalised global capitalism now allows them to carry out
product design and development in wealthier countries where they have
high levels of publicly funded education and research investment; where

they can obtain raw materials from whichever nation sells them at the
lowest price; sub-contract factories in countries where the labour, envi-
ronmental, taxation and other regulatory standards are low and workers
are plentiful and cheap; and move their profits through low- or no-tax-
haven nations to minimise the contributions their profits might make to
the public good (Grunberg 1998; Wade 2003). Indeed, much of the
world’s trade (between 1/3rd and 2/3rds) takes place between different
branches of the same company; the estimates would be higher if the out-
sourced and nominally independent sweatshops were taken into account
(World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization 2004). All
of this so that consumers can buy at ‘unbelievably low prices!’ products,
which advertising tells them they want, a world away from the exploita-
tive environments in which these products were created.
The benefits for poorer consumers in high and even middle-income
countries are obvious. The costs are less visible, unless one happens to
live in, for example, China where the country’s explosive industrial
growth has created the world’s most polluted air and waterways, causing
upwards of 750,000 environmental deaths annually (Kahn & Yardley
2007). China complains that the world is partner in its headlong rush to
free market modernity; most of its dangerous and polluting factories pro-
duce for foreign investors bent on making products for consumers that
are ‘cheap as chips’, as one Australian discount chain is called. We are all
implicated in this as producers, consumers and even as citizens, since the
environmental damage emanating from China’s factories is slowly sprawl-
ing across all of Asia, and is now the major source of health-damaging
air particulates as far away as Los Angeles (Kahn & Yardley 2007). Market
failures, in this instance the lack of internalising the high cost of pollution
and poor working conditions into the low price of goods, is an inherently
global problem.
This can place the globally aware health promoter in a difficult place:
making life more affordably healthier for their local poor but realising
that this affordability is based on outsourcing its health and social costs
to other people elsewhere. It also means that health promoters, ethi-
cally and pragmatically, can no longer avoid engaging with struggles to
make globalisation healthier and more sustainable.
Explaining globalisation
The first step health promoters can take in doing so is to understand bet-
ter what is meant by globalisation. Globalisation, at its simplest, describes
a constellation of processes by which nations, businesses and people are

becoming more connected and interdependent through increased eco-
nomic integration and communication exchange, cultural diffusion and
travel. It is not a new phenomenon. The history of humankind has been
one of continuous pushing against borders, exploring, trading, expand-
ing, conquering and assimilating, generally driven by an economic pur-
suit of resources or wealth (Diamond 1997). Disease has inevitably
followed its path as trade and travel have long been vectors for epi-
demics. Nor is this the first time in more recent history that capital, and
capitalists, have had greater interest in foreign markets than in those in
their home jurisdictions. The period of rapidly increased integration of
global markets that began in the 1980s continues a longer historical arc.
The percentage of global economic output accounted for by interna-
tional trade has only recently returned to the levels characteristic of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Cameron & Stein 2000),
before growing income inequalities and a global economic recession
helped fuel renewed protectionism and, eventually, two ‘world’ wars
(Nye Jr. 2002). But contemporary globalisation also differs from previ-
ous eras in significant ways, including
• The speed and scale of private, often speculative financial flows. The
flow of these ‘hedged’ or other derivative portfolio funds (over
$2 trillion exchanges currencies daily) dwarfs the money reserves of
all of the world’s countries and have precipitated several financial
crises. Each of these crises led to increased poverty and inequality
and decreased health and social spending (O’Brien 2002; Cobham
2002; Hopkins 2006) with women and children disproportionately
bearing the burden (Gyebi et al. 2002).
• The existence of enforceable trade and investment liberalisation
agreements. The best known are the global agreements under the
remit of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), or which exist region-
ally (such as the North American Free Trade Agreement or the South
American Mercosur). But many more are bilateral. As the WTO’s
Doha Development Round of negotiations, intended to benefit dis-
proportionately poorer countries, sputters to an inconclusive end
due to rich world mercantilism, bilateral agreements have multiplied
where the economic might of the larger countries eclipses the nom-
inal democracy of the WTO. Regardless of geographic scope, trade
agreements by definition limit the policy flexibilities of national gov-
ernments, often in ways that could imperil public health (Labonté &
Sanger 2006a/b).
• The size of transnational corporations, many of which are economi-

cally larger than most of the world’s countries. These companies exert
enormous influence in the free trade and investment rules to which
most governments have agreed (Jawara & Kwa 2003).
• The crisis of climate change. For over 20 years health promotion has
recognized the centrality, if not primacy, of the physical environ-
ment as a prerequisite to health (Labonté 1991a/b). Virtually all envi-
ronmental markers show deterioration in our life support. Climate
change is undoubtedly the most urgent health promotion issue and
its linkage to global market integration is straightforward: Moving
goods around the world consumes fossil fuel and exhausts green-
house gases. In the UK, increases in trade-related shipping are now
cited as the principle reason why that country will not meet its Kyoto
commitment.
Globalisation is not without health benefits: the potential rapid diffu-

sion of new health technologies; the digitally linked global network of
health and social activists working to create better social and environ-
mental conditions; the increasing adoption of multilateral agreements
affecting health and the environment or supporting human rights-
based approaches to development. But its economic aspects also carry
many health risks that demand critical appraisal.
From the international to the global
The first critical point, and one of particular relevance to health promot-
ers whose stock-in-trade is programme development and implementation,
is the distinction between international and global health. Until recently,
most health promoters, development agencies and non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) mobilised around ‘international health’ issues: the
greater burden of disease faced by poor groups in poor countries. Health
promoters working to reduce HIV prevalence in Africa, or to improve
maternal/child health programmes in Latin America, or to create gender
empowerment projects in South Asia are engaging in international health
promotion work. Their programmes and projects, and the empowerment
approach discussed in previous chapters, are simply international exten-
sions, into other countries, of the work they might have done within
their own borders. The only ‘global’ component is that funding for this
work is often provided through the rich world’s modest efforts, whether
official or funnelled through NGOs, to aid in the health development of
countries lagging behind.
But no longer can health issues and their social determinants in one
country be divorced from health issues in another. Sweatshop factories
and pollution tell us that. Even the HIV pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa
(SSA) has part of its roots in contemporary globalisation. Consider
another stylised story of a Zambian woman named Chileshe.
Chileshe waits painfully to die from AIDS. Antiretroviral programmes

are too little and too late for her. She was infected by her now dead
husband who once worked in a textile plant along with thousands
of others but lost his job when Zambia opened its borders to cheap,
second-hand clothing. He moved to the city as a street vendor, selling
the cast-offs of donations from wealthier countries. He would get
drunk and trade money for sex, often with women whose own hus-
bands were somewhere else working, or dead, and who themselves
desperately needed money for their children. Desperation, she
thought, is what makes this disease move so swiftly; she recalls that a
woman passing through her village once said that the true meaning
of SIDA, the French acronym for AIDS, was ‘Salaire Insuffisant Depuis
des Années’ – too little money for too many years.
(Labonté et al. 2005)
The globalisation facts behind Chileshe’s disease lie in the global debt
crisis of the 1980s and the imposition of structural adjustment pro-
grammes by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank
that indebted countries had to follow to qualify for new loans. We detail
this history in the section that follows; for now the salient feature
is that, in 1992, an IMF loan required Zambia to open its borders to tex-
tile imports including cheap, second-hand clothing. Its domestic state-
run clothing manufacturers, inefficient in both technology and
management by wealthier nation standards, produced more expensive
and lower quality goods. They could not compete, especially when the
importers of second-hand clothes had the advantage of no production
costs and no import duties. Within eight years, 132 of 140 clothing and
textile mills closed operations and 30,000 jobs disappeared, which the
World Bank later acknowledged as ‘unintended and regrettable conse-
quences’ of the adjustment process (Jeter 2002). Many of the second-
hand clothes that flooded Zambia and many other SSA countries
ironically began as donations to charities in Europe, the USA and
Canada. Surpluses not needed for their countries’ own poor were sold to
wholesalers who exported them in bulk to Africa, earning up to 300 per
cent or more on their costs.
For conventional economists, this was a textbook example of how and

why trade liberalisation works, even in poorer countries: Consumers got
better and cheaper goods and inefficient producers were driven out of
business. However Chileshe’s husband, and then Chileshe herself, paid a
heavy price. It was a price that cascaded throughout other sectors of
Zambia’s limited manufacturing base, with some 40 per cent of manu-
facturing jobs disappearing during the 1990s (Jeter 2002; UN Habitat).
Large numbers of previously employed Zambian workers came to rely on
the informal, ill-paid and untaxed underground economy.
Other facets of structural adjustment also played a role. Part of the
standard adjustment package is privatisation of state industries, partly
to raise short-term revenue to continue servicing overseas debts. This
robs a country of the ability to use revenues from state-run commercial
sectors to cross-subsidise the costs of social spending in areas such as
education and health. Liberalised financial markets, in turn, make it
easier for foreign-owned firms to move their profits offshore and avoid
having it taxed for public spending. The theoretical assumption that
growth would inevitably follow the economists’ shock treatment reme-
dies, leading to new forms of employment and taxation to replace the
sources lost by unemployment and tariff revenues, was not borne out in
fact. The result: a dramatic drop in the monies available to Zambia to
invest in health or education. This was buttressed by other adjustment
requirements: a decrease in public spending to reign in inflation, a cut
in public sector wages and the introduction of cost-recovery (user-fee)
programmes in health, education and other social services. This led to a
rapid rise in school drop-out and illiteracy rates and to fewer people
seeking health care or following through with treatment (UN Habitat;
Atkinson et al. 1999). All these changes were imposed just when the
AIDS pandemic was starting to surge; and to varying degrees, this story
recurred throughout Southern Africa (Labonté et al. 2005; Commission for
Africa 2005).
Blaming Chileshe’s HIV infection on globalisation is an oversimplifi-
cation. There are other important causes that explain why rates are high
in some African countries but not in others. These include cultural dif-
ferences (acceptance of multiple concurrent sex partners) (Halperin &
Epstein 2004)), political differences (some countries accept the need to
‘scale up’ prevention and intervention programmes while others still
question the HIV – AIDS link) and religious differences (fundamentalists
of most persuasions take a dim view on promoting condom use and tra-
ditionalists in countries where male circumcision is uncommon balk
at the surgery, despite both interventions showing definitive health
promoting gains). Gender politics are also important: former UN Special

Envoy for HIV in Africa, Stephen Lewis, writes of the feminisation of
AIDS on that continent (Lewis 2005), a result of women’s comparative
disempowerment, their lack of political participation, unequal access to
resources and property, restrictions on mobility and cultural codes that
accept sexual violence against them (Commission on Social Determinants
of Health 2007).
But globalisation’s role in AIDS cannot be excused away; even its gen-
dered impact is rooted in the backwash of globalisation’s neoliberal
policies. De Vogli and Birbeck (2005), for example, identified five mul-
tistep pathways that lead from globalisation to increased HIV vulnera-
bility among women and children: currency devaluations, privatisation,
financial and trade liberalisation, implementation of user charges for
health services and implementation of user charges for education. The
first two pathways reduce women’s access to basic needs due to rising
prices or reduced opportunities for waged employment. The third
increases migration to urban areas, which simultaneously may reduce
women’s access to basic needs and increase their exposure to risky
consensual sex. The fourth pathway (health user fees) reduces access to
HIV-related services, and the fifth (education user fees) increases vul-
nerability to risky consensual sex, commercial sex and sexual abuse by
reducing access to education. Education is one of the strongest predic-
tors of women’s empowerment.
In effect, African people, and especially African women, not responsi-
ble for the debts that precipitated the adjustment process were required
to sacrifice their health to ensure the debts would be repaid. As Sanjay
Basu, in an essay critical of the behaviour change emphasis in HIV pre-
vention programmes in Africa, succinctly summarises: ‘the background
for increasing HIV transmission is a background of neoliberalism – a
context where the movement of capital is privileged above the ability of
persons to secure their own livelihoods’ (Basu 2003).
Of debts, structural adjustment and neoliberal globalisation
The dawn of neoliberal globalisation broke in 1973, the year of the first
world oil supply crisis and the start of what would become the devel-
oping world debt crisis. While the specific aetiology of debt crises varies
from country to country, there are shared common causes:
• The oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979–80 had a severe impact on all of
the world’s economies, but especially those of oil-importing developing
nations. To continue their economic growth, they were forced to bor-

row heavily from international markets to pay for the higher oil costs.
• Rich world banks, awash in new ‘petrodollar’ deposits, needed to
lend huge amounts of this new wealth to maximise their own profit-
making. Much of this lending was indiscrete, going to corrupt rulers;
or to rich world contractors hired to build damns, roads or other
infrastructures at inflated costs that primarily benefited the well-off
in poorer, borrowing countries. Some argue that indebting poorer
countries in this way was a deliberate strategy to seize control of their
economy and their polity at much lower cost than occupying them
by colonial force (Perkins 2006). In an infamous speech to the US
Chamber of Commerce in 1983, then US Treasurer, Robert McNamara
outlined the sanctions that would be used against a defaulting
indebted country: ‘The foreign assets of a country would be attacked
by creditors throughout the world: its exports would be seized by
creditors at each dock where they landed, its national airlines unable
to operate and its sources of desperately needed capital goods and
spare parts virtually eliminated . . . in many countries even food
imports would be curtailed’ (Canak 1989).
• A rapid rise in real interest rates during the early 1980s resulting from
the US Federal Reserve policy of using high interest rates to drive
down inflation (‘fiscal monetarism’, still very much a part of global
economic policy). Debtor countries often had to roll over existing
debt at much higher interest rates, effectively doubling the amount
they owed without borrowing anything new.
• A fall in world prices for the primary commodities such as coffee that
were indebted countries’ major export and source of the ‘hard’ for-
eign currency that they required to pay their debts.
• Capital flight, both outright theft or, with more legality, the shifting
of assets abroad by elites worried about inflation, stability, taxation
and currency devaluations at home (Labonté & Schrecker 2007).
During the time that sub-Saharan Africa, home to most of the world’s
‘heavily indebted poor countries’ as they have come to be known,
became mired in debt, more money left these countries as capital
flight than that went into them as loans, foreign direct investment
or development assistance (Ndikumana & Boyce 2003).
While the debt crisis was the necessary precursor to neoliberal globalisa-
tion, structural adjustment was its first instrument. The term entered the
international lexicon when the World Bank, usually in conjunction with
the IMF, initiated loans to help indebted countries reorganise their
economies to increase their ability to repay foreign creditors. The

Mexican debt crisis of 1982, the first of many around the world, saw
both international financial institutions change from their original post-
World War Two mandates of development funding and helping coun-
tries with balance of payment problems into ‘watchdogs for developing
countries. This to keep them on a policy track that would help them
repay most of their debts and to open their markets for international
investors’ (Junne 2001). This policy track was steeped in neoliberal eco-
nomic ideas that first surfaced in the 1950s and 1960s in the so-called
‘Chicago School of Economics’, which included such famous free-market
economists as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, an early testament
to another of modern globalisation’s features, its cultural reach through
what is sometimes called ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas 1992; Labonté
et al. 2007), a sort of social movement of academic ideas. This economic
orthodoxy was carried by the School’s graduates to multilateral institu-
tions such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), the World Bank and the IMF, as well as to the
finance ministries of governments around the world. The result was ‘[a]n
alliance of the international financial institutions, the private banks, and
the [conservative] Thatcher-Reagan-Kohl governments willing to use its
political and economic power to back its ideological predilections’
(Przeworski et al. 1995). This alliance also resulted from the voting dom-
inance that the world’s richest countries hold at the World Bank and
IMF. The G7 countries alone (Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, the
USA, the UK) hold a near majority, and the USA has an effective veto
over any major reforms to the two institutions’ present lack of trans-
parency or good governance (Lee et al. 2007).
The ideologically driven neoliberal predilections of the conservative
1980s UK, USA and German governments, when applied to indebted
poor countries, distilled to
• reduced subsidies for basic items of consumption;

• removal of barriers to imports and foreign direct investment;
• reductions in state expenditures, particularly on social programmes
such as health, education, water/sanitation and housing, with recom-
mended and usually ineffective targeting of special supports to the
poor; and
• rapid privatisation of state-owned enterprises, on the presumption
that private service provision was inherently more efficient, and that
proceeds from privatisation could be used to ensure debt repayment
(Milward 2000).
The economic outcomes of structural adjustment remain equivocal;

some countries weathered the changes better than others, usually by
not fully implementing them. The World Bank and the IMF continue to
argue that things would likely have been worse for these countries with-
out these structural changes. The recently established IMF Independent
Evaluation Office, however, found that over half the countries under-
taking structural adjustment underperformed relative to theoretical
expectations; the assumed private sector recovery rarely occurred, or did
so much more slowly than anticipated; and the IMF’s emphasis on tax-
ing consumption, rather than income, fuelled domestic inequalities
(IMF 2004). None of these outcomes are good for health, generally, or
for health equity in particular. In Africa the outcomes of structural
adjustment were overwhelmingly negative and, in the case of health
impacts, singularly destructive (Breman & Shelton 2001). Part of that
destruction was due to the globalisation of a market-driven model of
health sector reform (Lister 2007). If health promotion is a practice
embedded primarily within health systems, these systems need to be
sufficiently comprehensive, equitable and supportive of actions on
the social determinants of health if that practice is to be empowering.
The ‘selective primary health care’ approach was actively promoted
by the World Bank from the mid-1980s until very recently. In its influ-
ential 1993 ‘Investing in Health’ report, the World Bank further argued
that health sector reform should be based on increased competition
among providers, use of cost-effective norms and greater reliance upon
private financing and private provision, unless the public system could
prove that it was more efficient.
Despite its lack of democratic accountability and allegations of direct
US government interference in its work that led to the resignation of its
Chief Economist and latter-day globalisation critic, Joseph Stiglitz, in
1999 (Hall 2007), the World Bank is a large institution with diverse
voices and programmes. Prior to the mid-1980s it promoted and funded
social insurance schemes in developing countries to help make health
and education more available to the poor on the assumption that social
spending in these areas would lead to better economic growth. After
almost two decades of promoting market solutions, the World Bank has
returned to its past practice of financing such programmes (Hall 2007).
It now recognises, albeit unapologetically, that markets inevitably fail to
care for the health of the poor, and that the high prevalence of poverty
in many developing countries continues to constrain their economic
growth. From a health-promotion vantage, problems with this social
insurance approach nonetheless persist: the emphasis of these insurance
schemes continues to be cost-effective and selective, leaving little room

for anything but behavioural health promotion. The programmes target
the poor rather than building universal systems, reducing the cross-class
solidarity needed for sustainability over time, while opening up private
markets for service provision to the non-poor. And another branch of
the World Bank that makes commercial loans (the International Finance
Corporation), and whose share of total World Bank loans has jumped
from 3.3 per cent to over 25 per cent in the two decades of rapid global-
isation (1980–2000) (Khoon 2006), is aggressively promoting private
investments in private health care around the developing world on the
unsupported assumption that there is no conflict between profit max-
imisation and equity in access (Nah & Osifo-Dawodu 2007). In 2007, for
example, the International Finance Corporation announced $1 billion
in new loans to finance private sector health provision in Sub-Saharan
Africa (Bretton Woods Project 2008a), a region that is home to the
world’s poorest families facing greatest health need.
This contrariness in World Bank and IMF policies – on the one hand,
some public care for the poor; on the other, continued integration into
global markets – persists in the successor to these institutions’ now dis-
credited structural adjustment programmes. Since 1999, in order to qual-
ify for debt relief, indebted poor countries have had to prepare Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and to provide periodic updates and
progress reports for approval by the World Bank and the IMF. These
Papers embody some health-positive elements: they are supposed to
show how funds freed up by debt relief will be used in a ‘pro-poor’ man-
ner; and citizens are supposed to be involved in the process of selecting
these policies. However, participation by civil society groups in many
instances remains more nominal than authentic. Fundamentally, the
neoliberal nostrums of structural adjustment remain firmly ensconced
within PRSPs: privatisation, liberalisation in trade and services (some-
times calling for greater cuts in tariffs than those agreed to during WTO
negotiations) and caps on public sector salary spending which, while
not targeting health or education sectors per se, have prevented several
SSA countries from expanding public spending in these areas (World
Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization 2004; Brock &
McGee 2004; Wood 2006).
Alongside the explicit conditionality of the international financial
institutions is the increased ease and speed with which money can move
around the world, creating an ‘implicit conditionality’ (Griffith-Jones &
Stallings 1995). The recurrent financial crises discussed earlier in this
chapter have seen national currencies lose half their value or more with
serious economic and health fallouts. Anticipation of such a crisis means

that even governments with strong commitments to equity oriented
domestic policy sometimes temper these promises to maintain their
credibility with international creditors. Development policy scholar
Peter Evans points out that ‘the major banks’ aversion to the possibility
of redistributive developmentalism’ led to a 40 per cent decline in the
value of Brazil’s currency in the run-up to elections that brought the
Workers’ Party to power. After the elections, the Workers’ Party ‘chose
to suffer low growth, high unemployment and flat levels of social
expenditure rather than risk retribution from the global financial actors
who constitute “the markets”’ (Evans 2005).
Maybe yes, maybe no, mostly no: Interrogating

globalisation’s dominant health ‘story’
The proponents of neoliberal globalisation have a powerful and sound-

biting story for why liberalisation and global market integration is good
for everyone, including their health. Disentangling its assumptions by
examining its more sceptical critiques provides health promoters with a
solid, evidence-informed set of arguments with which to engage their
communities and politicians.
The main issue starts from the dominant ‘story’, as economists
describe their theories, that increased trade and foreign investment
improve economic growth, which increases wealth and reduces poverty,
leading to improved health. Increased wealth can be taxed to sustain
public provision of health care, education and water/sanitation, further
improving health. A more literate and healthy population, in turn, accel-
erates economic growth: the globalisation-is-good-for-us circle closes vir-
tuously upon itself.
The last set of claims, while hardly novel, is nonetheless impor-
tant because it underscores the positive contribution of improved pop-
ulation health to economic growth. The relationship between health
and economic growth informed the work of the 1998–2001 World
Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health,
chaired by the well-known economist, Jeffrey Sachs (Commission on
Macroeconomics and Health 2001). Its research findings suggest that at
least one-third of the economic growth of the so-called Asian Tiger
countries (South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and
Malaysia) in the 1980s and 1990s was a result of their population’s
improved health. Economist Amartya Sen (2000) similarly attributes
China’s more rapid growth, as compared to India’s, to its pre-market
reform emphases on public education and health care which created a

healthy, literate, cheap labour force that became that country’s source
of comparative advantage.
There remains an ethical issue with this formulation, of course: it
assumes that the goal is economic growth, not health, and that if
investments in health do not yield such growth then they are not worth
making.
But more to the present point, how true is the rest of the story?
Liberalisation and economic growth

This derives from research that shows a positive relation between liber-
alisation, economic growth and poverty reduction (Dollar 2001; Dollar
2002; Dollar & Kraay 2002). These oft-cited studies concluded that dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s, ‘globalisers’ grew faster than ‘non-globalisers’,
potentially expanding the resources at their disposal to ‘trickle down’ to
improve health and its social determinants. This conclusion, however,
has been severely criticised. Model high-performing globalisers such as
China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and Viet Nam, for example, actually
started out as more closed economies than those non-globalisers whose
economies stalled or declined during this period, mostly in Africa and
Latin America. The problem is one of definition. Globalisers in these stud-
ies are those countries that saw their trade/GDP ratio increase since 1977;
non-globalisers are those that saw their ratio drop. Yet the non-globalisers
started out more highly integrated into the world economy and traded
globally as much as, if not more than, the globaliser group (Birdsall 2006).
The growth difference, then, is clearly not one due to globalisation.
But the key contention remains: would developing countries be bet-
ter off (growth-wise) if they liberalised their trade policies? The evidence
here is so mixed that, according to one recent review, liberalisation on
average may lead to better growth but this is ‘neither automatically
guaranteed nor universally observable’ (Thorbecke & Nissanke 2006). It
all depends on how and when countries integrate into the global econ-
omy, and on what terms. It is now commonly accepted that the model
Asian globalisers did not, in fact, follow the standard package of market-
oriented reforms that the laggard African and Latin American globalis-
ers had imposed on them via structural adjustment programmes. They
exercised a trial-and-error flexibility in the timing and depth of liberal-
isation and domestic market reforms. This unorthodox approach to
economic reform is no longer available to countries struggling up the
development ladder; trade treaties have removed the necessary policy
flexibilities (Chang 2002) and the insertion of a billion low-wage workers
from China and India into the global labour market prevents them from
having any comparative advantage in terms of lower labour costs. The
result: global unemployment in 2006 is at an all time high (Employment
Conditions Knowledge Network 2007).
Growth and poverty reduction

Much is also made of liberalisation’s ‘rising tide lifting all boats’ and it
is now widely accepted that world poverty, at least in its most extreme
form, is decreasing. Between 1981 and 2003 the number of people liv-
ing on $1/day or less declined by 414 million. (See Box 5.1) Most of this
reduction, however, occurred before 1987 and the annual rate of decline
has since slowed by a full order of magnitude (Chen & Ravallion 2004;
Nah & Osifo-Dawodu 2007). Neither did the rising tide lift people very
far. The number of people living on $2/day or less rose by 285 million
over the same period (Chen & Ravallion 2004). Excluding China, where
the accuracy of poverty data has been questioned (Reddy & Minoiu
2005) and where half of the poverty reduction occurred before that
country embraced market reforms (Chen & Ravallion 2004), the num-
ber of global poor actually rose by 30 million at the $1/day level and by
567 million at the $2/day level. As one World Bank development econ-
omist concluded: ‘It is hard to maintain the view that expanding exter-
nal trade is . . . a powerful force for poverty reduction in developing
countries’ (Ravallion 2006).
Growth and income inequalities

Another contention is that globalisation’s past quarter century of growth
has not worsened income inequalities. Whether, or how, income inequal-
ities affect population health remains a disputed point among health
researchers. Poverty, which is higher in high income-inequality countries,
may be the bigger problem. But greater income inequality makes it harder
for economic growth to lift people out of poverty. Income inequalities
also continue to be associated with declines in social cohesion, public
support for state redistributive social policies (Deaton 2001; Gough
2001) and even political engagement (Solt 2004); as well as with higher
rates of infant mortality, homicide, suicide and generalised conflict
(Deaton 2001). Cross-national studies further find that income inequal-
ities actually dampen longer-term economic growth (Easterly 2002)
delaying the health gains such growth might bring or sustain. So
inequalities are bad for health and for the economy. But are they rising?
There are conflicting answers that depend on what measures are used
and what units are measured (Dollar 2002; Wade 2002; Deaton 2004).
Box 5.1 Measuring poverty?
One of the most important of the Millennium Development Goals

(MDGs) agreed to by the world’s nations in 2000 and discussed in
Chapter 6 is to reduce by half the number of people living in extreme
poverty ($1/day) by 2015. But what does poverty at $1/day actually
mean?
In 1985, the World Bank converted a number of country-level
poverty lines into ‘purchasing power parities’ (PPP) based on what
$1 in the USA could buy in that country. These statistical manipula-
tions led to creation of the international poverty levels of $1/day
and $2/day. The methodology has been heavily challenged for being
arbitrary; using a PPP equivalence that is not well defined; and
extrapolating estimates on very limited data without acknowledging
their high probability of errors (Reddy & Pogge 2005). Consider, too,
that in 1993 the World Bank changed slightly its calculus for the
$1/day level, leading it to conclude by this new measure that
extreme poverty had declined by 58 million from 1987–98. The old
measure would have indicated a decline of only 8 million. Who
asked the statistically richer 50 million what they thought? To make
the probability of errors even worse: Some countries’ poverty levels
are based on surveys of household income; others, mostly in Asia,
survey household consumption instead. The consumption measure
includes out-of-pocket health spending. This leads to an ironic con-
clusion that large numbers of Asian households have ‘escaped’
poverty because of catastrophic medical expenses (van Doorslaer
et al. 2006) that are known to be major causes of income-measured
poverty, affecting over 100 million people annually (Norton et al.
2001; Wagstaff et al. 2001). Using consumption, rather than income,
to measure poverty not only provides a false picture; it also substan-
tially underestimates resulting inequalities (Asian Development
Bank 2007).
Even accepting this flawed measure, the MDG poverty reduction
goal if achieved (it likely will not be) would leave almost 1 billion
people living below the $1/day level, causing at least 18 million pre-
ventable poverty deaths annually (Pogge 2008).
Income inequalities within many countries are rising. On most measures,

income inequalities between countries are also increasing (Milanovic
2003). Poverty reduction in China and India, with their large popula-
tions, means that income inequalities between individuals across the
world may be declining slightly, although there is disagreement even
here. Inequalities within both countries, though, have skyrocketed
since they started down globalisation’s neoliberal path. Since inequality
is strongly tied to social comparison and geographic propinquity it is
‘within-country inequalities’ that should concern us most (Marmot
2006). The important question here is globalisation’s impact on these
trends. Some economists claim that, because there is no consistent rela-
tionship between globalisation and within-country inequalities, we
shouldn’t worry; on average, the rising tide lifts all boats more or less
equally (Dollar & Kraay 2002; Dollar 2002). But simple arithmetic tells
a different story. Consider three people, one earning the equivalent of
$5,000,000/year, another earning $50,000/year and another earning
$500/year, a not atypical situation in countries like India or China. If each
person’s income rises by an equal 10 per cent, the effect is to increase
absolute inequality between the first two persons by an astounding
$495,000 and between the last two by a still substantial $4,950. To the
extent that one’s income or wealth corresponds to political influence
and power, which we argue it does, these absolute differences should
deeply concern us.
Growth and investing in health

The final part of the ‘globalisation-is-good-for-health’ story is one we
have already encountered: the assumption that the loss of a country’s
tariff or border tax revenues will be made up by increased growth,
wealth and new forms of taxation. This has not been the experience
with most low-income countries, even those whose economies have
grown (Glenday 2006). For a majority of these countries there has been
a net decline in overall public revenues with obvious implications for
reduced public expenditures on health, water, social services and other
health-promoting initiatives. The reasons include the informal nature
of their economies, with large subsistence sectors making income taxa-
tion difficult; and the lack of institutional capacity for effective revenue
collection when taxation is more administratively complex than col-
lecting tariffs at the border. High-income countries, with already well-
established taxation systems and existing public infrastructures, have
been able to move away from tariffs as a source of revenue with mini-
mal loss in fiscal capacity.
France Japan
80 Spain Italy
Mexico
China UK Germany
USA
Korea
70
Brazil
life expectancy, 2000
India Argentina
Russia
Indonesia
60 Pakistan
Bangladesh
Gabon
50 Equatorial Guinea
Nigeria South Africa
Namibia
40
Botswana
0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000

GDP per capita, 2000, current PPP $
Figure 5.1 Life expectancy and per capita income (adjusted for purchasing parity)
Source: Angus Deaton, Journal of Economic Literature, 41, 2003, 113–58; reproduced with
permission.
Growth and improvements in health

Finally, the relationship between economic growth and health improve-
ment is not at all straightforward. First, life expectancy at birth (LEB)
rises with GDP/capita in most countries, up to a level of around $5000
(Edward 2006; Deaton 2006). At this point, as Figure 5.1 shows, there is
a ‘kink’ in the curve, with declining margins of health improvement as
economies continue to grow. While there are methodological issues
with establishing the certainty of this ‘kink,’ it’s long-noted presence
This has led some analysts to suggest the establishment of an ‘ethical
poverty line’ of between $3–$4/day, an amount that correlates with
an average LEB of around 70 years (Edward 2006). (Because the ethical
poverty line is based on household consumption rather than national
income, which no country distributes equally to its households, to
achieve this $3–$4/day level actually requires a GDP/capita averaging
around $5000.) Second, there are several countries with fairly low
GDP/capita and growth levels that experience high levels of and con-
tinuing improvements in LEB, attributed in part to social program
spending on health, education and gender empowerment and fairly low
levels of income inequality. A nation’s health may be prerequisite to its
wealth, but it takes little wealth to provide for its health if the resources
that health requires are equitably shared.
An unhealthy tale of winners and losers
But equitable sharing has not been contemporary globalisation’s strong

suit. Rather, and ineluctably, globalisation generates winners and losers
through the logic of what economist Nancy Birdsall, of the US-based
Center for Global Development, describes as the inevitable effect of
globalisation’s inherent asymmetries (Birdsall 2006). The reasons, she
argues, is that the global marketplace rewards countries already rich in
productive assets; disproportionately burdens the poor when market
failures lead to financial or other crises; and is run by rules largely devel-
oped by, and for the, rich in high-income countries.
Winners from globalisation, most in high, but also some in, middle-
and low-income countries, comprise a global elite that sociologist
Zygmut Bauman (1998) calls ‘tourists’. They have the money and status
to ‘move through the world’ motivated only by their dreams and desires.
‘Vagabonds’, on the other hand, are those less privileged hundreds of
millions whose migrations to escape war, famine or poverty, or to pursue
opportunity and a better life are not welcome: Africans crossing the
Mediterranean or Atlantic, Chinese hiding in Canadian-bound cargo
ships and more than a million Mexicans each year who try unsuccess-
fully to enter the United States illegally. National borders are increasingly
closed to them. Not all of globalisation’s losers become vagabonds; some
are even welcome temporarily to tend the gardens, clean the offices and
houses, take out the trash and mind the kids of the ‘winners’. But their
numbers are continuing to rise as losers outpace winners, because of how
winners have set the global rules. In the words of the World Commission
on the Social Dimensions of Globalization (WCSDG), a high-level tri-
partite (government, corporation, labour) group organised under the
auspices of the International Labour Organisation: globalisation’s ‘rules
and institutions are unfair to poor countries, both in the ways they were
drawn up and in their impact’ (World Commission on the Social
Dimension of Globalization 2004).
A recent scorecard provides evidence of this (Weisbrot et al. 2001). It
compares health, economic and development indicators for the pre-
globalisation (1960–80) and rapidly globalising (1980–2000) periods.
During the globalising period, economic growth per capita declined in
all countries, but declined most rapidly for the poorest 20 per cent of
nations. The rate of improvement in life expectancy declined for all but
the wealthiest 20 per cent of nations, indicating increasing global dis-

parity. Infant and child mortality improvements slowed, particularly for
the poorest 40 per cent. The rate of growth of public spending on edu-
cation also slowed for all countries, and the rate of growth for school
enrolment, literacy rates and other educational attainment measures
slowed for most of the poorest 40 per cent of nations.
How much of this was due to globalisation policies? In partial answer,
a special study commissioned by the Globalisation Knowledge Network
of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health asked: What
would have happened to life expectancy at birth (LEB) if the trends of
the less globalised 1960s–1970s had continued, and how much of the
difference could be explained by the globalisation-driven effects of the
1980s and 1990s (Cornia et al. 2007)? The study first reviewed evidence
of pathways linking globalisation to poorer health such as material dep-
rivation, psycho-social stress, lifestyles, social stratification, loss of social
cohesion, and ‘shocks’ such as disasters, wars and epidemics. The
research team, lead by Andrea Giovanni Cornea, one of the first
researchers to study the health effects of structural adjustment, selected
key variables for the most important pathways and performed a num-
ber of regression analyses against the ‘counterfactual’ of continued
trends from the pre-globalising decades. They found that the past 25
years of intensified global market integration have indeed witnessed a
slowdown or reversal in health improvements and growing health
inequalities. Globalisation policy-driven changes reduced potential LEB
gains by 1.52 years, due primarily to increases in income inequalities.
Sub-Saharan African and Latin American countries, the former USSR and
countries in economic transition suffered the greatest LEB losses. Much
of the reversal in LEB in sub-Saharan Africa is a result of HIV/AIDS, the
high prevalence of which, as we have already seen, is attributable in part
to globalisation policies associated with debt crises, capital flight and
structural adjustment programmes. In the former USSR, much of the
reversal in LEB is due to the collapse of public institutions and social
safety nets.
Who wins with globalisation? According to World Bank economist
Branko Milanovic, who has studied this question relentlessly: the origi-
nal Asian Tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea) and
immediately after them, the high-income countries of Western Europe,
North America and Oceania (Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand). His
pithy conclusion: ‘Maintaining that globalization as we know it is the
way to go and that, if [its policies] have not borne fruit so far, they will
surely do so, is to replace empiricism with ideology’ (Milanovic 2003).
The globalising work of health promotion

The health sector and health promotion in particular entered the glob-
alisation ideology debate somewhat late in the game and is still in its
infancy in coming to terms with its implications. Environmentalists,
feminists, social justice activists and civil society mobilisations in
poorer developing countries were there years before. The ‘just globalisa-
tion’ movement is notable not only for it being the first universal social
movement in human history, it is also one led as much by those in
poorer as in richer countries and circumstances.
The Bangkok Charter for Health Promotion in a Globalised World (World
Health Organization 2005) is only the second health promotion
‘Charter’ that the World Health Organization has seen fit to issue.
Others of its various international health promotion gatherings have
put out Declarations which have lacked the same imperative of a
Charter. Responding to the surge of health concern with globalisation,
the Bangkok Charter posits that health promotion must become ‘central
to the global development agenda’. While a reasonable claim it does not,
unfortunately, provide a clear role for practitioners or a plan of action
indicating who, how and when this commitment will be achieved, apart
from developing the role of partnerships
to close the health gap between rich and poor . . . This requires
actions to promote dialogue and cooperation among nation states,
civil society, and the private sector.
(World Health Organization 2005)
An interesting comparative discourse analysis with the Ottawa Charter

finds the Bangkok Charter significantly lacking in action terms (Porter
2006), reading more like a lukewarm multilateral text than a manifesto.
The international People’s Health Movement, a global network of health
activists, is particularly critical of the Bangkok Charter’s avoidance of the
political economy and global power differentials that create the ‘health
gap between rich and poor’ on which we must act, and of its assump-
tion that the interests of different governments, private sector actors
and civil society are free of conflict or contradiction.
Whatever the Bangkok Charter’s strengths or weaknesses, health pro-
motion does not need a new Charter or a new Declaration to begin its
work tackling what is unhealthy with globalisation’s present form. We
need to only apply the skills and strategies we already have to problems
of a different order, in new settings and with a changed set of allies and
a larger cast of opponents.
Before turning to this task in the next two chapters, we close with a
reprise of the two stories of Bilkis and Jia to offer a few notes of cautious
optimism for health promotion’s globalising work.
Bilkis expressed concern that child labour, which began to disappear
from Bangladeshi sweatshops in the 1990s, was making a comeback.
What caused its initial disappearance was the pressure exerted on retail-
ers and producers by a melange of unions, women’s groups, new inter-
nationalists, fair trade advocates and more powerful multilateral
institutions such as the tripartite International Labour Organisation.
Some of this pressure was directly political, some discursive and some as
consumer boycotts. New forms of pressure are now being considered to
end the hazardous labour affecting over 125 million children aged 5–17
years, worldwide (UNICEF 2007). The US government, for example, is
debating legislation that would ‘prohibit the import, export, or sale of
goods made in factories or workshops that violate core labour standards,
and prohibit the procurement of sweatshop goods by the United States
Government’.
There is, of course, something richly ironic about globalisation’s hege-
mon considering such a law, especially since it is one of a handful of
countries that has not itself ratified the conventions covering the ILO’s
four core labour standards (of six conventions, the USA has ratified only
two) (International Labour Organisation 2007). Some developing
nations regard such American actions more as back door protectionism
for its own producers than as serious regard for the health and welfare of
its outsourced factories. But support for the proposed America law is
growing in Bangladesh, as well in the USA; and it is hard to argue that
the core labour standards, which most countries have ratified, are unfair:
freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining, the elimi-
nation of all forms of forced or compulsory labour, the abolition of the
most hazardous forms of child labour and the elimination of discrimi-
nation in respect of employment and occupation. In the UK, meanwhile,
a government inquiry has been launched into allegations that its big
retail chains are forcing their suppliers to break their ethical codes and
labour laws. What the state might do if it finds this to be the case is
unknown. One might hope that the companies’ voluntary ethical code
becomes a national law with regular inspection and enforcement.
Jia’s hopes for a healthier, better paid and more secure workplace may
yet start to be fulfilled. China, under domestic and international pres-
sure, is making some effort to improve the lot of its export workers. In
June 2007, it passed a new labour law, drawing on advice from Europe’s
social democratic and labour-friendly governments. China’s present
labour laws are based on individual contracts between employees and

employers. The new labour law still will not allow independent unions.
Nonetheless, it will increase the rights of workers to enjoy greater secu-
rity and benefits, decrease the chances of them being abused by third-
party labour contractors, provide for termination with just cause only
and empower the state-run central union to intercede with individual
contracts to strengthen negotiations in favour of workers, including bet-
ter health and safety provisions. China’s modest initiative, however, was
fiercely opposed by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai,
whose 1300 members have benefited in the past by having to pay little
heed to workers’ rights, health or safety (Elfstrom 2006). Foreign com-
pany lobbyists succeeded in weakening some, though not all, of the
labour law amendments to their advantage (Cha 2007). In every oppor-
tunity to reform globalisation for a public health good, one can expect
opposition from those who have gained from its present architecture.
The Bangkok Charter may be right in emphasising that without build-
ing bigger, better partnerships there will be little hope for ‘health pro-
motion in a globalized world’. But, as with local health-promoting
empowerment, global health-promoting empowerment means choos-
ing one’s partners carefully. It also means taking care of how the health
challenge of globalisation is framed. While most of these discourses
have something strategic to offer a global health promotion, the ethical
imperative is one of creating more equitable global resource distribu-
tions towards health.
6
Working to Build Empowerment:
The Global Challenge
Ultimately, the question should not be whether a

human being is better off in a sweatshop working 100
hours a week or unemployed . . . The question needs
to be: can we come up with a better version of global-
ization?
(Heymann & Kidman 2007)
In this chapter we begin to answer the question posed by Heymann and

Kidman by examining a number of different discourses in which glob-
alisation and health have been framed. These discourses compete for
political influence and hold differing potential for what remains the
single most important global health imperative: a dramatic shift in the
distribution (and redistribution) of global resources essential to health.
While there are many ways in which the relationship between health
and globalisation can be viewed, the immediately discernable and more
dominant discourses are as follows:
• Health as security
• Health as development
• Health as global public good
• Health as commodity
• Health as human right
Some, notably health as security, are recent or recently reformulated.

The preambular nod to ‘health’ as ‘fundamental to the attainment of
peace and security’ in the World Health Organization’s 1946 constitu-
tion gathered dust until the destabilising effects of the HIV pandemic
and fears over bioterrorism re-wed the two terms in the early 2000s
127
(Szreter 2003; Fidler 2007). Health as a human right emerged immedi-

ately after World War II in the text of the Universal Declaration on
Human Rights, but languished as a global discourse until the collapse
of the Soviet Union left a vacuum in normative alternatives to market
capitalism. Health as development has a more continuous, if episodic,
lineage, first gaining international notice with the 1978 Alma-Ata
Declaration on Primary Health and then rising and falling almost year-
to-year as an aid priority of high-income countries. Health as global
public good is decidedly new and owes itself to UN agency efforts to har-
ness one economic theory to soften the harsh edges of another. Health as
commodity, and the inevitable market failures in its equitable provision,
has long jostled with multiple corrective state interventions. Only with
the advent of global trade rules has health’s commodification become a
global, rather than simply national, concern.
Which elements of any or all of these discourses offer the most eman-
cipating potential for promoting global health equity? Which framings
should health promotion incorporate into its practice, philosophy and
strategy?
Health as security
The most dominant discourse of recent years has been that of national
security. At its extreme it finds such expression as the ‘risk of infection
by American citizens [and] US military personnel abroad . . . [and]
increased political and economic instability in strategically important
countries because of failures by their government to control the [HIV]
pandemic’ (US National Intelligence Council 2000). Health as national
security is consistent with nation-states’ often explicit duties to protect
their citizens from foreign risk by guarding their borders, whether the
‘invaders’ are pathogens or people. It has also, post SARS, given long-
neglected public health measures more political clout and fiscal
resources, at least in many high-income countries. (Public health sys-
tems in many low-income countries continue to languish.) But it has
also led to a distortion in global health risk and response and elides dan-
gerously with repressive political measures in the ‘war on terror’.
On the first: The securitisation of health, while now ‘a permanent fea-
ture of public health governance in the twenty-first century’ (Fidler
2007), disproportionately directs funding to those ills deemed politically
to be security risks: HIV, twice addressed by the UN Security Council; and
Avian flu as the present exemplar of feared modern pandemics. Such des-
ignation is not based upon global risk, since easily preventable maternal
and childhood illnesses and a number of so-called ‘neglected diseases’

exact a higher toll in poorer countries than does HIV, to say nothing of
the pandemic of chronic diseases sweeping developing nations alongside
the globalisation of Western lifestyles, food products and consumption.
Rather, and in ethically troubling ways, the securitisation of health priv-
ileges those diseases most likely to inconvenience global trade and
finance or to travel to high-income nations, reversing ‘international
health responses’ from their historic ‘people-centred values to a narrower
understanding of health as a national security risk’ (Thieren 2007).
On the second: Health, in sharing national security with terrorism,
may inadvertently lend credence to what UN human rights observers
concluded is a national security that ‘is reductionist . . . essentially mil-
itaristic and manifestly retrogressive . . . with reliance placed on the
superiority of military firepower and the curtailment of civil liberties
(United Nations Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human
Rights 2003). Fear of infection can morph into a fear of (bio)terrorism,
and then into a fear of the terrorist-Other itself. The continuous and
heightened expression of possible risks routinised in airport screenings
and building security checks, intersects with a saturated Western individ-
ualism to create a pervasive sense of helplessness. Helplessness without
check becomes fear, transforming the possible into the probable (Durodié
2005). As public health historian, Simon Szreter, warns, this creates a base
for, and apathy towards, political actions that abuse human rights and
which can slip slowly towards fascism (Szreter 2003). Economic interests
also underlie the security frame. Worry over Avian flu created windfall
profits for Roche, the patent holder of Tamiflu®, in 2006 and 2007 (Cage
2007). While some of this profit might be taxed back for useful health
promotion purposes, Roche (like many transnational firms) reportedly
operates through two offshore financial centres to minimise or avoid tax
payments (Transnationale 2007). The broader terrorist-security frame has
created a massive ‘security industry’; in 2003 over US$550 billion was
estimated to have been spent on domestic (not military) security, ten
times the amount of total foreign aid that year (Labonté et al. 2004).
The realpolitik of international relations, however, assures durability to
the security discourse. If the resource scarcities in such life basics as food
and water anticipated by environmental researchers emerge as rapidly
as some climatologists now caution, one can expect national security’s
reductionism and militarism to deepen. This places health-promotion
activists’ concerned with global health equity in an awkward place. To
dismiss security is to remove one from potentially useful policy engage-
ments. To accept it risks a tacit strengthening of its worst forms.
From national to human security?

A mitigating strategy exists in national security’s less commonly voiced
sibling: human security. Human security, which has its own multilateral
policy texts (Chen et al. 2004a, 2004b), bases itself upon a person’s
‘physical safety, their economic and social well-being, respect for their
dignity and worth as human beings, protection of their human rights
and fundamental freedoms’ (Helsinki Process 2001). It emphasises
attending to the needs of vulnerable peoples, representing an approach
to security more consonant with the idealised principles of health pro-
motion. It specifically stresses core capabilities, including income secu-
rity, health care, housing, education, environmental security among
other essentials for life. It also recognises that national security is no
guarantee of human security within borders, and that the ‘core moral
value of people’s security’ may actually be in potential conflict with it
(Coupland 2007). Framing security in human, and not simply national,
terms thus forces open debates on policy measures beyond rich country
efforts to create a cordon sanitaire (whether for unwanted pathogens or
unwanted aliens) to consideration of a larger set of international
responsibilities. In doing so, it creates an argumentative path into other,
potentially more empowering, global health discourses.
Health as development
One of these – development – is perhaps the second most prominent in

global health debate. Health has long been one of the desired outcomes
of development. This is best expressed in the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) (see Table 6.1). Agreed to by all the world’s nations in
2000, the MDGs represent the most concentrated and collective global
statement of development intent in human history. Significantly, they
are all directly or indirectly health goals. While these goals have gal-
vanised global attention on issues of health and disparity, there are at
least five problems with their present iteration:
1. They lack equity stratifiers, meaning that countries can achieve them
by improving the health of the better-off while worsening that of the
poor.
2. They ignore any statement on the causes of the problems they seek
to redress.
3. Emphasis on targets reinforces a bias towards short-term interven-
tions that are selective, fail to be empowering and lack sustainability.
Moreover, most countries lack the data to accurately track progress.
Table 6.1 Millennium development goals and targets
Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Target 1: Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people
whose income is less than one dollar a day
Target 2: Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people
who suffer from hunger
Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
Target 3: Ensure that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike,
will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling
Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
Target 4: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary educa-
tion preferably by 2005 and to all levels of education no later
than 2015
Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
Target 5: Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-
five mortality rate
Goal 5: Improve maternal health
Target 6: Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the
maternal mortality ratio
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Target 7: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of
HIV/AIDS
Target 8: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of
malaria and other major diseases
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
Target 9: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into
country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of
environmental resources
Target 10: Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable
access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
Target 11: By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the
lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers
Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development
Target 12: Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-
discriminatory trading and financial system
Target 13: Address the special needs of the least developed countries
Target 14: Address the special needs of landlocked countries and small
island developing states (through the Programme of Action
for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing
States and the outcome of the twenty-second special session
of the General Assembly)
Target 15: Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing
countries through national and international measures in
order to make the debt sustainable in the long term
(Continued)
Target 16: In co-operation with developing countries, develop and imple-

ment strategies for decent and productive work for youth
Target 17: In co-operation with pharmaceutical companies, provide
access to affordable, essential drugs in developing countries
Target 18: In co-operation with the private sector, make available the
benefits of new technologies, especially information and
communications
Source : (United Nations Millennium Development Goals)
4. As global targets, they do not address what is do-able country by coun-

try. It is now widely accepted that most African countries will not meet
these targets.
5. Past global declarations have a long history of never being matched
by the rich country resources required by poor country efforts to
achieve them (Anon. 2005).
The poverty goal also warrants some elaboration as it uses the narrowly
defined and ethically non-ambitious $1/day level. As the Chapter 5
recounted, modelling studies suggest a minimum ‘ethical’ poverty line of
$3–$4/day as sufficient to allow consumption that would permit a life
expectancy of 70 years. Using this ethical poverty line triples the current
estimate of world poverty from 1 billion to just over 3 billion persons
(Edward 2006). Using the World Bank’s own disputed measures of poverty
reduction in the liberalised globalisation era, we would not reduce by half
those living below this ethical poverty line until 2209 (Woodward 2007).
That would still leave 1.5 billion people living below it, and those rising
above it would still experience life expectancies 10–15 years below that
enjoyed by persons in high-income countries. There are also problems
with some of Goal 8’s targets: the open global trading system it advocates
has not been of much benefit to the world’s poor; developing world debts
should not be made ‘sustainable’ (meaning at a level they can afford to
repay) but in many cases cancelled outright; and most of the gains in
access to essential drugs has arisen from citizen advocacy and legal actions
against, and not in cooperation with, pharmaceutical companies.
These problems with the MDGs are neither insurmountable nor nec-
essarily cause to dismiss them for their normative importance. As past
experiences with national health promotion goals and targets in many
countries suggest, the MDGs can be used to hold political processes
accountable for their efforts. They should not, however, become ossified
planning guideposts, under which communities and nations are held
narrowly accountable for meeting quantifiable targets that cannot even

be verified.
Pathology of instrumentalism
A deeper issue than the problematic nature of the MDGs is how the
relation between health and development is seen. Until recently, develop-
ment, invariably taken to mean economic growth, was viewed as preced-
ing gains in health. Rich world aid and trade policy, when not in its own
self-interest, is aimed at encouraging growth with health as a virtuous
spin-off. A newer economic health/development ‘story’, however, posits
that investing in health yields substantial economic returns (Global
Forum for Health Research 2004; Commission on Macroeconomics and
Health 2001). Health is no longer seen simply as a consequence of eco-
nomic growth, but as one of its engines. While politically compelling
this instrumental reasoning raises three concerns.
First, it increasingly silos health funding into vertical disease-based pro-
grammes for which there are targets achievable in a short time-period.
Cost-effectiveness measures are applied and results-based management
dominates accountability systems (see Box 6.1 ). These requirements are
not conducive to health promotion’s concerns with underlying social
determinants of health or with building sustainable public health sys-
tems, aid transfers for which have fallen in recent years to support a
doubling in funds for the ‘securitised’ HIV risk (OECD DAC online sta-
tistics 2007). Such requirements also imply that the causes and conse-
quences of health inequities are technical problems divorced from the
political and economic decisions that partly create them.
Second, the health-as-investment rationale disproportionately rewards
those countries with the ‘right’ set of economic policies – the dominant
neo-liberal model of growth through market liberalisation and global inte-
gration. They are under constant pressure to do the ‘right’ thing, a pres-
sure that often extends to multilateral or bilateral trade negotiations (‘if
you accept our trade terms, we’ll give you more aid’). There is also overlap
with the national security discourse. Several countries now tie their aid dis-
bursements to a recipient’s stance on the ‘war on terror’. Over 60 per cent
of aid increases between 2001–04 went to Afghanistan, Iraq and mineral-
rich conflict-riddled Democratic Republic of the Congo, which together
account for less than 3 per cent of the developing world’s poor (World
Bank 2006). Most of the trumpeted aid increase in 2005 came as debt
reduction for Iraq and Nigeria, the latter an oil-rich nation of increasing
interest to Western countries. Once removed, aid levels actually decreased
over the previous year (OECD DAC 2006), and fell yet again in 2007.
Box 6.1 Global public-private partnerships: For better,

for worse?
Since the early 1990s there has been a multitude of initiatives that
bring together state, market and civil society actors, often referred to
as global public-private partnerships (GPPPs). In health these include
the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative (GAVI), Global Fund to Fight
AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), and Global Alliance for
Improved Nutrition (GAIN). One of the key innovations of GPPPs has
been to involve for-profit organisations directly in decision-making,
the appropriateness of which has been questioned. Many of the GPPPs
are disease-focussed or, in the case of GAIN, narrowly targeted to vita-
min and mineral food supplementation. Analyses of GPPPs to date
raise concerns about their vertical approach, longer-term sustainabil-
ity, undermining of local health systems and fragmenting of global
health governance. There are also concerns about potential conflicts of
interest between the need to tackle issues such as poverty and inequal-
ity through fundamental structural change and the vested interests of
private sector ‘partners’ in the existing economic order, since the gov-
ernance of resource mobilisation and allocation has remained firmly
under the control of major donors. These programmes, by offering
substantially higher salaries to health workers, also contribute to an
internal ‘brain drain’ of health workers away from more comprehen-
sive services to intervention-specific initiatives (Hanefeld et al. 2007).
This weakens already fragile public health systems, including their
health promotion capacities. It also worsens the already debilitating
flow of health workers – often trained at public expense – from vastly
under-resourced poor countries to much less needy rich ones (Packer
et al. 2007). The absence of such workers is now regarded as the single
greatest barrier to any ARV ‘roll out’ in Sub-Saharan African countries.
There are some signs of change: The Global Fund is now setting
aside part of its funding to build health systems and train health
workers. South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, described in
Chapter 3, showed how an initial narrow focus on HIV and treat-
ment expanded to a broader concern with health systems and social
determinants. The same occurred in Haiti, where HIV programmes
fed local demands for better health care, sanitation, water and hous-
ing. Finally, in September 2007, several GPPPs, high-income country
donors, and low-income country aid recipients signed an ‘interna-
tional health partnership’ agreement to coordinate more closely with
(Continued)
Box 6.1 (Continued)
the national health plans of the recipient countries (Alexander 2007).

This could help minimise the fragmentation of different initiatives
that tax the reporting resources of many poor countries. Even so, this
new partnership explicitly restricts its priorities to health-care access
and ‘promotion of healthy behaviours’. No reference is made to
empowerment, or to the social determinants of health.
Alongside the growth in these GPPPs has been the rise of private
philanthropy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the
world’s single largest health aid donor, with a budget far surpassing
that of the World Health Organization. If we accept the premise that
money speaks loudly in defining public discourse and policy, we now
confront a future in which global health policy is being influenced
by a small circle of extremely wealthy individuals and their advisors.
The Gates Foundation, for example, received in late 2006 an addi-
tional $31 billion pledge from Warren Buffett, one of the world’s
richest men. Buffet, who received global accolades for his donation,
made his fortune through astute investments in a global ‘casino cap-
italism’ that has been responsible for multiple financial crises, deep-
ened poverty and worsening health in many countries. Most of the
people whom his charitable donations will now partially benefit
were, and remain, excluded from playing the very game by which he
made his wealth. Pertinent to this book’s concern with underlying
determinants of health one study found that 87 per cent of Buffett’s
investments are in companies facing allegations of environmental
irresponsibility or human rights violations (Clark 2007).
Third, the confluence of technical intervention and the ‘growth is

good’ sloganeering blinds commentary on the impossibility of many of
the world’s poorest countries to grow their way into better health, given
only a modest boost from wealthier nations. Aid historically has been
the major form of capital transfer from rich to poor for health as devel-
opment purposes. The resurgence of global activism around the need
for greater levels of aid spending has been accompanied by renewed cri-
tiques of aid as dependency-producing with little to show in terms of
development returns over a half century of effort (Easterly 2006). Africa,
which has received almost $1 trillion in aid over the past 50 years, has
failed to develop economically.
What such arguments ignore is the counterfactual: What shape might
Africa now be in if no aid had been disbursed, given the reliance of many
poor African countries on aid for much of its public sector spending?
What might have happened if Africa had not lost as much or more in cap-
ital flight over this same period due to corruption, profit repatriation and
the recycling of aid funds back to the donor country for the purchase of
its goods and services? Stated polemically, aid transfers to Africa over
the past half-century merely offset the plunder of the continent, often
by the same donor nations (Bond 2006). Even given rightly criticised inef-
fective and inefficient uses of much aid spending, recent meta-analyses
find that aid does increase economic growth (Taylor 2007), which other
studies argue likely occurs through investments in health, education and
other forms of human capital development (Commission on Macro-
economics and Health 2001). As Sachs (2007) shows, the likelihood of
many poor African countries being able to raise through their own taxes
sufficient revenues to fund even a fraction of the estimated minimum
requirements for health is non-existent. They are decades away from being
able to do so, and that is if we assume large growth rates of questionable
environmental sustainability. ‘Foreign aid’, Sachs concludes, ‘is therefore
not a luxury for African health. It is a life-and-death necessity’ (Sachs 2007).
Aid inadequacies
The most serious concern is that aid transfers continue to be resound-
ingly inadequate. Neither the health-development link increasingly
prominent in rich country promises nor the white-banded celebrity-
led movement to ‘make poverty history’ have sustained aid efforts.
The most recent and authoritative estimate of what it would cost for
all countries to reach the MDGs puts the price at an additional
$60–$120 billion a year in aid (United Nations Millennium Project
2005). This is double of what donor countries presently give, but less
than their repeatedly promised 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income
(GNI) on which all but a handful of European countries have repeat-
edly failed to deliver. It is also a fraction of what Canada, the USA and
other wealthy nations have spent on tax reductions for their rich over
the past five years (see Figure 6.1). Had donor nations abided by their
0.7 per cent target when they first made it in 1975, they would have
transferred $2 trillion more to developing nations over the past 30
years than they actually did (Urban Settlements Knowledge Network
Final Report 2007).
Most poor countries also continue to pay more in debt servicing costs
to public and private foreign creditors and to the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund than they receive in aid (see Figure 6.2).
Many of the debts still owed by the world’s poorest countries are odious:
loans knowingly made to corrupt officials, for work of no net benefit, for
purposes of military repression or without the consent of the eventual
30000
25000
20000
Additional costs of
15000 meeting 0.7% target
Value of tax cuts
10000
5000
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Source: OECD Development Assistance Committee, Development Co-
operation 2004 Report, DAC Journal 2005;6(1)[full issue] and earlier years;
Canada Department of Finance, The Budget Plan 2003, Table A1.9
Figure 6.1 Comparative costs, aid and tax cuts, Canada 2000–5, Millions of C$
Development assistance
Debt service outflows receipts
Sub-Saharan Africa
South Asia
2005
2004
Middle East and North Africa 2005
2004
2003
Latin America 2002
2001
2000
East Asia and the Pacific
-200 -150 -100 -50 0 50

US $ (billions)
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (accessed March 4, 2008);

Graph generated by Ted Schrecker, University of Ottawa
Figure 6.2 Worldwide, external debt service dwarfs development assistance flows
debtors; and by international law these debts should be considered

uncollectible (Howse 2007). Using international legal definitions, one
recent study estimates that $726 billion of the current debt of 13 devel-
oping countries is odious and should be cancelled and, further, that 10
countries should actually receive refunds of $383 billion in past pay-
ments on such debts (Mandel 2006).
Stated somewhat differently, the continent of Africa since the 1970s

has borrowed $540 billion, paid back $550 billion and still owes $295
billion (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 2004)
due to accumulating interest charges. If fully repaid, the world’s poorest
and sickest continent would have transferred over $300 billion to the
world’s richest and healthiest ones. Rich world donor countries, pres-
sured by moral outrage expressed by civil society groups from both sides
of the debt equator, now offer partial debt relief to the 40 nations
known as the ‘Heavily Indebted Poor Countries’ (HIPCs), But most of
the world’s poor do not live in HIPCs and most of the developing
world’s debt is not owed by HIPCs. This makes debt relief programmes
ineffectual at a global scale. Even for those countries receiving debt
relief, the amounts are only a fraction of the estimated new revenue
requirements for the MDG targets. And to qualify for debt cancellation,
these countries must subscribe to many of the same neoliberal policies
originally imposed under structural adjustment, which added to their
debt burdens in the first place.
A questionable model of development

Some of these problems are being addressed. More countries are untying
their aid. Several have pledged to reach the 0.7 per cent commitment by
2015 or sooner, although considerable doubt on the strength of those
promises remains. There is growing support for disbursing more aid
directly to governments rather than spreading it thinly, and for an end to
all forms of conditionality apart from transparency and accountability;
monies go where they are intended and make a positive difference in
peoples’ lives. There is increasing pressure on the World Bank and IMF
to remove or reduce their macroeconomic conditionalities on loans,
grants and debt relief. Many Latin American and some Asian countries
are now simply rejecting any new monies from these institutions partly
because of recently created regional lending banks under their more
direct control. These regional banks themselves are an effect of globali-
sation, the result of accumulating foreign reserves arising from out-
sourced manufacturing in Asia and from oil exports to high-income
countries from Venezuela. Such distancing from the World Bank and
IMF, however, remains a luxury poorer African and other Asian countries
cannot afford.
As with security, health promotion activists need not dismiss the value
of the development discourse. When invoking it, however, they need to
recast it in at least two ways. First, the concept of development must be
centred on human potentials rather than market performance, a point
long argued by progressive ‘new internationalists’. This requires contin-

ued scrutiny and critique of the hegemony of economic rationalism that
defines neoliberal globalisation. Second, in an increasingly interdepen-
dent economic world, the transfers, now called ‘aid’, should not be seen
as ‘aid’ at all but as redistributive obligations. Politically, redistribution
on a global scale is no different than the financial transfers federated
nations make between their component states, or that the European
Union makes between its member nations: reallocating fiscal resources
from its more populous or wealth-generating members to those states or
nations that are less populous or poorer. Such transfers are usually made
on the basis of strengthening social solidarity and maintaining social
cohesion, the absence of which leads to a loss of faith in democratic gov-
ernance, a rise in domestic disturbance and, ultimately, economic chaos.
Even the World Bank in its 2007 Global Economic Prospects Report (World
Bank 2007), while extolling the gains of increasingly globalised market
capitalism, cautioned that the environmental damage and income
inequalities that it was creating would lead increasingly to social unrest.
This implies the need for solidarity-building mechanisms of global redis-
tribution, albeit a conclusion that seems to elude the World Bank itself.
Health as global public good
The limitations of the development/aid discourse have nonetheless given

rise to a third: that of global public good. Health promoters frequently
invoke public or common good as shorthand to capture an ethic that
places collective benefit above individual gain. In this use the term has
the same evocative imprecision as ‘community’ (Labonté 2000). In classic
economic theory, public good has a more exact meaning. It is something
whose use is open to all, and whose use by one does not diminish its use
by others, for example, air, water, biodiversity, peace and even – the classic
example used to illustrate the concept – the order created by traffic lights.
A global public good is one whose benefits extend to all countries,
people and generations. The concept is based on the premise that ‘[i]n
today’s world, globalization has brought about interdependencies that
blur the distinction between domestic and external affairs. The best way
to ensure one’s own well-being is to be concerned about that of others’
(Kaul & Faust 2001). A stable climate is one example of a global public
good. Efforts to correct its inverse ‘global public bad’, greenhouse gas
emissions, are also considered global public goods. Definitional bound-
aries remain vague, however, and identifying such goods remains more
a matter of public policy than economic theory (Woodward & Smith
2003; Kaul & Mendoza 2003). Nonetheless, there are two axiomatic
qualities of a global public good: its benefits are not confined to citizens
of one nation; and, as with all public goods, it is under-provided in the
market because its use by all engenders free riders, those who enjoy the
good but pay nothing for it. Global public bads, in turn, are character-
istically private or public decisions made in one country that have
undesirable spill-over effects on people in other countries. Global pub-
lic goods not only fill in for market failures in provision; they also cor-
rect for market ‘successes’ that create negative public externalities.
Preventing disease, not promoting health

Health, or more precisely what creates it, is considered by some, but not
all, to be a global public good. There is more agreement that what pre-
vents the global public bad of disease fits better with the concept. A rea-
sonably short, but still plentiful, list of such goods has been suggested:
• Cure for disease

• New treatment regime for disease
• Control of air and water pollution emissions
• Uncovering basic research findings
• Monitoring disease
• Disseminating research findings
• Curbing epidemics (Sandler & Arce 2000)
Definitional differences nonetheless question the usefulness of the

global public good discourse in advocacy for greater health financing.
A narrow definition lends itself to more effective policy advocacy, but
can lose sight of important equity and gendered dimensions. A more
elastic definition that allows for numerous claims to the title of a global
public good for health loses its policy relevance, and therefore its effec-
tiveness. A recent effort by the World Health Organization concluded
that a narrower definition was the better approach, emphasising three
areas: the production, dissemination and use of knowledge; policy and
regulatory regimes to prevent disease; and effective and accessible health
systems (Woodward & Smith 2003).
There are critics of the concept: some argue that it is not accepted as
an appropriate paradigm for health development (Deneulin & Townsend
2006), confusing and weaker in policy advocacy than human rights
arguments. Others contend that global public goods, like the develop-
ment discourse, do not sufficiently address equity in health and fail to
address why inequities have arisen in the first place (Mooney & Dzator
2003). A more serious limitation is its utilitarian approach to global

cooperation. As with the security discourse, its underlying premise is
that shared interests are the key rationale for collective action, a per-
spective that reflects a particular value system in contrast with needs- or
justice-based human rights or ethics.
Strategically, the discourse bridges between health as security and
health as development. It suggests the importance of funding and build-
ing new multilateral institutions for the global research, regulation and
services provision that will minimise the harm of ‘diseases without bor-
ders’. The growth of various global disease funds, notably The Global
Fund (to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria), are good examples of
this. Despite their problems these funds begin to de-couple aid from the
strategic interests of specific donor nations. Fidler (2007) further argues
that ‘public health constitutes an integrated public good that benefits the
state’s pursuit of security, economic well being, development and respect
for human dignity’. That is, arguing health as a global public good helps
states to meet many of their other global health objectives, making it, by
Fidler’s estimate, ‘a “best buy” for foreign policy’. Moreover, the under-
lying theoretical and empirical public good argument – that there exists
profound market failures in key areas of human health and survival
demanding new forms of global financial ‘risk pooling’ and regulation –
is one that is likely to have greater traction with economists in treasury
departments than any of the other global health discourses.
Other examples of global public goods for health include
• The 2005 revision of the International Health Regulations which

requires WHO member states to strengthen core disease surveillance
and response capacities and to report public health events to WHO.
• The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) which
requires states parties to enact bans on tobacco advertising, marketing
and promotion, implement warnings on packages and implement
measures to protect exposure to second-hand smoke (see Box 6.2 ).
Health as commodity
Even so, the global public goods discourse must compete in treasury
departments with the one outlier – health as tradable good. There is
some pretence that such trade will lead to better outcomes, but the real-
ity is that health is reduced to goods (such as drugs and new technolo-
gies) or services (private health insurance, facilities or providers), the
Box 6.2 Health promotion activism and the Framework

Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC)
The International Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC)

was adopted by the World Health Assembly in May 2003 and is con-
sidered the first international health treaty or the first global healthy
public policy. As of September 2006, 168 countries have signed the
agreement and 139 have become state parties to it following ratifica-
tion. The FCTC requires these countries to enact bans on tobacco
advertising, marketing and promotion, implement warnings on pack-
ages and measures to protect exposure to second hand smoke, and
‘encourages’ them (in multilateral parlance, a term that conveys intent
without obligation) to raise tobacco taxes and consider litigation to
hold the tobacco industry liable for its wrongdoings. The FCTC is not
as strong a treaty as health and civil society organisations (CSOs)
wanted. Several of these CSOs participated in the negotiating forum
that led to the FCTC, and continue to lobby for amendments and
compliance as a ‘Framework Conventional Alliance’. They are credited
with maintaining pressure against the continuous efforts of countries
such as Germany, Japan, and the USA, each with large tobacco indus-
tries, to weaken substantially the health provisions. Japan, whose gov-
ernment is a key stakeholder in its tobacco industry, played a
particularly obstructionist role and successfully watered down the
FCTC wording in several key sections (Assunta & Chapman 2006).
There is little doubt that trade liberalisation in tobacco increases
smoking rates. World Bank research found that reduced tobacco tar-
iffs in a number of Asian countries resulted in a 10 per cent rise in
smoking rates above what it would have been without trade liberali-
sation. To prevent trade policy taking precedence over health protec-
tion, health organisations and WHO have urged the exclusion of
tobacco from trade treaties (BMA 2002, Macan-Markar 2004). The
FCTC acknowledges the link between trade and tobacco but, signifi-
cantly, contains no provisions to address it. The need for continued
global anti-tobacco health activism persists.
increased cross-border flow of which is designed to maximise profit, not

health.
The indirect effect on health of trade treaties, though receiving less
global health attention, is actually likely to have greater impact. Open bor-
ders in many low- and middle-income countries, often coerced through
loan conditionalities from the World Bank and IMF, as we have seen, led
to domestic economic decline and loss of public revenues for health and
education. A more pervasive effect, and one experienced by most coun-
tries, is increased economic insecurity (Blouin et al. 2007). Workers and
producers in the sectors that were protected from foreign competition
may see their revenues decrease or their employment disappear when tar-
iffs or regulatory barriers are removed. The negative impacts are not lim-
ited to one-time adjustments to trade reforms. Displaced workers have to
move to other sectors which may lack jobs or require a different set of
skills (Torres 2001). One poignant example of how this insecurity leads to
negative health outcomes is the sharp rise in the suicide rate among cot-
ton farmers in the Warangal District in Andra Pradesh, India
(Sudhakumari 2002), and in Maharashtra, India (Mishra 2006). In 1991,
the Indian government changed agricultural policy to encourage farmers
to produce commodities for exports such as cotton. Due to the high
volatility of world market prices in cotton, the absence of any domestic
insurance programmes and a decline in state support for rural activities,
many cotton farmers became heavily indebted and increasingly desperate.
At the same time, net job losses in rich countries due to outsourcing
to lower-wage nations have not been as great as sometimes claimed, or
as substantial as losses due to technology changes in production. The
threat of outsourcing, however, has been used effectively by companies
to exact wage and working concessions from their labour force (Martin
2007). Auto giants, Ford and General Motors, are threatening to move all
of their US production factories to lower-wage countries unless their
unionised workers take major pay cuts (Guardian Weekly, 31.08.07, p. 16).
In response, auto worker unions in the USA agreed to a two-tiered wage
system, where all new employees would receive starting wages less than
half the previous amount (Keenan 2007). Not only does this create
unhealthy inequalities in the workplace, it will put downwards pressure
on all other manufacturing sector wages. Open trading in currencies also
has a negative impact. Between 2005–07, Canada’s dollar rose over 30 per
cent in value against the US dollar. In response, according to a survey of
business leaders, over 20 per cent of remaining manufacturing in Canada
closed shop and moved to low-wage, fixed-currency China (Chase 2007).
Most of the new jobs in Canada exist in the part-time and insecure serv-
ices sector, or in that even less secure option known as ‘self-employment’.
An alphabet soup of trade treaties

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is the best-known institution over-
seeing global market integration through liberalisation of trade in goods,
services and finance. The WTO is the successor to an earlier and more
informal body known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), founded in 1947 to undo some of the protectionism among the
industrialised nations that arose during the interwar period of high
unemployment. Significantly, the benefits of gradual tariffs reduction in
the post-War period were seen in the context of Keynesian economics
and the prominent role it gave to government interventions into the
economy, particularly in debt-funded countercyclical spending, that is,
that governments should borrow and spend more in public works dur-
ing periods of recession and high unemployment. Liberalisation under
the WTO has taken place in a context of neoliberal economics which
truncates the role of government in the economy, and seeks to reduce
government debt and spending regardless of economic cycle (Collier
2006). Also important is that the GATT was essentially a ‘gentlemen’s
club’ of rich countries; developing nations played little role in them
until the 1980s and 1990s, and there was no requirement for reciprocal
trade concessions on their part.
All that changed with the birth of the WTO in 1995. As trade tariffs
came down, by GATT obligations for rich nations and through struc-
tural adjustment requirements for poorer ones, trade talks focussed on
expanding markets and investment opportunities for wealthier coun-
tries. This led to a new suite of treaties that covered investment, serv-
ices, domestic regulations, even government procurement, many of
which have potentially far-reaching health implications (see Table 6.2).
For most of these, and with only limited forms of what in trade-talk is
called ‘special and differential treatment’, all developing countries are
now subject to formal rules and binding dispute settlements. The impli-
cations of these agreements were not well understood by many trade
negotiators in rich countries, never mind the fewer and less prepared
negotiators from poorer ones (Labonté & Sanger 2006a/b; Labonté et al.
2007). The bottom line of increased liberalisation and global market
integration has been a rise in capital’s share of global wealth, relative to
labour’s (Labonté & Schrecker 2007); and to such an extent that the
World Bank recently warned of globalisation’s widening wage gaps
between skilled and unskilled workers, and how this might increase a
call for national protectionist policies in high- and low-income coun-
tries alike (World Bank 2007).
The key health and development criticism about WTO and other trade
agreements is a simple one that this book has previously noted: Equal
rules for unequal players will only produce unequal results. A fair trad-
ing system is one that handicaps the rich while discriminating in favour
of the poor. That was the principle that guided world trade before the
Table 6.2 WTO agreements with major public health implications
Agreement Health Impacts
GATT 1994 Reduced tariffs in many developing countries led to job

losses in ‘uncompetitive’ sectors, with subsequent impacts
on poverty, and declines in net public revenue, decreasing
the funds available for health, education, water/sanitation
and other key health determinants.
AoA (Agreement Continuing export and producer subsidies by the USA,
on Agriculture) EU, Japan and Canada depress world prices and cost
developing countries hundreds of millions of dollars in
lost revenue which could be used to fund health, educa-
tion and other health-promoting services. Subsidised food
imports from wealthy countries undermine domestic
growers’ livelihoods. Market barriers to food products
from developing countries persist and deny poorer coun-
tries trade-related earnings.
SPS (Agreement Requires scientific risk assessments even when foreign
on Sanitary and goods are treated no differently than domestic goods
Phytosanitary (i.e., there is no discrimination). Such assessments may
Measures) be costly and imperfect.
TBT (Technical Requires that any regulatory barrier to the free flow of
Barriers to Trade goods be ‘least trade restrictive as possible’. Many trade
Agreement) disputes over domestic health and safety regulations have
invoked this agreement. Only one so far has clearly ruled
in favour of health over trade.
GATS (General Locks in privatisation levels in committed service sectors,
Agreement on several of which (health care, education, environmental
Trade in Services) services) are important to promoting public health, and
are frequently prone to market failure, i.e., private provi-
sion often excludes access to the poor. Once a service
sector is committed, there is no cost-free way to extend
public provision of that service in the future.
TRIPS (Agreement Extended patent protection can limit access to essential
on Trade Related medicines. Higher resulting cost of drugs can consume
Intellectual public funding otherwise useful for primary health care or
Property Rights) investing in other health determinants.
TRIMS (Agreement Prohibits government’s abilities to place domestic
on Trade Related purchase requirements on foreign investment; such
Investment requirements can increase domestic employment, which
Measures) can be important to improving population health.
AGP (Agreement Limits government’s abilities to use its contracts or
on Government purchases for domestic economic development, regional
Procurement) equity, employment equity or other social goals with
strong links to better population health. While currently a
plurilateral (voluntary) agreement, there is negotiating
pressure to make it a binding multilateral agreement for all
150 WTO member nations.
WTO; it is one that needs re-enacting. Rich world promises to strengthen

‘special and differential treatment’ for poorer WTO members have so far
not been honoured. Instead, developing countries are being pressured to
lock-in a schedule of tariff reductions on almost all goods, removing for
them the very flexibilities used by presently rich countries to become so
(Chang 2002). The most recent least developed countries to join the
WTO have actually had to make deeper liberalisation commitments than
the wealthiest OECD countries, foregoing important development policy
flexibilities in the process (Mehrotra 2004).
The negotiating pressure on poorer nations reveals a popular miscon-
ception about the WTO and, for that matter, the World Bank and the
IMF. These institutions are often cast as the cause of the particular form
of neoliberal globalisation that is producing unhealthy effects world-
wide. They are not. It is true that people working within these institu-
tions are often ideologically committed to neoliberal economics; there
is a lack of transparency or democratic accountability in these institu-
tions; and their organisational structure very much discriminates
against the interests of or participation by poorer countries or civil soci-
ety organisations. But these institutions are creations of governments;
the source of whatever is wrong with them lies with these governments,
notably the wealthier ones who were the victors in World War Two, and
who dominate actual decision-making or negotiating sessions within
them. This is an empowering fact for activist health promoters con-
cerned about globalisation, since the targets for global health promot-
ing advocacy work are simply different sectors of the same state
structures that are targets for national health-promoting advocacy work.
An overpopulation of regional and bilateral trade treaties

The power behind trade treaties becomes clearer when we recognise the
growing importance of bilateral and regional trade treaties. Talks have
stalled at the WTO, a result of civil society activism visible as the ‘Battle
of Seattle’ during the 1999 WTO Ministerial Meetings; developing world
mobilisation within the WTO; continuing rich world undermining of
the ‘Doha Development Round’ by demanding more ‘give’ by develop-
ing countries before allowing them any new ‘take’. Many of the richer
nations, particularly the USA and the EU, are now spending more time
negotiating regional and bilateral trade treaties where it is easier to
impose their will on smaller countries by virtue of their economic
might. They have already gained most of what they want from the
global trade deals; any more is easier to obtain through bilateral or
regional deals that can then be ‘ratcheted up’ to the WTO level.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico,

the USA and Canada is one of the best-known examples of a regional
trade deal. While it generated some impressive trade and investment
gains for Mexico, the weakest partner, these were transitory and failed to
translate into any real domestic economic growth, development,
poverty reduction or health improvement (UNCTAD 2007). NAFTA also
contains a controversial provision that allows private companies to
directly sue national governments for potential lost profits due to public
policy decisions. Examples with public health implications include
Canada’s retreat from plain-packaging for cigarettes, withdrawal of a ban
on a potentially neurotoxic gasoline additive, a fine against a Mexican
municipality for stopping creation of a toxic dump site that could pol-
lute its source of drinking water and an attempt by an American water
company to sue a Canadian province for over $10 billion in lost poten-
tial earnings from its ban on bulk water exports (Labonté & Sanger
2006a). Recent NAFTA tribunals, however, appear to be reducing rather
than expanding the scope of this controversial provision.
Bilateral investment agreements (BITs) are another example of treaties
with negative health outcomes. BITs began their explosive rise after the
collapse of talks to create a multilateral agreement on investment (MAI)
and now number over 2200 (Peterson 2004). Most BITs are intended to
protect foreign investors and are often highly restrictive of performance
requirements that governments might impose on such investment. Like
NAFTA, they allow companies to sue directly governments over policy
changes not in their favour. Many of the BIT cases now in arbitration
relate to Latin American or African water concessions. Private investors
are seeking to overturn government regulations on tariffs, taxes and
water quality; or are seeking multimillion dollar compensation because
governments cancelled their contracts due the companies’ own failure
to meet their obligations. Some foreign mining companies are threat-
ening to use BITs to seek high levels of compensation from the South
African government which, to rectify the historic exclusion of the Black
majority from the country’s economy, is changing its domestic legisla-
tion on ownership of mineral resources (Peterson 2004). BITs generally
lack any reference to development goals and dispute that tribunals have
erred on the side of protecting foreign investors. This effectively min-
imises any risks such investors face due to changing socio-political, eco-
nomic or environmental conditions. Governments intervening to
mitigate the health or social costs of changed conditions, or to respond
to citizens’ needs for better living conditions, are increasingly facing
costly challenges and fines if their actions diminish the profitability of
foreign investments. Of 255 investor-state lawsuits filed under BITs,

over two-thirds have been in the past four years, most are from rich-
world companies against developing nations and two-thirds of the cases
so far heard have resulted in these countries having to make large pay-
outs to these private companies (Guardian Weekly 31.08.07, p. 25).
Of cures and care

There are two WTO trade treaties that directly commodify health and
have received the greatest health promotion attention: Agreement on
Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which extends patent
protection that may limit poor countries’ access to essential medicines;
and General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which locks-in
existing health care privatisation to the benefit of elites and private
companies but to the detriment of those unable to pay the costs. Some
progress on amending TRIPS to allow easier access to cheaper generic
drugs was made in 2003. But the rules remain cumbersome and costly,
and the USA has since been pressurising its poorer trading partners to
accept so-called ‘TRIPS-plus’ deals that take away the flexibilities they
won at the WTO. The 2006 Democrat majority in both US houses of
government has led to some potentially significant shifts in that coun-
try’s bilateral trade policy, essentially loosening some of the TRIPS-plus
language in them so that they are more WTO-equivalent and making
compliance with labour rights and some environmental agreements
core obligations subject to disputes and trade retaliation (ICTSD 2007).
The power of big pharmaceutical multinationals to impose extended
patent protection may also be diminishing, in part due to health activist
pressures.
GATS is a more complex agreement combining bottom-up options
and top-down requirements. The main concern is that the agreement
could accelerate an already global trend in health services privatisation.
GATS negotiations have ground to a halt as developing countries scru-
tinise more clearly its costs and benefits, since only a handful of the
larger ones have service industries that might compete with those in the
rich countries aggressively pushing GATS. Nonetheless, 54 WTO mem-
bers, most of them developing nations, have already made commit-
ments to liberalise some health services under GATS (see Box 6.3).
Governments may still want to experiment with commercialisation in
some components of their health systems. But until governments have
demonstrated their ability to regulate private investment and provision
in health services in ways that enhance health equity, they should avoid
making any commitments in binding trade treaties. It is not clear that
Box 6.3 Thailand’s note of caution
Thailand has not made commitments in health services under the

GATS but has actively participated in global trade in health services
since the early 1990s, notably the promotion of private urban hospi-
tals and health tourism. Facilitated through tax incentives to invest-
ment in private hospitals, this has enabled a rapid and substantial
rise in the number of foreign patients being treated, most coming
from high-income countries such as Japan, the USA, Taiwan, the UK
and Australia, but also increasingly from Middle Eastern oil-rich
nations. In 2001, over 1 million foreign patients were estimated to
have been treated in both private and public facilities (though pre-
dominantly in the former). The government policy is to continue to
increase the number of foreign patients. The resources used to serv-
ice one foreigner are the same as those used to service four or five
Thais. In order to address the increased demand for health profes-
sionals created by foreign patients, the Thai government in 2004
approved a policy to increase by over 10,000 the number of doctors
in the following 15 years. This measure may address some of the
future shortage of physicians, but does not address the immediate
needs or deal with the question of how the incomes generated by
medical tourism can be better harnessed to benefit the local popula-
tion (Pachanee & Wibulpolprasert 2006).
The rapid growth in medical tourism, estimated at over 30 per cent
annually, is not restricted to Thailand. Other countries ramping up
private hospitals for private, or privately insured, overseas patients
are India, Singapore, South Korea and the Philippines. Together with
the flow of health workers from developing to developed countries,
primarily nurses, we are witnessing the rapid creation of a global pri-
vate health system for those who can afford it. The long-term impli-
cations for public health systems – which, unlike private systems,
remain locked within national borders – are troubling, especially
given the lack of adequate public health systems and health workers
in many of the countries seeking to benefit from these private flows.
any government, anywhere in the world, has met this test. There are fur-
ther political and ethical considerations associated with the GATS,
underscored by the South African experience. One of the last acts of that
country’s apartheid regime was to commit to fully liberalise trade in
health services. The post-apartheid government subsequently passed
national legislation guaranteeing certain health rights by requiring

needs-testing before service providers can set up shop in different parts
of the country. Intended to improve equity in access, this provision vio-
lates its GATS commitments, leaving the country vulnerable to costly
disputes (Sinclair 2006). Such a potential outcome leads some to call for
cancelling all existing GATS commitments on health services and
removing health services from the scope of its subsequent negotiations
(Woodward 2005).
Health can be, and is being, commodified; but it is not a commodity.
Public systems for health care arose in most developed countries
because private systems proved inadequate and inequitable, a fact being
rediscovered by most of the world’s developing countries. For health
promotion activists, the stance on this particular discourse is clear: trade
treaties, which are intended to promote private commercial interests,
are no place to negotiate international rules for health, health care and
other health determinants, such as education and water/sanitation.
Health as human right
Indeed, there are clear conflicts between the health/commodity dis-

course and that of health as a human right, embodied in a number of
international declarations, covenants (treaties) and plans of action.
Covenants – which are legally binding on countries that ratify them –
do not require states to guarantee that all people enjoy the same level
of health. They do obligate states to ensure that all people enjoy the
same access to goods and services essential to the enjoyment of this
right. All human rights covenants contain a provision for ‘progressive
realisation’, meaning that a country’s compliance with rights obliga-
tions will vary according to its available resources to do so, but that it
must, year by year, move progressively towards complete fulfilment.
This obligation jars against that of WTO membership which requires
commitment to progressive liberalisation of trade. To the extent that
such liberalisation disadvantages poorer countries in terms of their
capacities to collect and disburse public revenues or ensure equitable
access to essential health services it contradicts their obligations to pro-
gressively realise human rights.
Domestic equity
A key text on the right to health is Article 12 of the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Article 12
proclaims ‘the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest
attainable standard of physical and mental health.’ This Article, and its
definitive 2000 ‘General Comment 14’, read a little like the World Health
Organization’s founding document and the Ottawa Charter for Health
Promotion but with a trenchant difference: it specifically obligates States
Parties (those that have ratified the Covenant) to ensure provision of a
number of health care and public health services, as well as equitable
and affordable access to such key underlying health determinants as ‘safe
and potable water and adequate sanitation, an adequate supply of safe
food, nutrition and housing, healthy occupational and environmental
conditions, and health-related education and information, including
on sexual and reproductive health’ (General Comment 14 para 11).
Countries’ performances in doing so are reviewed periodically by the
UN Human Rights Committee that oversees this Covenant.
Global responsibility
There are further international obligations. State parties to the
Covenant must respect the right to health in other countries, partly by
ensuring that any other international agreements they negotiate ‘do
not adversely impact upon the right’ (General Comment 14 para 39).
This is where the potential conflict between free trade and human rights
enters. States Parties to the covenant must protect against infringements
of this right by third parties such as corporations, using their legal or
political influences. They must also fulfil this right, which for rich coun-
tries means enhanced international assistance and cooperation to
poorer countries to allow their progressive realisation of this right.
The former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Paul Hunt,
whose second three-year term expired in 2008, issued several assessments
on the real and potential conflicts between trade and health, focussing
principally on extended intellectual property rights and their denial of
access to essential medicines, health services trade and the migration of
health workers from poor to rich countries. He also commented a priori
on the human rights implications of bilateral trade agreements in nego-
tiation i.e. the ‘TRIPS-plus’ requirements of US-negotiated trade deals,
usually at the invitation of the developing country partner.
While Hunt’s advice, and that of his successor, is non-binding, it adds
substantial leverage to civil society campaigns opposed to trade deals
that limit access to health care and other essential goods or services.
This includes a 2006 global right to health campaign by dozens of civil
society organisations under the broad umbrella of the People’s Health
Movement, now active in 40 different countries. The focus of this cam-
paign is a ‘mobilisation of action from below’ through training and
capacity-building sessions, documenting violations of health rights

and lobbying national governments for policy change. Its most active
campaign, in India, has conducted a number of people’s tribunals
where evidence of lack of access to health care and its damaging effects
have combined with lobbying and court actions to hold the govern-
ment accountable to its domestic and international legal obligations to
maintain health services (http://www.phmovement.org/en/campaigns/
righttohealth). A key premise of its activist work is to build the capaci-
ties of local organisations to monitor violations of the right to health.
Such popular mobilisations within countries have so far proved to be
the only means of achieving policy change under the right to health.
Apart from ‘naming and shaming’ at a global level, international human
rights treaties lack enforcement courts. Despite the rhetorical support for
human rights offered by the world’s most powerful nations, no single
dispute panel at the WTO has yet to consider a human rights argument
in its deliberations (Harrison 2007); yet the WTO’s rules have largely
been set by these same ‘rights-talking’ governments. Scores of countries,
however, have adopted all or parts of the Covenant and the right to
health within their constitution. As such, the right becomes domesti-
cally judiciable, and has been used successfully in numerous campaigns
(see Box 6.4).
Efforts to advance human rights as the guiding frame for twenty-first-
century global governance are growing. All UN bodies are now obliged
to apply a human-rights based approach, although how this should be
done and what this means for each UN agency still remains unclear. The
key features nonetheless are consonant with health promotion: partici-
pation, empowerment and universality. Like any discourse advancing
the possibility of global justice, rights-based arguments are easily dis-
missed by the realist ideology common to many governments and media
commentators as romanticism, a waste of energy or, worse, diverting
attention from the real work of growing economies or fighting the war
on terror.
Some activist scholars and civil society organisations, in turn, argue
against the present emphasis on human rights, which are individual and
not collective rights, for their lack of class analysis. This diverts energies
away from a deeper critique of, and efforts to mobilise against, the appro-
priation of capital by global elites and the ongoing commodification of
most aspects of life. Rights scholars themselves sometime express concern
over potential competition between different rights: Does the right to
security of person, for example, require a government to allow private
health systems to compete with public ones so that those with the
Box 6.4 When health activism meets the law
The human right to health requires the provision of essential medi-

cines as a core duty that cannot be traded for private property inter-
ests or domestic economic growth. This has long placed human rights
and the TRIPS agreement on a collision course, although the com-
bined power of collective mobilisations and legal activism appears to
be eroding the corporate claims to intellectual property rights. Legal
scholars talk of life cycle in which legal rights become social norms,
moving from norm emergence, to norm acceptance and ‘cascade’, to
norm internalisation where what was once contentious becomes
taken-for-granted and no longer a matter of public debate.
Lisa Forman (2007), an expert on TRIPS and the right to health,
argues that the Treatment Action Campaign became a precipitating
event the led to a ‘cascade’ with a sharp upsurge at the UN in inter-
national statements on treatment as a human right and articulations
of state obligations on ARV. The same year saw the WTO issue its
Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health. A second case in South
Africa bypassed the courts, and went to that country’s Competition
Commission, where activists successfully argued that the high prices
for ARVs levied by two big drug companies violated regulations
against excessive pricing and South Africa’s guarantee of the ‘right to
life’. A third South African case forced the government to supply
ARVs to HIV+ prisoners (Singh et al. 2007). These rhetorical and legal
victories were matched by considerable ARV price shifts, from over
$15,000/year per person to as low as $150/year. New global funding
mechanisms were also created; and in five years, access to ARV in
Sub-Saharan Africa has increased from under 1 per cent to current
levels of 28 per cent (Labonté et al. 2007).
Even countries where the right to health has not been formally
written into its domestic legislation have been found liable to obli-
gations under Article 12 of the ICESCR. In Argentina, people affected
by haemorrhagic fever successfully argued before the courts that the
country’s ratification of the ICESCR obligated it to finance treatment
and prevention of the epidemic disease. Argentina’s government
countered that it didn’t have the money; the courts said, ‘find it,
because you are responsible’. A similar ruling was made against the
Ecuadorian government’s decision to suspend an HIV programme. In
India, the High Court in 2007 upheld a compulsory license not for
(Continued)
Box 6.4 (Continued)
an ARV, but for a patented cancer medicine, thus allowing produc-

tion of cheaper generics. Thailand similarly has approved compul-
sory licenses for several patented ARVs and for drugs used to treat
heart disease. In both cases the patent holding pharmaceutical com-
panies have exacted some economic revenge by withdrawing other
drugs from their markets or withholding research and development
investments; and have threatened challenges before the WTO. But
only governments can initiate a challenge at the WTO, and the home
countries of these drug multinationals have indicated that they have
no intent to do so.
ability to pay can avoid wait-times for public care that could pose a risk
to life (Mathews 2007)? Given the slow global dominance of Western lib-
eralism with its individualisation over the more communitarian ethos of
many developing countries, this is a realistic concern. It is also leading
some human rights activists to urge prioritisation among rights, giving
more weight to those which, while still applied to individuals, obligates
states to act in ways that benefit larger collectives (as in the right to
health) or to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable.
Others are urging the importance of building upon General Comment 14
to create a full-blown collective right to public health (Meier 2007). But it
would still take a wilful naïveté to assume that the existence of legally
binding state obligations under unenforceable human rights treaties is
sufficient in itself.
Whether or not ‘rights-talk’ proves to be a sustainable countervailing
discourse to our still dominating neoliberalism is unknown. At the same
time, human rights are ‘the most globalized political value of our times’
(Austin 2001), representing the most widely shared language of opposi-
tion to devaluation of health that results from the globalisation-driven
spread of markets. For ‘health as human right’ reframes, at a basic and
ethically important level, each of the other four discourses:
• Security becomes human-centred rather than nation-centred.

• Debt cancellation and development assistance become legal obliga-
tions and not intermittent charity.
• Global public goods for health similarly become binding requirements.
• And trade is subordinated as a means to the right to health (or devel-
opment more broadly); it is never an end in itself.
The health imperative of redistribution
Global health is the new challenge for a 20-year mature health promo-
tion, and a just globalisation is its new prerequisite. How should this
challenge and prerequisite be framed? The assumption underlying any
examination of discourses is that these linguistic constructions set the
boundaries of problem-definition and intervention. In that sense, each
global health discourse examined has limitations but all, apart from the
commodification discourse, have something strategic to offer.
Security gives global health interventions greater traction across a
range of political classes than a rights-based argument alone. To the
extent that this strengthens a base of public health expansion; securiti-
sation of health may be a prerequisite to its eventual de-securitisation
(Fidler 2007). But vigilance is needed to avoid national security from
trumping human security.
Development remains the invitation to global governance debates. It
provides a seat at the table. Risks inherent in its ‘investing in health’
instrumentalism can be tempered by continuously reminding decision
makers to distinguish ‘which one is the objective (human development)
and which one the tool (economic growth)’ (Global Forum for Health
Research 2004). The accountability advocacy of international NGOs
continues to pressure rich nations to move beyond the inadequate
patchwork of broken aid promises to a global system of taxation and
redistribution.
Global public goods provides a language by which economists of one
market persuasion can convince economists of another that there is a
sound rationale for a system of shared global financing and regulation.
Human rights, though weak in global enforcement, has advocacy trac-
tion and legal potential within national boundaries. Such rights do not
resolve embedded tensions between the individual and the collective,
an issue to which human rights experts are now attending.
This resolution requires firm ethical reasoning, presently lacking in
the legalistic nature of human rights treaties (Ruger 2006). This need, in
turn, has created scholarly momentum to articulate more rigorous argu-
ment for a global health ethic. Competitors for such an ethic range from
Rawls’ liberal theory of assistive duties based on ‘burdened societies’ in
need (Rawls 1971) to Sen’s and Nussbaum’s emphases on minimum
capabilities needed for people ‘to lead lives they have reason to value’
(Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000), to Pogge’s more recent arguments for a new
ethic of ‘relational justice’ (Pogge 2002). The latter offers the most com-
pelling moral case for what other analysts argue is the urgent necessity
for a global entrenchment of rights, regulations and redistribution

(Deacon et al. 2005). Pogge bases his reasoning on evidence that eco-
nomic institutions operating on an international scale have been com-
plicit in creating many of the conditions that lead to ill health, notably
the ‘radical inequality’ of persisting poverty. Persons involved in uphold-
ing these institutions are thus implicated in creating subsequent ill
health, even though they may be half-way around the world (hence the
‘relational’ nature of justice) (Pogge 2004). Globalisation, as we have
come to know it, is not a natural or inevitable fact but a series of delib-
erate decisions that disproportionately favour some over others.
Alternatives to the global order – in the form of regulation, redistribu-
tion and the institutions required to manage them – are technically fea-
sible and would allow human rights obligations and health equity to be
better fulfilled. On this basis, Pogge concludes, the current global order
is morally unjust and indefensible.
Health promotion’s grandest challenge: Revalorising redistribution

Relational justice implicates all of us in the struggles to make the world
fairer and healthier. Two approaches to this in current vogue are ‘ethi-
cal consumerism’ and increased wealthy philanthropy. Ethical con-
sumerism means purchasing goods that are produced under reasonable
work conditions and with as light an environmental touch as feasible.
But consumption in itself has never made distribution equitable. Even
its ‘fair trade’ global movement, while commendable, usually offers
only marginally better returns for poorer producers in poor countries
and fails to deal with the environmental and economic limitations of
reliance on primary commodity exports. Neither has philanthropy ever
made distribution equitable. Charity is not a substitute for justice.
Progressive taxation, popular mobilisations and the scrappy world of
public policymaking are what created the Western world’s most equi-
table system of governance: the post-War welfare state. As much as
health promoters complain of the rules-bound rigidities of its bureau-
cracies, the welfare state is the best system humans have so far created
to allocate resources on the basis of principle rather than nepotism or
power. The problem is that economic globalisation is challenging the
welfare state’s survival or delivering it stillborn in virtually all of the
world’s countries. If capital is global, then so must be systems for its tax-
ation and redistribution. Several systems of global taxation have been
proposed, of arms sales, carbon emissions and financial transactions
to name a few. One is already operational: a tax on airline fuel along
with creation of a new organization (UNITAID), also known as the

International Drug Purchasing Facility, to finance essential medicines
and health systems in poor countries. There is a new ‘Leading Group’
of nations comprising Brazil, France, Indonesia, Norway, Senegal, South
Africa and Thailand, exploring other forms of ‘solidarity levies for
development’.
Another important step would be closure of offshore tax havens that
allow multinational enterprises and wealthy individuals to shelter their
income from national tax regimes. A recent study by the Global Tax
Justice Network (Tax Justice Network 2005) estimated that $11.5 trillion
of high-income individuals sit in such accounts, representing $255
billion in lost annual tax revenue. This amount is more than enough to
fill the MDG funding gap, and is roughly equal to what detailed UN esti-
mates calculate must be spent annually to stabilise and return green-
house gas emissions to their 1990 level by 2030 (Guardian Weekly
07.09.07, p. 4). No estimates of corporate profits in such havens exists,
although annual profits from US-based companies held offshore soared
from $88 billion in 1999 to $149 billion in 2002 (Tax Justice Network
2007). Between the two, high-income evaders and corporate avoiders,
there would be enough recaptured and fairly taxed capital to substan-
tially reduce the worst of the world’s health problems and their causes
and to finance an avoidance of climate disaster.
Despite being tarnished by over two decades of unbridled market
greed, redistribution remains health promotion’s most important policy
goal and, arguably, global health discourse. Even a small amount of
redistribution is far more efficient in reducing poverty than is economic
growth (Woodward & Simms 2006). Redistribution is ethically defensi-
ble since by relational justice we are all implicated in how globalisation
and market-driven politics is affecting the widening chasms of wealth
and health inequalities. Sustainability demands redistribution, since the
growth to lift people out of poverty would almost certainly destroy the
environmental resources needed for survival.
There is a cost to redistribution. To meet the ethical poverty line of
$3/day, a 30 per cent tax on consumption that exceeded the US median
level would be required. This would affect about 6 per cent of the
world’s population, but up to half of those living in rich countries. This
means less bankable income or fewer purchases for most of us reading
this book. But there is an almost folkloric abundance of evidence telling
us that happiness has not risen with rich world per capita income over
the past half century. Nor does health improve much with rising
income past a surprisingly modest threshold, whereas stress and disease

do rise with income inequality.
Simply put: in the rich world, enough is already too much. In the
poor world, too little is not enough. The scales need rebalancing. That
is the moral quest of this millennium. Will health promotion be able to
rise to it and play its part?
7
Glocalisation: Health Promotion’s
Next Grand Challenge?
Certain things cannot be achieved, but this is not a

reason to give up seeking them.
Mário Quintana, Brazilian poet.
(Becker et al. 2007)
[T]oday no place is constituted wholly by local or

global factors. At the same time glocal spaces . . . have
tremendous potential as a base for new and transfor-
mative politics and identities.
(Harcourt & Escobar 2002)
This final chapter discusses competing ideas about how to improve

health equity at both a local and global scale. It begins by revisiting the
story of the two women factory workers in Bangladesh and Pakistan in
Chapter 5, and how individual choices by those of us in the rich world
are necessary, but insufficient local, strategies. It then discusses three
approaches to empowering the local, globally: relocalising the econ-
omy, democratising global governance, and overhauling the very bases
of economic practices. It concludes with some thoughts on what this
means for health promoters committed to an empowering practice.
Saying no is necessary but not sufficient
We started our examination of globalisation’s effects on health with the

depressing tale of two women workers caught between globalisation’s
promises of modernity and financial independence, and its reality of pro-
duction conditions that rivalled the worst of Europe’s headlong rush into
industrialisation two centuries earlier. We ended with a hint of optimism
159
based on renewed international efforts to establish core labour rights in

these countries.
In an ironic twist, countries that are more open to international trade,
including many low-income nations such as Bangladesh, actually report
fewer violations of core labour rights than do closed countries (Neumayer
& De Soysa 2005a/b). No one is sure why, although scrutiny by NGOs,
attention by trade unions in countries where its workers lost their employ-
ment from outsourcing and occasional consumer boycotts may all play
some role in this outcome. It is harder for gross violations of human rights
to go unnoticed in an increasingly Internet-linked world; this is perhaps
globalisation’s most health promoting effect to date. That open countries
have better labour rights than those who remain economically closed does
not, however, mean that their workers necessarily benefit from these
rights. Indeed, as the authors of the study on trade openness and labour
rights themselves conclude, ‘it is entirely possible . . . perhaps even likely,
that globalisation boosts the bargaining power of capital at the expense of
labour, which would put downward pressure on outcome-related labour
standards such as wages, working times and other employment condi-
tions’ (Neumayer & De Soysa 2005a). In other words: it is one thing to
have a right de jure (in law) and quite another to have it de facto (in fact).
There are at least two reasons for this. The first has to do with the extent
to which trade openness in many countries has increased the informal
nature of employment. Women working on piece-rates from their home
or men selling second-hand clothing in local markets do not benefit from
formal labour rights, with a few exceptions (see Box 7.1). The second has
to do with ‘the bargaining power of capital’, in this instance Wal-Mart,
now the largest corporation in human history. Wal-Mart and, to compete,
all its competitors no longer shop the world to find the least expensive
goods for their stores. They create bidding wars amongst factories to pro-
duce at the prices they dictate, reversing the historic capitalist bargaining
between producers (those who make) and retailers (those who sell). Under
these constraints, having the right to organise and to bargain collectively
for better working conditions is meaningless to production workers. Even
in its retail operations, Wal-Mart is notoriously anti-union, closing any
store where workers have managed to organise successfully. It was also
recently found guilty of not compensating many of its retail workers
forced to work overtime ( Joyce 2006). But as long as people shop there,
the global power imbalances that Wal-Mart, its copycat competitors and
the ethos of ‘cheap consumerism’ have created will keep the poor and
marginalised of the developing world trapped in the personal pathologies
of a ‘healthy’ global economy.
Glocalisation 161
Box 7.1 The Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA)
In Ahmedabad, India, there are around 100,000 street vendors, form-

ing a sizeable proportion of the informal employment sector in the
city. They sell fruit, vegetables, flowers, fish, clothes, vessels, toys,
footwear, and many other items for daily and household use. Most
vendors have been selling in the city’s markets and streets for genera-
tions. Like other poor self-employed women, the vegetable sellers of
Ahmedabad live in poor parts of the city. They start work at dawn, buy-
ing their wares from merchants in the wholesale markets. They fre-
quently need to borrow money, incurring very high rates of interest,
and routinely face harassment and eviction from their vending sites by
local authorities. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a
union of almost one million workers, is a striking example of collective
action by these women and others like them, to challenge and change
these conditions. To strengthen control over their livelihoods, veg-
etable sellers and growers (all SEWA members) linked together to set up
their own wholesale vegetable shop, cutting out exploitative middle-
men. As a result, both growers and sellers have seen improved incomes
through better prices for their produce. SEWA also organises child care,
running centres for infants and young children, and campaigns at the
state and national level for child care as an entitlement for all women
workers. Further, SEWA members are improving their living conditions
through slum upgrading programmes to provide basic infrastructure
such as water and sanitation. This happens in partnerships with gov-
ernment, people’s organisations and the corporate sector.
In order to solve the problem of access to credit, the SEWA Bank
provides small loans and banking facilities to poor self-employed
women, such as the vegetable sellers, avoiding the huge interest rates
demanded by private loan agents. The Bank is owned by its mem-
bers, and its policies are formulated by an elected Board of women
workers. In times of health crisis, poor families not only lose work
and income, but often also have to sell assets to secure the where-
withal to pay for treatment: poor informal sector workers and their
families are pushed further into the cycle of poverty and indebted-
ness. With SEWA, however, when the vegetable sellers or their fam-
ily members fall ill, collectively organised health insurance can be
used to pay for health-care costs. SEWA has started an integrated
insurance scheme for women in times of crisis. Frequently harassed
(Continued)
Box 7.1 (Continued)
by local authorities, the vegetable sellers campaigned with SEWA to

strengthen their status through formal recognition in the form of
licences and identity cards, and representation on the urban Boards
that govern market activities and urban development. That cam-
paign, started within Gujarat, subsequently went all the way to the
India Supreme Court, and inspired international attention and
alliances. SEWA web site: http://www.sewa.org/services/bank.asp
Source: WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, Achieving Health Equity:

from root causes to fair outcomes. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2007.
The localised health-promoting response: just say no. We can exercise

personal empowerment in the choices we make by assessing their rela-
tive impacts on empowerment (and environment) more globally.
Otherwise we simply gain in our health and power by displacing dis-
eases and powerlessness to other, less seen corners of the world.
But individual choices are insufficient. Health promoters have argued
this insufficiency with respect to environmental determinants for some
time: it is far more effective and efficient to regulate and subsidise costs
for energy retro-fitting of private residences than to rely on hundreds of
millions of individual consumer choices, especially when the initial
retro-fitting costs may be unaffordable for many. The same applies to
how we govern our economies. The issue is whether we can (or should)
relocalise our economies, democratise their globalisation or rebuild our
entire economic practices in policy-possible ways.
Relocalising the economy
The second of our two gardening stories with which the book opened was
framed around the future-survival need to source our food locally. The
‘carbon footprint’ of food has become the latest environmental front line,
whether it pertains to reducing Western societies’ carbon-intensive red
meat diet (and the globalisation of this diet to such populous nations as
China) or seeking to restrict the flow of long-distance produce.
Consuming locally inevitably raises the issue of trading-off short-term
poverty alleviation for the world’s poorest for longer-term environmen-
tal sustainability, which at this point is enjoyed most by the world’s
richest. One UK organisation recently proposed a ban on organic food
imports from poor countries because of the air miles involved in their
Glocalisation 163
shipping. This would have devastated tens of thousands of poor small

farmers in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania, where producing
organic produce for export, notably cut flowers, herbs, essential oils and
cotton, has become the major source of agriculture-led economic growth
(Hartley 2007). On the one hand, as a Kenyan delegate to an interna-
tional health conference complained, ‘growing flowers to send to Europe,
is that any way to develop our country?’ (Canadian Conference on
International Health 2007). On the other hand, as a Kenyan Kikuyu
farmer pleaded, ‘a ban on export markets will be the death for us.’ In the
end, the UK organisation compromised by putting off the decision to a
later date (Vidal 2007a).
Not that calculating environmental costs are easy to make. New
Zealand lamb shipped to the UK exhausts only 1520 pounds/ton (includ-
ing its airfreight), compared to the UK’s domestic lambs expelling 6280
pounds/ton (Wente 2007). The reason is that New Zealand lamb free-
ranges on clover fields while UK lamb relies upon carbon-heavy animal
feed. Similarly, some studies find that the carbon footprint of African
flowers shipped to Europe is less than that of flowers grown locally due
to less use of pesticides, fertilizers, heating and machinery (Hartley 2007).
Consider, too, that many of the world’s poorest countries in Africa are
not net food-exporters, but net food-importers. Without buying food
grown in other countries people would starve. Only part of this is due
to population growth exceeding the supply of arable land. Another is
the legacy of the nineteenth century ‘white man’s burden’, which
divided Africa among the European colonisers in such a way that many
of the newly minted nations lacked then, and now, sufficient land,
water, coastal access and other natural resources to be either food or,
more broadly, economically self-sufficient. Lurking in the background is
the power of the global food transnational companies, many based in
the USA. These companies, through their influence on the US govern-
ment, succeeded in pushing through a WTO Agreement on Agriculture
that, with its array of delays and subsidy boxes, is still advantaging high-
income country corporate farmers at the cost of low-income country
household producers. In the telling words of the US Agriculture Secretary
at the start of negotiations on the Agreement, the ‘idea that developing
countries should feed themselves is an anachronism . . . they could bet-
ter ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products’
(Bello 2002).
Behind this complexity is an even more profound problem: the ‘inex-
orable decline’ noted by the United Nations Environmental Programme
in the planet’s water, land, air, plant and animal and fish stocks. This
decline has led to global food shortages, a rapid drop in global food
reserves and a rise in retail food prices that is placing the cost beyond the
reach of poorer groups in countries throughout the world (Vidal 2007b).
One of globalising drivers behind this: the recent, rapid and massive con-
version of food-productive land into cane and maize crops for use as
ethanol, a ‘biofuel’ that is helping high-income countries reduce their
dependency on foreign-controlled and declining oil reserves. Increasingly
food-scarce regions around the world (from India, Africa and Brazil to the
USA) are committed to ramping up substantially biofuel production in
the coming years. At the same time, conservative estimates place the
number of environmental refugees seeking food and water beyond their
borders at 1.8 billion by 2025 (Glenn & Gordon 2007).
It is the apparent health-suicidal tendencies of such trends that have
led some to campaign urgently for a dramatic relocalising of our
economies. Colin Hines’ book, Localization: A Global Manifesto (2007) is
one of the more popular, yet carefully reasoned, arguments for the
active rejection of economic globalisation. The ‘local’ could, for many
industries, be the nation; though for environmental goods such as food,
Hines argues for regions that do not exceed the circulation of local
papers. His premise is that economic policy should invert its present
bias favouring liberalised global trade and instead favour
• Safeguarding nation and regional economies against imports of

goods and services that can be produced locally;
• Site-here-to-sell-here rules for industry;
• Localising money flows to rebuild the economies of communities;
• Local competition policies to ensure high-quality goods and services;
• The introduction of resource and other taxes to help pay for such a
fundamental and expensive transition, and to guide it in such a way
that adequately protects the environment;
• Fostering democratic involvement in both the local economic and
political systems;
• A redirection of trade and aid, such that it is geared to help the
rebuilding of local economies, rather than international competi-
tiveness (Hines 2007, p. viii).
Hines’ arguments are similar to many other globalisation critics and

activist organisations. His rejections of free trade tenets and the economic
mantra of international competitiveness in favour of more robust local
economies are buttressed by scores of useful policy suggestions for rewrit-
ing our present global rules. The one major weakness with his argument
Glocalisation 165
is that it privileges the nation state as the largest boundary for the local.
Nations, or even regions within nations, would be empowered to dis-
criminate against foreign imports in favour of domestic producers – the
very protectionism that others have argued partly spurred Europe’s two
great wars in the last century (Nye Jr. 2002; Bello 2007). There is also the
problem of domestic producers being no less monopolistic, predatory or
exploitative than transnational firms, though this could be rectified
through strong, democratic regulation of the private sector. But there is a
nagging global question: does it promote health equity ?
Does it promote health equity?

Despite the environmental rationale for relocalising the economy,
replacing an open-trading system with a protectionist one that favours
local production will not solve the short-term dilemmas facing poorer
countries and health promotion’s quest for greater global health equity.
Returning to the issue of food and whether it is better or worse to ‘grow
one’s own’: agriculture-led export growth has been aptly described as a
‘dead-end’ for poorer countries’ long-term economic development. It is;
and it often does little to promote equity or sustainable agriculture
unless it is carefully monitored and regulated to do so. But agriculture-
led export remains important for a period of time in order for poorer
countries to earn the foreign currencies they need to purchase the tech-
nologies they require to develop their domestic manufacturing, or to
leapfrog directly into high technology services (Glenn & Gordon 2007).
Even if a nation can produce its own food in more sustainable ways, for
a rich country to shut down market access to all poorer countries’ food
exports is too blunt an instrument and one that can aggravate, rather
than alleviate, global wealth inequalities. The localising manifesto to
redirect economies to become nationally self-sufficient, without con-
comitant efforts to redistribute financial and material resources globally,
condemns smaller, poorer countries to remain the world’s lowly paid
gardeners and woodcutters.
Instead, there are both environmental and equity goals to be achieved
through better managed systems of global trade – a ‘glocalising’ of the
economy. This differs from ‘localising’ it, as it recognises the need to
render local what can be localised while democratising what remains
globally necessary for local survival. As Walden Bello, one of the devel-
oping world’s more prominent activist-academics and founder of the
NGO Focus on the Global South, points out in his provocatively titled
book Deglobalization, what is needed is a ‘double movement of “deglob-
alization” of the national economy and the construction of a “pluralist
system of global economic governance”’ (Bello 2002). ‘Deglobalization’,

Bello emphasises, ‘is not about withdrawing from the international econ-
omy’ (2002). Rather, it is a deliberate reorienting of national economies
from their emphasis on production for export to production for the local
market. In that it parallels the main arguments put forward by Hines, but
with a less insistent approach to localisation per se. Key measures to
‘deglobalize’ include
• Building up domestic savings to avoid a reliance on foreign investors

and markets for development finance,
• Undertaking reforms for income and land redistribution to create a
more vibrant internal market,
• Placing equity ahead of growth in national development strategies to
reduce environmental disequilibrium,
• Making economic decisions a matter of public debate rather than pri-
vate market choice,
• Strengthening civil society monitoring of the private sector and the
state and
• Creating new production linkages between community-run coopera-
tives, the local private sector and state enterprises with minimal
involvement of transnational corporations.
But this ‘re-empowerment of the local and the national’, Bello acknowl-
edges, ‘can only succeed if it takes place within an alternative system of
global economic governance’ (Bello 2002). What does such an alterna-
tive pluralist system look like? For Bello, the answer is simple: one in
which the power of the ‘three sisters’ of globalisation (the World Bank,
IMF and WTO) is weakened and that of others, such as the ILO and UN
agencies charged with health and human development, strengthened.
He writes: ‘It is in a . . . more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic
world, with multiple checks and balances, that the nations and com-
munities of the South – and the North – will be able to carve out the
space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies
of their choice’ (Bello 2002).
This may be true, but more policy precision on what a more pluralis-
tic or democratised system of global governance is also needed.
Democratising the global economy
George Monbiot, like Hines and Bello, a ‘public intellectual’ who has
written extensively and critically of globalisation’s present course, posits
Glocalisation 167
that the problem is not that we have too much globalisation but that we
have too little. In his book, The Age of Consent (Monbiot 2003), he sum-
marises an oft-claimed flaw with globalisation-as-we-know-it: borders no
longer restrict (at least very much) the movement of capital, goods and
elites (Bauman’s ‘tourists’ described in Chapter 5) but are raised for
unwanted labour (the ‘vagabonds’) and mark the terminus of democratic
politics. We have globalised the economy without globalising an effec-
tive governance system of regulatory and redistributive checks and bal-
ances. Monbiot, while sharing Hines’ criticisms of globalisation, sketches
a competing ‘manifesto’ to localism urging, among other reforms:
• Creating a World Representative Parliament (WRP), established by a

founding treaty among nations, with elected representative based on
population. The WRP would not be a direct governance voice, but a
moral voice overseeing the myriad of existing global actors (transna-
tional corporations) and governance institutions (the IMF, the WTO,
the World Bank, the multiple UN agencies).
• Democratising the UN by replacing the ‘one nation, one vote’ system
with a population-weighted vote system, capturing the power now
vested in the undemocratic UN Security Council.
• Replacing ‘free trade’ with ‘fair trade’ rules that institutionalise the
principle of greater development equity for poorer nations.
• Establishing an International Clearing Union (ICU), originally pro-
posed by the influential twentieth century economist John Maynard
Keynes, but rejected by the USA in the post-World War Two ‘Bretton
Woods Conference’ that created today’s global governance institu-
tions. The ICU would function to prevent trade deficits and interna-
tional debt accumulation, thus stabilising global trade.
These ideas, like those advanced by Hines and Bello, have a powerful nor-
mative ring to them. Elections to the WPR, for example, would allow more
local concerns to be expressed directly within global forums and about
globalisation processes. Some critics were quick to dismiss Monbiot’s alter-
native ‘manifesto’: Could we ever expect such powerful nations as the
USA and rising India and China to agree to creation of a world parlia-
ment when they won’t even agree to participate in the International
Criminal Court? Would the rich nations who control the voting at the
World Bank and IMF ever give up the powers they have over these insti-
tutions? In one sense the critics are right: we almost need the form of
global democracy Monbiot is writing about in order to create it; in which
case it would no longer be necessary. But we must also be mindful of
Quintana’s aphoristic reminder that having no idea (as yet) on how such
reforms might be achieved is no reason to abandon them. Sometimes
referred to as ‘international cosmopolitanism’, the ideas in Monbiot’s
manifesto have serious academic and political provenance in efforts to
increasingly ‘legalise the international’ by establishing democratic regu-
lations at the supranational level that correspond to those existing
within the world’s democracies.
As Chapter 4’s discussion of the policy process hinted, there are also
ways to take incremental steps towards achieving such ends, pushing the
policy frame beyond its present boundary but not so far that the canvass
of possibility rips apart. In some ways this prodding of policy choices
within the limits of social democracy was the remit for the Globalisation
Knowledge Network, a group of academic and NGO activist researchers
working alongside the World Health Organization’s Commission on
Social Determinants of Health. The Commission, comprising 20 former
heads of states, ministers and senior academics, and chaired by the emi-
nent social epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot, was charged to examine
how governments and people could improve health equity (a concept we
explored in Chapter 1) by affecting the determinants of health (which
we discussed in Chapter 2). The Network’s task was to comb the world-
wide evidence base for how globalisation functioned as a ‘determinant of
health determinants’ and what are the policy implications arising from
such a review (Labonté et al. 2007). Many of the Network’s findings
informed the evidence reviewed in the previous two chapters. Here we
elaborate on three only: the need to restrain global trade, to reinvent
global governance and to reconfine capital.
Restraining trade
Regarding liberalisation, the Network emphasised the importance of
health ministries and NGOs participating more fully in national discus-
sions shaping countries’ negotiating positions in current and future
trade agreements. National health and development goals should be
given priority over trade and growth. Rich country pressures on devel-
oping countries to ‘lock-in’ and agree to a formula to steadily reduce their
tariffs should cease until these countries show evidence of developing
broader and more equitable tax bases to offset the loss of tariff revenues.
There should be sufficient flexibility in any tariffs reduction formula to
allow countries to raise and lower these border taxes over time to meet
their domestic development goals. Intellectual property rights should be
removed from the WTO and returned to the World Intellectual Property
Organisation, where disputes are settled through negotiation rather than
Glocalisation 169
through trade sanctions. As we argued in Chapter 6, governments

should not commit to liberalise (commercialise) trade in health and
other essential services until they have experience regulating commercial
provision in ways that do not undermine equity. Pressure from health
activists in Canada, as one example of health-promoting advocacy in the
globalisation arena, led that country to declare that it would not liber-
alise trade in any of its health, education or social service sectors.
Some international NGOs have been pushing to have trade agree-
ments incorporate ‘social clauses’ – essentially using the enforcement
rules of trade treaties to pressure governments to honour their envi-
ronmental, human and labour rights obligations. Sound in principle,
social clauses may be risky in practice. Developing countries argue that
they could become a form of ‘back door protectionism’ by which
richer countries can close their borders to imports from poorer ones
less able to implement these obligations. An alternative option is to
alter the process by which trade disputes are resolved. Most disputes
originate from rich countries against each other, or against poorer ones.
These disputes are settled by closed panels of trade policy experts. These
experts generally do not consider health, human rights or development
goals, only the narrow interpretation of trade rules. While WTO agree-
ments include a few weakly worded clauses that allow exceptions to
trade rules for health, environment or national security purposes, dis-
pute panels have almost always interpreted these to give trade the ben-
efit of the doubt. So far human rights obligations have never been
considered in their deliberations. A simple way to rectify this would be
to create a parallel panel comprising health, human rights and devel-
opment experts that would determine if a country’s failure to comply
with a trade rule was necessary for it to meet its human rights obliga-
tions or development goals. The latter would include not only the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (Chapter 6), but also those
associated with the ‘right to development’ declared by the United
Nations in 1986 (the USA was the only country to vote against this
Declaration). This would allow civil society groups within countries to
pressure their own governments to act on such obligations; it would
not, as with social clauses, surrender more national sovereignty to trade
treaty organisations such as the WTO. Instead, and following Bello’s
advice, it would weaken rather than strengthen the role of the WTO in
global governance, something most international NGOs and many UN
agencies agree is necessary. It would lead to global ridicule of, and other
forms of pressure against, any country that insisted on enforcing a suc-
cessful trade dispute that only came at the cost of denying another
country its abilities to meet internationally agreed upon human rights

and development goals.
Another important health aspect of global trade is the ‘nutrition tran-
sition’ taking place in many low- and middle-income countries. Diets
based on local foods are being transformed into dependence on imported
processed foods, creating obesogenic food environments and increasing
the prevalence of chronic disease. The evidence linking nutrition transi-
tion to trade, though not yet conclusive, is highly suggestive. The growth
of transnational supermarkets has further led to changes in food avail-
ability, accessibility, price and, through marketing, desirability. This has
shifted demand for home-produced foods to dependence on store-bought
processed foods. Global regulation of food trade is considered important
for two reasons: improving domestic food security and decreasing the
health problems of over/under malnutrition. Many health activists are
now calling for negotiations of a framework convention related to food
trade, using the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control as a poten-
tial model. The challenge will be confronting countries such as the USA,
which intervened to ‘water down’ an earlier WHO strategy document on
diet, physical activity and health in order to protect its transnational food
companies (Lee et al. 2007). But health promoters played an important
role in the years of mobilising and advocacy that eventually brought
tobacco under stronger regulatory control; there is no reason they cannot
do the same with food security and global food regulation.
Reinventing global governance

Global governance is not the same as global government. The latter,
though potentially incubated by Monbiot’s suggestion of a World
Representative Parliament, would replicate the authority that nation
states currently exercise over their citizens. This is unforeseeable
in any near term. Global governance involves governments but
extends to the messy amalgam of ‘stakeholders’ and organised social
actors – non-governmental, private, institutional – and their efforts to
individually or collectively influence power and decision-making at the
international level. There is ‘thick governance’ in some sectors, such as
in global rule-setting and enforcement bodies like the WTO and its
member nations; and ‘thin governance’ in many others, notably the
health, rights and social sectors.
Many of the key institutions involved in global governance that affect
health have woefully inadequate systems to ensure participation, trans-
parency and accountability. Representation on the Executive Boards of
the IMF and the World Bank, for example, substantially reflects the
Glocalisation 171
weighted votes of the members. Developed countries that account for

20 per cent of IMF members and 15 per cent of the world’s population
have a substantial majority of votes in both institutions. Developing
countries, by contrast, are seriously under-represented relative both to
their share of Fund and Bank membership and to their share of world
population. Despite recent efforts to engage with a broader range of
stakeholders, improve public information systems and provide fuller
reporting of activities by many of these institutions, the transparency
of key decision-making processes in both institutions remains inade-
quate. As Chapter 6 noted, their influence, and certainly that of the
IMF, may be on the wane. The Fund’s loan portfolio, and hence the
weight its pro-liberalisation economic policies carry, has shrunk from
$105 billion in 2003 to just $17 billion in 2007 (Weisbrot 2007). Only
the world’s poorest countries are still captured by its tutelage. The rea-
son many others have been released, however, bears its own health
risks: the luck, or curse, of sitting on and exploiting oil reserves or other
scarce natural resources, often with little regard to the environmental or
human health effects.
The WTO, while nominally more democratic (one country, one vote,
though negotiating decisions are assumed by consensus if no country
protests), also does not do well on ‘good governance’ criteria of partici-
pation, transparency and accountability (Blagescu & Lloyd 2006). This is
primarily because in practice most substantive discussion takes place
outside formal structures through a complex series of meetings, such
as ‘mini-ministerials’, to which only the most powerful countries are
invited. Closed negotiations are the preferred mode, with decisions often
made without full approval by low- and middle-income countries. For
example, at the 1996 Singapore Ministerial meeting of the WTO, involv-
ing all 150 nation members, only 30 were invited to the informal meet-
ing where the major decisions were made. The remaining countries were
asked to accept these decisions as a fait accompli on the last night of the
negotiations ( Jawara & Kwa 2003). For many observers the actual gover-
nance of the WTO defaults to ‘relative market size’ as the ‘primary source
of bargaining power’ (Karns & Mingst 2004). This leads some to urge a
complete scrapping of the WTO. Others believe that this would weaken
the potential collective bargaining power of poorer nations within the
WTO, leaving them vulnerable to bilateral trade pressures from more
powerful countries. At minimum, the reach of trade obligations into the
policy space of governments can be shrunk, while that of international
organisation working for health and social goals can be expanded and
strengthened. This strengthening can extend to their formal roles within
the WTO; the WHO, for example, presently has an observer role only on
just two of the WTO’s many governing committees.
This expansion and strengthening, however, is not cost-free. One of the
major weaknesses in the current UN system of agencies is that their core
budgets have been frozen for the past decade. They have become increas-
ingly reliant on countries willing to give them special project funding to
perform their work. This makes UN agencies more beholden to donor
countries (that is, the rich countries) than to the consensus goals arrived
at by all member nations through the UN General Assembly or, in the
case of the World Health Organization, the annual World Health
Assembly. It robs these agencies of the political independence they need
and makes them less likely to provide policy advice or undertake pro-
gramming that might run counter to the interests of the wealthier donor
countries. The WHO in particular has fallen behind the World Bank and,
more recently, the huge swell of private health philanthropy in being able
to influence global health policies. Once again, the USA has been the
major force trimming the UN system’s capacities. Until the bureaucracies
of global governance – which is one way to consider the role played by
UN agencies – are less constrained in their work, global governance will
continue to be the privilege of the powerful, such as the Group of 8
Nations (the G8, comprising the USA, UK, Germany, France, Russia, Italy,
Japan and Canada, and now with more regular invitational participation
by China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa) (Labonté et al. 2004).
Reconfining capital
One of the important tasks of any reformed system of global governance
is limiting the global free flow of capital. As Chapter 5 noted, daily bet-
ting on short-term currency fluctuations is huge and continues to risk fis-
cal crises throughout the world which inevitably hurts the health of the
poorest. The countries that weather these crises best are precisely those
that retain restrictions on the inward/outward flow of money. As Chapter
6 pointed out, liberalisation of financial markets has also aided rich indi-
viduals and corporations in their ability to park much of their wealth or
profits in small tax-haven countries. At the same time, the conventional
policy advice from both the World Bank and the IMF – to say nothing of
the power of private financiers the world over – has been for countries to
lower their taxes to attract investors. Closing tax havens or issuing com-
panies and wealthy individuals with global tax identity numbers in order
to fairly tax them for public goods are both technically feasible remedies.
So, too, is imposing a ‘Tobin tax’ on all currency exchanges, named for
the Nobel economics laureate, James Tobin, who first proposed it.
Glocalisation 173
This tax would be low enough that most travellers, who also exchange
currencies, would scarcely notice it, but large enough to discourage cur-
rency gamblers. Some countries, such as Brazil, have already instituted
such a tax, hypothecating it for public health services. France and Belgium
also have currency taxes. More recent proposals include a ‘Spahn tax’,
named for a German economist who argued for a two-tiered currency tax
system: a very low Tobin tax for normal times and a much higher one
when currency exchanges became volatile and potentially destabilising. If
stock markets suspend trading when swings in share prices and exchange
volumes become too wild to allow panicky traders to ‘cool down’, the
same should apply to trade in currencies. There is also support growing
among some 53 nations belonging to a recently formed (2006) ‘Leading
Group on Solidarity Levies to Fund Development’ to use currency taxes to
fund global health and development projects. If this Group sustains its
momentum, it successfully begins the longer-term project of creating a
global taxation/redistribution structure that Chapter 6 argued was essen-
tial for promoting global health equity.
The limits of global governance?

Democratising global governance nonetheless presumes the emergence
of shared goals; therein lays its political weakness. Ideas still matter. In an
essay on the ‘new global politics of poverty’, Alain Noël write that ‘ideas
that catch fire tend to be anchored in conceptions of justice that matter
to social actors’, noting that the main political reforms of the past cen-
tury have not been implemented for instrumental reasons but from the
organised and moral force of progressive social movements (Noël 2006).
But Bello offers another important caution to the idea that global gover-
nance, however democratised, provides the better option to localisation:
[I]t is . . . questionable that, even if one could conceive

of a globalization that takes place in a socially equi-
table framework, this would, in fact, be desirable. Do
people really want to be part of a functionally inte-
grated global economy where the barriers between the
national and the international have disappeared? . . .
Indeed, the backlash against globalization stems not
only from the inequalities and poverty it has created
but also the sense of people that they have lost all sem-
blance of control over the economy to impersonal
international forces.
(Bello 2007)
One could quibble that digital technologies have already psychologi-

cally blurred national borders in many peoples’ minds, while also cre-
ating international links that make ‘community’ and the empowerment
one experiences through social groups transnational, and not merely
translocal. But the more profound question is whether global capitalism
can (or should) be saved. As Bello continues:
[N]eoliberal globalization is not a new stage of capitalism but a

desperate and unsuccessful effort to overcome the crises of over-
accumulation, over-production, and stagnation that have overtaken
the central capitalist economies since the mid-seventies. By breaking
the social democratic capital-labor compromise of the post-World
War II period and eliminating national barriers to trade and invest-
ment, neoliberal economic policies sought to reverse the long-term
squeeze on growth and profitability. This ‘escape to the global’ has
taken place against a backdrop of a broader conflict-ridden process
marked by renewed inter-imperialist competition among the central
capitalist powers, the rise of new capitalist centers, environmental
destabilization, heightened exploitation of the South . . . and rising
resistance all around.
(Bello 2007)
Whether or not we accept Bello’s analysis, tinkering with global gover-

nance might best be seen as opening a door to demands for a more rad-
ical rethink of how we could structure our economic relations in ways
that promoted health, ended poverty and saved the planet. This is not
to abandon the quest for global governance. It is to recognise that the
most important goals for health and survival may not necessarily be
shared; and that the current structures of our global institutions and
how they condition or constrain economic practices is in need of a very
fundamental overhaul.
Globalising the economy as if poverty, health and the

environment mattered
In such a far-ranging overhaul, what steps might be taken that embody

the ideals of equity and sustainability while also accounting for the real-
ity of political feasibility?
Firstly, the critique of globalisation’s current economic shortcomings
needs to be sustained. Politicians of many political persuasions find it easy
to agree with those presently benefiting from globalisation’s deepened and
Glocalisation 175
enlarged markets that all that is needed are ‘transitional safety nets . . .
to help the adjustment to dislocation’ and that enable people ‘to take
advantage [of globalisation] and roll with it rather than oppose it’
(Bergsten 2000). On the one hand, there is evidence that, even in the
stiff face of international competition, some Asian countries have been
able to extend and deepen their social protection policies (Labonté et al.
2007). Yet an unregulated global market makes it ‘more difficult to rec-
oncile the demands of social responsibility with the demands of prof-
itability’ (Bello 2002). Thus, on the other hand, even such bastions of
Nordic global solidarity as Denmark and Finland are now developing
globalisation policies that ‘centre entirely on the success and competi-
tiveness of the[ir] “own” nation’ (Kosonen 2007). Only within a context
of continuous interrogation and critique of globalisation and national
responses to it can a sufficient ‘glocal’ space for consideration of alter-
natives be created.
But, beyond critique, a health-promoting global activism must also
provide a roadmap of where we want to go, and how we might get
there. David Woodward (2007), an economist formerly with the UK-
based new economics foundation and a member of the Globalisation
Knowledge Network, has given these issues considerable thought. He
suggests that there are three major tasks our global economy must be
restructured to achieve:
• Provide the means (‘capabilities’ or capacities) for fulfilment of the

right to health.
• Eradicate poverty, not just at the $1/day level, but at the ‘ethical’
$3/day level.
• Control climate change and natural resource depletion.
The first is dependent on the other two; and persisting poverty and
environmental degradation both stem from the same root of a gross
misdistribution in global wealth and power. Neither of the two current
approaches to economic development, Woodward argues, can resolve
both problems simultaneously.
The first approach, the neoliberal model of globalisation of which this
book has been most critical, is grossly less efficient in reducing poverty
that is redistribution, is increasing rather than reducing inequalities and
allows most of the benefits of growth to be captured by a small number
of people. These people must consume vastly greater amounts of goods
and services in order for the poverty-reducing effects of growth to ‘trickle
down’. This is patently unfair and unsustainable. The second approach,
embodying many of the reforms for global governance discussed earlier

in this chapter, would reconstruct global trade and finance rules in ways
that allowed today’s poorer countries to industrialise or develop in the
same way as today’s wealthy nations, by subsidising their export-led
growth and/or restricting imports to protect and promote domestic com-
panies. This approach might create more equity between nations, but it
still relies upon the rich within these countries getting richer and con-
suming more goods and services in order for the wealth to ‘trickle down’
to their poorer neighbours.
Woodward argues that economic policy must now be designed to meet
all three goals (health, poverty eradication and environmental sustain-
ability) at the same time. Such policies are likely best enacted locally, with
national and global policies functioning to enable this. To reduce poverty,
governments can support microcredit and income generation schemes;
labour-intensive public works programmes that give priority to the infra-
structure needs of the poor; public procurement designed to benefit small
and medium-sized local enterprises; small farmers; strengthened social
safety nets; and, as needed, can direct cash transfers. The underlying prem-
ise of these policies is that priority would go to increasing poor people’s
production of local goods and services that, in turn, are needed most by
poorer households. The demand for these goods and services would
increase as poverty rates themselves fall. The intent is to break the econ-
omy’s growth dependence on increased, but unnecessary, consumption by
the rich, in favour of increased and necessary consumption by the poor.
To reduce growth’s carbon footprint, international agreements are
needed to ‘roll-out’ microrenewable technologies in all parts of the poor
world. The cost of this would be covered, in part, through various forms
of international taxation on present global trade/travel. There is growing
consensus among many environmental economists that technologies for
radically carbon-reduced economic growth already exist. What does not
exist is the political commitment by the world’s governments to pool
wealth to fund their rapid deployment – which is where a global health
argument framed in the discourse of global public good holds strategic
appeal. The increasing pace of climate change may itself begin to force
such a commitment that environmental activism alone has so far failed
to mobilise. Consistent with other findings from the Globalisation
Knowledge Network, Woodward calls for escalating taxes on luxury con-
sumption of natural resources. Water for essential household consump-
tion (a so-called minimum ‘lifeline’) would be free with the cost rising
progressively with use. Water for swimming pools, bottling soft drinks or
keeping golf courses green in desert climates would cost dearly.
Glocalisation 177
Woodward’s proposals also, and more controversially, call for trad-

able carbon emission permits, around which there is less civil society
consensus owing to the likelihood that this could lead to wealthier
countries simply buying their excess consumption/emission at the
longer-term expense of poorer ones. Woodward’s proposals address this
in part by calling for allocation of an equal carbon ration to each per-
son to be held, in part, by their governments. Companies would need
to purchase carbon permits from governments to carry out their busi-
ness, passing on the cost to consumers and thereby allowing market
‘supply/demand’ pricing to work for environmental ends. Governments
would also have another source of revenue for spending in pro-poor
development ways. Households would receive remaining allocations,
which poorer households under-consuming could sell to richer house-
holds over-consuming. This process would eventually balance out as
poorer households consumed more to the average, the above-average
consumption of richer households became too costly.
Globally, agreement on universal tariffs shared equally by exporters of
tropical products would stop the downward spiral in their price, benefit-
ing economically poorer countries even while reducing demand for
these products. Developing countries dependent on export of minerals
and fuels could organise collectively to create ‘bidding up’ rights to these
resources by transnational companies, rather than the present bilateral
‘bidding down’ that characterises such exchange. Such a ‘cartelisation’
worked for the Organisation of Oil-Exporting Countries (OPEC). It could
also work for those countries now exporting coltan, copper, phosphate
or any other global commodity. This would, of course, require ‘South-
South’ or regional economic agreements between low- and middle-
income countries; but such agreements are now on the rise. Examples
are the Southern African Development Cone, Mercosur (an economic
union agreement involving several South American countries) and the
Chiang Mai Initiative, under which several Asian countries will pool
their foreign currency holdings to create their own stabilisation fund
independent of the Western, high-income dominated IMF.
These ‘do-able’ ideas do not preclude a wholesale overhaul of global
governance. The system established in 1944, which predates climate
change and was agreed upon when most of today’s low-income coun-
tries were still colonies, does not and cannot meet the needs of the
twenty-first century. Woodward’s suggestions, along with others
described in this chapter, establish the goals and policy baseline for
what a renewed global governance system would need to achieve. How
we mobilise the public and political support necessary to create such
a system is another matter, although many of the ‘local’ health promo-

tion strategies described in earlier chapters are as relevant to global
transformation as they are to neighbourhood change.
What can health promoters do?
The ideas presented in chapters 4, 5, and 6 might also seem overwhelm-

ing to the majority of those working in health promotion. Health pro-
motion remains rooted in localities and continues to struggle to up its
ante to the national level, much less the global. Most health promoters
are engaged in programmes involving face-to-face encounters with citi-
zens, not in efforts to tip the minds of global policymakers. The question
remains: how can they more effectively ‘glocalise’ their work? While
some of the answers to this question have been embedded throughout
this book, we summarise a few below.
First, health promoters should recognise that this task is not simply
about their professional lives. It is also about their lives as citizens.
Actions here span several sectors:
1. Environmental: travel less, eat less carbon-intensive diets, consume

less, live more locally, prepare for more climate change/ecological
refugees
2. Economic: share the wealth – stand up for the virtues of fair taxation,
corporate regulation, local production/consumption cycles when-
ever possible, and national foreign policies that aim at increasing
global equity rather than mercantile competitiveness
3. Social: combat the potential for local racism as the planetary move-
ments of people increase (whether fuelled by their desire to partake
of the rich world’s opportunities increasingly on global offer, or for
political, economic or ecological necessity)
Second, these actions can extend to our professional lives. Do not stop
the local empowerment. Paul Farmer, a physician and international
social justice advocate working primarily in the poorest communities of
the poor nation of Haiti, points out that ‘genuine change’, by which he
means framing economic and social development around the principle
of health as a human right, ‘will be most often rooted in small commu-
nities of poor people’ (Farmer 2003). Much of the knowledge of global-
isation’s present pathologies and some of the means to correct them
gestated first in the popular struggles of poorer communities around
control over land, water, housing, income, health care, education and
Glocalisation 179
other basic rights. We saw in Chapters 3 and 6 how a national struggle

for access to essential medicines (the Treatment Action Campaign) pre-
cipitated significant changes in global public and private policies. It
continues to deepen: recent generosity on the part of many multina-
tional pharmaceutical companies in financing research into treatments
for ‘neglected diseases’ (diseases that affect the hundreds of millions of
people living in the tropics who cannot afford to pay for medicine) is as
much a response to their global shaming over the South African court
case as any moral enlightenment. What becomes important in all of our
localised work, then, is finding ways to link empowerment struggles in
one community with those in other localities around the world. The
global economic constraints affecting local empowerment are becoming
universally more similar, even if they are of differing intensities depend-
ing on the baseline wealth of a community. Recognising both the
opportunities and necessity to build global solidarity from the work of
local mobilisations, a number of civil society organisations are now
premised almost exclusively on what could be called a ‘glocalising’
approach to health promotion (see Box 7.2).
Third, we need to attend carefully to growing xenophobia and
racism. This is perhaps the most perfidious and difficult externality of
globalisation’s dislocations to combat. Analyses of the causes of
inequalities lend themselves to reasoned debate. Once these inequali-
ties become constructed as a function of race or ethnicity (as in, ‘these
migrants are taking my job’) they submerge to an irrational location
that is much harder to penetrate by those who seek fairness and more
easy to manipulate by those who seek power by the old rule of ‘divide
and conquer’. Robert Putnam, famous for popularising the concept of
‘social capital’, has recently written how societies experiencing growth
in their ethnic diversity show a decline in both ‘bonding’ (within
group) and ‘bridging’ (between group) forms of social capital. Stated
bluntly, trust between people declines (Bunting 2007). Importantly,
Putnam argues for historical context. Many countries have successfully
experienced large waves of migration and ethnic diversity in the past,
not without initial tensions and not with periods of extreme religiosity
on the part of new arrivals. Marketing tolerance and deliberately build-
ing links within and between émigré populations and native-born citi-
zens are the healthy prescriptions. Exaggerating or stereotyping
differences are not. In our experience, some of health promotion’s most
empowering local projects and trenchant health policy critiques in
recent decades have been diffusing tensions between ethno-cultural
groups by supporting those marginalised by their ethnicities while
Box 7.2 Glocalising health activism
The People’s Health Movement (PHM) is a global network of health

activists. As one example of its advocacy, the PHM launched a cam-
paign in 2006 to strengthen the right to health with a focus on
defending the right to health care. The campaign looks at what meas-
ures are needed to tackle human rights violations in the context of a
broader analysis of power and social inequalities. It seeks social trans-
formations indispensable to resolving such inequalities as they affect
health. As such, the campaign focusses on changing national and
global health sector reform policies that affect access to health care
by the poor, the disadvantaged and the marginalised. It also seeks to
put in place mechanisms to effectively redistribute resources. PHM
activists have documented violations of the right to health and
planned joint actions with claim holders (citizens) and duty bearers
(states) to stop these violations. Capacity building of PHM cadres and
partners in civil society, responsible for calling duty bearers to
account is seen as indispensable in this process of social mobilisation
and empowerment. PHM (as of November 2007) has also carried out
over 30 country assessments of the status of the right to health care
(www.phm.org). One of the key purposes of the PHM has been to
give a voice to those currently excluded from global forums, and to
diversify the views represented within them as a means of improving
the governance of global health.
The Association for the Taxation of Financial Transaction for the
Aid of Citizens (ATTAC) is another global advocacy group founded in
France to support the Tobin and Spahn taxes on currency transac-
tions. But there is another side to progressive global taxation, and that
is preventing capital from gaining further ‘rights’ in our globalised
economy. ATTAC, which now has branches in 40 countries, is cred-
ited by many with contributing to France’s decision to withdraw from
OECD talks on a proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment
(MAI), leading to the collapse of the talks (Waters 2004). The Organi-
sation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is a net-
work of the world’s originally 20, and now 30, wealthiest nations. It
had proposed an investment treaty that would have allowed foreign
private investors to move their money in and out of countries with-
out restriction; to invest in almost all economic, social and natural
resource sectors preventing nations from regulating foreign owner
(Continued)
Glocalisation 181
Box 7.2 (Continued)
ship for domestic development purposes; and to sue nations if future

government regulations led in any way to a loss in their potential
profits. The successful campaign against the MAI included local
mobilising efforts by advocacy groups in several other OECD coun-
tries, notably Canada. It marked the political birth of the global jus-
tice movement. While the MAI is now history, wealthy countries (the
EU, the USA) continue to push for a multilateral investment agree-
ment at the WTO in clear contradiction with the aims of the 1986
Declaration on the Right to Development (Ghosh 2005). Monitoring,
vigilance, local mobilisation and global advocacy: struggles for global
equity require that all four be unflagging.
building common cause across ethnic divides. This is locally empower-

ing work with global resonance.
Fourth, most of the globalising practices that negatively affect health
equity are products of individual nation’s decisions. Even the WTO is
simply a ‘club of nations’; problems in its governance – for example,
that business lobby groups are far more likely to be involved in formal
ministerial meetings than are public interest NGOs – are due to the will
of its (generally more powerful) member states. Reforming globalisa-
tion’s more toxic policies or rules cannot be separated from changing
the globalisation politics of national governments. To that end, health
promoters (at least some) can become more active through their profes-
sional organisations or other civil society groups to pressure their
national governments to adopt global policy positions that enhance,
rather than imperil, health equity. Some countries have begun already
to do that. Norway, for example, is mobilising international support to
increase and streamline funding to poorer countries to help them
meet the health-specific MDGs. It also is attempting to create greater
‘coherence’ in its foreign policy and in at least two ways. It is presently
withholding part of its contribution to the World Bank’s International
Development Association (which makes loans to low-income countries)
because the Bank’s conditionalities on such loans still constrain too
much the policy space of countries receiving such loans (Bretton Woods
Project 2008b). The Norwegian government elected in 2005 also stated
that its own trade negotiating position would ensure ‘that the WTO
rules [do] not deprive poor countries of the management right and
means that have been important in developing our own society into a
welfare society’ (Norwegian Labour Party 2005). This differs markedly

from the mercantilist negotiating positions of most other high-income
countries. Canada’s 2004 International Policy Review, for example, var-
iously claims that ‘much of the world’s population is essentially power-
less, either victims of stalled development or citizens of states too weak
to affect the global agenda’ (which acknowledges, albeit in patronising
tones, the global asymmetry in power and wealth); but that ‘Canada is
in a race with many countries . . . one we cannot afford to lose’ (which
undermines the previous claim by promoting a ‘beggar my neighbour’
approach to global trade and commerce). A study of Canadian policy-
leaders similarly found that their commitment for Canada to altruisti-
cally ‘do the right thing’ in terms of health, development and aid
coexisted in unresolved tension with its presumed need to retain a com-
petitive edge in the global marketplace (Nixon 2006).
Finally, if health promoters’ localising work exceeds their time-resources
to become more engaged in global health efforts, they can support
financially those campaigning civil society groups that continue to hold
states and multilateral institutions to health equitable account. This has
become a trickier endeavour in recent years, as ‘charitainment’ – the
celebrity led, feel good approach to ‘attend a free rock concert, buy a
T-shirt and wear a white wrist band’ to ‘make poverty history’ – is
reframing complex issues of power and politics into catchy media slo-
gans that fail to sustain protest momentum for the long haul of policy
change. It took over 25 years of gritty, evidence-backed campaigning
and raucous street protests by NGOs to finally (and only partly) obtain
some measure of debt cancellation in 2005 for the world’s poorest
countries. The role of celebrities in aligning with global political
causes should be cheered; but not when it begins to dull the analyses
and policy prescriptions that have finally gained some traction in gov-
ernment and multilateral forums only after years of hard effort and
local campaigning.
Revalorising the idea of empowerment: A closing caution
This book has made much of the concept of empowerment. What was
emancipating about the term arose first from popular struggles
(women’s, the poor, ethno-racial and sexual minorities) to exact legal
rights and entitlements from the state. Only later did it become an
abused marketing slogan or, as Moore (2001) calls it, ‘cheap talk’ used
by the World Bank and other multilateral organisations to sound polit-
ically stylish without changing their policy status quo. The ‘cheap’ part
Glocalisation 183
of the empowerment talk, in Moore’s estimate, is the elision it makes

with ‘community’. Since community empowerment has been another
theme running throughout this book, we want to distance ourselves
from the premise that empowerment is only, ever or best experienced at
that level. It is this mythology that Moore attacks in many multilateral
organisations’ embrace of the term. He argues that most experiences of
meaningful change in the social distribution of power have arisen when
groups mobilised translocally on the basis of systemic oppression: as
wage workers, women, tenants, small farmers, even as slum-dwellers.
Local empowerment cannot be separated from political forms of
empowerment at national and international levels.
At the same time, empowerment’s non-material base, the psychologi-
cal experience of feeling powerful, has gained increasing prominence as
an important health determinant. As inequalities in wealth and privilege
increase, as they are globally, the prospects of equitable empowerment,
whether material or non-material, diminish. The reason for emphasising
this is that, while the health inequities arising from inequalities have
both material (physical) and non-material (psychological) effects, both
outcomes arise from a fundamentally material inequality (manifest in
what Chapter 2 described as ‘power-over’). Empowerment cannot be
reduced only to a psychological experience (Chapter 2’s description of
‘power with’ or ‘power-from-within’). Health promotion actions to chal-
lenge relative powerlessness cannot be restricted to initiatives that bol-
ster peoples’ experiences of power, without also changing the unfair
capture of global wealth and a decreasing amount of natural resources by
elite groups. As the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social
Determinants of Health noted in its Interim Statement (2007):
We see empowerment operating along three interconnected dimen-

sions: material, psychosocial, and political. People need the basic
material requisites for a decent life, they need to have control over
their lives, and they need political voice and participation in decision-
making processes. Although individuals are at the heart of empower-
ment, achieving a better distribution of power requires collective social
action – the empowerment of nations, institutions, and communities.
(p. 10)
Empowerment, despite the semantic abuses it has suffered in recent

years, is an idea that still matters to health promotion. It begins with
communities identifying what they need to improve and sustain their
health. It progresses to the extent governments support, or can be made
to support, policies that provide communities with the resources they

need for local actions. It extends to broader public policies affecting the
distribution of resources and power nationally, a political enterprise
that rarely succeeds without the pressure exerted by translocal civil soci-
ety organisations or coalitions of local groups. It stretches, now, even
further, to recreating rules and systems of global governance that ensure
all people have the capabilities to ‘lead lives they have reason to value’
(Sen 1999).
Health promoters have roles to play at every level in this process. It
will not be easy, but our very survival, and not only our health, may
depend upon our willingness to do so.
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Index
accountability 74 anti-globalisation movement 66

addiction antiretroviral (ARV) drugs
social determinant of health 45 state obligations on 153–4
advocate Asia
health promotion 10 EPZs in 105
role of 30 Asian Health Forum 35
tensions in role of 14–15 Asian women
Africa depression and isolation among
EPZs in 105 35–6
HIV/AIDS 110–11 assessment 26–7
Age of Consent, The 167 Association for the Taxation of
Agreement on Agriculture (WTO) Financial Transaction for the
(1994) 145, 163 Aid of Citizens (ATTAC) 180
Agreement on Government autonomy
Procurement (WTO) characteristic of health promotion
(1996) 145 professionals 41
Agreement on Technical Barriers to avian flu 128
Trade (WTO) (1994) 145
Agreement on the Application of Bangkok Charter for Health
Sanitary and Phytosanitary Promotion 7, 124, 126
Measures (WTO) (1994) 145 Bangladesh
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects export clothing factories in
of Intellectual Property Rights 103–4
(WTO) (1994) 145, 151 Bauman, Zygmut 122
health effects of 148 behaviour modification 12
Agreement on Trade-Related Bello, Walden 165–7, 174
Investment Measures (WTO) beneficence
(1994) 145 characteristic of health promotion
aid 135–6 professionals 41
as redistributive obligations 139 Bernstein, Ed 35
Canadian approach to 182 bilateral investment agreements (BITs)
inadequacies 136–8 147
linked to stance on ‘war on terror’ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
133 135
Norwegian approach to 181–2 biofuel 164
untying 138–9 biology
Alcohol and Substance Abuse Preven- health and 50–1
tion (ASAP) Programme 35 biomedicine 17–19
Alma Ata Declaration on Primary bioterrorism 129
Health Care (1978) 20, 22–3, Birdsall, Nancy 122
128 breastfeeding 68
American Chamber of Commerce in Buchanan, D. 56
Shanghai 126 Buffett, Warren Edward 135
204
Index 205
Canada community
approach to aid 182 concept of 37–8
child poverty 15 community capacity
population health approach in 23 building 82–4
capital flight 112 community capacity building skills
limiting 172 41
‘carbon footprint’ 176 community developer
food 162–3 health promotion 10
Caribbean role of 29–30
EPZs in 105 tensions in role of 13–14
cartels 177 community development 2, 101
Casa Dona Juana 33 health projects 58
Centre for Global Development 122 community events 84
Chadwick, Sir Edwin [1800–90] 16 community health groups 58
charitable donations 135 community nutritionists 27
Chiang Mai Initiative 177 community organisations 59–61
Chicago School of Economics 113 community participation
child development local empowerment 98
health and 49 community-based programming 77
child labour 125 competencies
export clothing factories 104 definition of 38
child mortality health promotion 38, 40–3
MDG 131 compulsory labour 125
child poverty Confederation of British Industry 57
Canada 15 conservative governments 113
child-care facilities 84 consultation 91–2
China definition of 77
labour laws 125–6 opportunities for 74
pollution in 106 continuum model
civil society 11 local empowerment 53–7
classic liberalism 21 cooperation
climate change 108 local empowerment 100
colonisation coping skills
legacy of 163 health and 48–9
Commission on Macroeconomics and Cornea, Andrea Giovanni 123
Health (WHO) (2001) 116, cost-benefit analysis 87
133, 136 cost-recovery programmes 110
Commission on Social Determinants cotton farmers
of Health (WHO) (2005–8) 28, suicide among in India 143
123, 183 culture
commoditisation health and 49–50
health 141–2, 148–50 currency transactions
communication taxation of 180
effective 74–6
norms of 75–6 Daly, Sister Patricia 66, 68
communication interventions 75 debt crises 112–13
communication strategies 40–1 debt reduction 133
communicators debt servicing
lack of skills 75 developing nations 136–8
206 Index
debts Doha Development Round 107, 146

cancellation of 137 Durning, Alan Thein 56–7
decision-making
involvement in 74 early life
political 85 social determinant of health 45
stakeholders and 76 Easter Island 43
decision-making powers 66 ecology
decisions changing 43
implementing 93 economic exploitation 26
moving towards 92 economic growth
Deglobalisation 165–6 health improvements and 121–2
demand income inequalities and 118, 120
not matched by supply 75 liberalisation and 117–18
democracy poverty reduction and 118
global governance 159 economic insecurity 143
promotion of by interest groups 60 economic policy
WTO and 171 goals of 176
depression economic theory 21
among Asian women 35–6 economy
design relocalising 159, 162, 164–5
local empowerment 95 education
developing nations health status and 47
aid to 133, 135–8 educator
debt servicing 136–8 health promotion 9
untying aid to 138–9 role of 29
development tensions in role of 11–12
definition of 155 employment
health as 130, 132–3, 135–9 health and 47
devolution 81 increase in informal nature of 160
Diamond, Jared Mason 43 nature of 160
differential consequences empowering assessment 27–8
health and 51 empowerment 7–9
differential exposure domains of 30–2
health and 51 health and 8–9
differential vulnerability health promotion 182–4
health and 51 local 16, 53–72
digital technologies 174 challenges to 73–102
direct action 93 design 95
towards empowerment 67 evaluating 94–7, 101–2
direct democracy 85 implementation 95
discussion papers measurable indicators of 95–6
issue of 91 measuring 96–7
discussions outcomes 95–6
local empowerment 99 visual representation of 97, 101
disease environment
prevention of 140–1 globalisation and 174–6, 178–82
disease-based programmes 133 environmental sustainability
disempowerment 35 MDG 131
displaced workers 143 epidemiology 18
Index 207
epistemic communities 113 free trade

equity 7–9 proposals to replace with fair trade
applied to health 8 167
‘ethical’ poverty line 132, 157 Freire, Paulo [1921–97] 35, 61
ethics Friedman, Milton [1912–2006]
health promotion 38, 40–3 113
ethnic diversity 179
ethnicity G7 countries 113
health and 49–50 gender
evaluation health and 50
key characteristics of 94–5 gender equality
local empowerment 94–7, 101–2 MDG 131
Evans, Peter B. 116 General Agreement on Tariffs and
export clothing factories Trade (GATT) (1994) 145
Bangladesh 103–4 WTO successor to 144
export processing zones (EPZs) General Agreement on Trade in
104–5 Services (WTO) (1994) 145
women favoured for employment effects on health of 148, 150
in 105 genetic endowment
exports health and 50–1
food 162–3 geographic dimensions
Eyerman, Ron 19 community 37–8
George, Susan 78
fair trade germ theory 17
proposals to replace free trade with Global Alliance for Improved
167 Nutrition (GAIN) 134
Farmer, Paul 178 Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative
financial crises 107 (GAVI) 134
financial flows 107 global debt crisis (1980s) 109
financial market liberalisation 105, Global economy
110 democratising 166–8
fiscal monetarism 112 Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Focus on the Global South 165 Tuberculosis and Malaria
food (GFATM) 134, 141
‘carbon footprint’ of 162–3 global governance 170–2
food imports 162–3 democratising 159
food production limits of 173–4
local 3 global health
food shortages 164 international health distinguished
forced labour 125 108
foreign exchange 173 global health ethic
foreign investment need for 155
EPZs 105 global health interventions
foreign reserves security and 155
accumulating 138 global public goods 155
Framework Convention on Tobacco global public-private partnerships
Control (FCTC) 141–2, 170 (GPPPs) 134–5
frameworks global taxation
policy process 86–7 proposals for 156
208 Index
globalisation 3, 174–9, 181–2 relationship with globalisation

background to 111–12 127–58
explanation of 106–8 social determinants of 23, 25–52
health and 116–18, 120–6 social justice and 8
health equity and 181–2 WHO definition of 7
HIV/AIDS and 110–11 Health Action Zones 62–3
human rights and 155–6 health activism 68–72, 153–4
inequity in 122–3 ‘glocalising’ 180–1
relationship with health 127–58 health advocacy
Globalisation Knowledge Network role of media 90–1
123, 168, 175–6 health behaviourism 17–19
‘glocalisation’ 3, 159–84 health care
GOBI formula 22 based on narrowly prescribed cost-
graphing benefit analyses 8
local empowerment 101 costs of 12
groups privatisation of 148
criteria for selecting to organise or health coalitions 77
support 39–40 health equity
globalisation and 181–2
Habermas, Jürgen 75 health improvements
Haiti economic growth and 121–2
HIV/AIDS 134 Health of Towns Association 16
Hart, Julian Tudor 12–13 health policy
Hayek, Friedrich August [1899–1992] influencing 84–9
113 identifying issues 88–9
hazards policy analysis 89, 91
exposure to 51 health promotion 3
health 7–9 approaches to 1–2
as commodity 141–2 ascendancy of 19–20
as development 130, 132–3, competencies 38, 40–3
135–9 decline of 20–3
as fundamental human right 128 empowerment 182–4
as global public good 139–41 ethics 38, 40–3
as human right 150–2, 154 focus of 6–7
as security 127–9 foundational theory of 42
effect of General Agreement on funding 23
Trade in Services on 148, 150 globalising work of 124–6
effect of trade treaties on 143–50 historical context 15–17
effect of TRIPS on 148 information provision on 81
empowerment and 8–9 link between global and local
equity applied to 8 103–26
funding 133 local empowerment 2
global responsibility 151–2, 154 meaning of 6
globalisation and 108, 116–18, political action and 65–8
120–6, 174–9, 181–2 practice of 25–52
investment in 120–1 programming 36–7, 75
non-medical determinants of 23 recent developments 23–4
perception of 8 redistribution and 156–8
relationship of power with 28–9 relocalising economy and 165
Index 209
social action and 65–8 income inequalities

tensions in 10–11 economic growth and 118, 120
Victorian 16 indebted countries
work of NGOs 108 sanctions against 112
health promoters India
role of 9–10, 178–82 health promotion partnership in 61
health sector reform medical tourism 149
World Bank report on 7–8 Self-Employed Women’s Association
health status (SEWA) 161–2
education and 47 suicide among cotton farmers 143
healthy lifestyle 18 work of People’s Health Movement
heath services 50 in 152
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries indirect action
(HIPCs) 138 towards empowerment 67
hegemony 26–7 inequality
Herceptin creation of 11
lack of access to 68–9 inequity
Hines, Colin 164, 166–7 globalisation and 123–4
HIV/AIDS 128, 133, 141, 153 Infant Baby Formula Action Network
globalisation and 110–11 (IBFAN) 68
MDG 131 infant formula manufacturers 68
pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa 109 infection
treatment 70–2 fear of 129
home-produced food inflation 110, 112
increased demand for 170 information
honesty clarity of 74
characteristic of health promotion meetings and 79
professionals 41 provision of 81
Hong Kong interest groups
economic growth in 116 promotion of democracy by 60
human rights 129 interest rates
globalisation and 155–6 rise in 112
health as 128, 150–2, 154 International Clearing Union (ICU)
human security 130 proposals for establishing 167
Human Services Integration Forum International Code of Marketing of
(HSIF) 62 Breast-milk Substitutes 68
Hunt, Paul 151 International Conference on Health
hypothecation Promotion (1992) 3
public health services 173 International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (1966) 30
illiteracy 110 International Covenant on Economic,
implementation Social and Cultural Rights (UN)
decisions 93 (1966) 150–1, 153
local empowerment 95 International Finance Corporation
implicit conditionality 115 115
imports international financial institutions
food 162–3 113
income international health
social determinant of health 44 global health distinguished 108
210 Index
international health partnership life expectancy 122–3, 132

agreements 134 per capita income and 121
International Health Regulations Lindquist, E.A. 86
revision of 141 links to others
International Labour Organisation local empowerment 99
(ILO) 105, 122, 125 loans
International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressure on World Bank and IMF
2, 109, 113–15, 136, 170–1, 177 to remove conditions on 138
pressure on to remove conditions local authorities
on loans 138 improving service delivery 80
international trade 107 local concerns
intersectoral action on health deter- engaging with people to address
minants 63–5 73–80
inverse care law 12–13 local empowerment 53–72
involvement challenges to 73–102
health coalitions 77 design 95
isolation evaluating 94–7, 101–2
among Asian women 35–6 health promotion 2
implementation 95
Jamison, Andrew 19 measurable indicators of 95–6
job losses measuring 96–7
due to outsourcing 143 outcomes 95–6
judgemental assessment 26–7 visual representation of 97, 101
justice local health boards 16
characteristic of health promotion local involvement
professionals 41 road maintenance 82
local leadership
knowledge local empowerment 98
gap between practice and 74–5 local partnerships
building 81
Labonté, R. 53–4, 56 local services
labour laws improving delivery of 80
China 125–6 Localization: A Global Manifesto 164
labour rights
violation of 160 McKnight, John 26
lamb McNamara, Robert Strange 112
export from New Zealand 163 ‘make poverty history’ movement
Latin American 136
EPZs in 105 malaria 141
Laverack, G. 41 MDG 131
leadership Malaysia
empowerment domain 31–3 economic growth in 116
Leading Group on Solidarity Levies to market
Fund Development 173 as wealth generator 11
lending market integration 143–4
indiscrete 112 Marmot, Sir Michael Gideon 28–9,
liberalisation 168
economic growth and 117–18 maternal health
trade in goods and services 143–4 MDG 131
Index 211
measurable indicators North American Free Trade

local empowerment 95–6 Agreement (NAFTA) 107, 147
measurement Norway
local empowerment 96–7 approach to aid 181–2
media Nussbaum, Martha 42
role in health advocacy 90, 92 nutrition 1–2
media stunts 93 social determinant of health 45
medical profession 84
medical tourism 149 Offe, Claus 11
medicine(s) Office of the High Commissioner for
access to 148, 179 Human Rights 30
meetings 78–9 offshore tax havens 157
Mercosur 107, 177 oil crises 111–12
microrenewable technologies 176 oil exports 138
Milanovic, Branko 123 Oldham Health Authority 36
Mill, John Stuart [1806–23] 21 Organisation for Economic Co-
Millennium Development Goals operation and Development
(MDGs) 119, 130–3, 136, 169 (OECD) 113, 180
Monbiot, George Joshua Richard Organisation of Oil Exporting
166–7, 170 Countries (OPEC) 177
monitoring 11–12 organisational structures
policy 93–4 empowerment domain 31, 33–4
multilateral agreement on investment local empowerment 98
180–1 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion
collapse of talks to create 147 (1986) 6–7, 22–3, 43–4, 62,
multinational companies 108, 157, 151
177 impact of 19–20
outcomes
National Health Service (NHS) 13, local empowerment 95–6
69 outside agents
National Institute of Health and role of 31
Clinical Excellence (NICE) 69 outsourcing 160
national security 128–30 job losses due to 143
natural resources
taxes on consumption of 176 Pan-American Health Organisation 3
needs assessment 79–80 participation
‘neglected’ diseases 129, 179 empowerment domain 31–2
neoliberalism 21–2 opportunities for 76–9
New Zealand passive 85–6
export of lamb 163 studies of 85
Noël, Alain 173 partnership development
non-governmental organisations health promotion 10
(NGOs) 61–2, 168–9 role of 30
health promotion work of 108 tensions in 14
non-maleficence partnerships 61–5
characteristic of health promotion People’s Health Movement (PHM)
professionals 41 151–2, 180
non-spatial dimensions per capita income
characteristic of community 37 life expectancy and 121
212 Index
personal action 57 private health care 115

personal health practices private health insurance 141
health and 48–9 privatisation 110
pharmaceutical companies problem assessment
finance of research by 179 empowerment domain 31, 34
pharmaceutical industry 84 problem assessment capacities
Philippines local empowerment 98
medical tourism 149 programme design 40
physical environment programme management 31
health and 48 local empowerment 100
Pogge, T. 155–6 protectionism 144
policy protests 93
influencing 41 public health 3, 13, 128, 133
policy analysis 89, 91 historical context 16–17
policy evaluation 93–4 Public Health Act (1848) 16–17
policy making public health services
communities’ influence on 85 hypothecation for 173
policy process public sector wages
models of 86–7 cuts in 110
policy solutions public services
developing 85 improving delivery of 80
political action public spending
health promotion and 65–8 decrease in 110
political paradigm publicity 93
policy process 86–7 publicity campaigns 92
pollution purchasing power parities (PPP) 119
China 106 purposive rationality 75
population health approach 23 Putnam, Robert David 179
population health determinants 44
poverty rationalist paradigm
globalisation and 174–9, 181–2 policy process 86–7
measuring 119 rationality
poverty eradication 132 types of 75
MDG 131 redistribution
poverty reduction health promotion and 156–8
economic growth and 118 redistribution of power 81
World Bank’s measure of 132 redistributive developmentalism 116
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers redistributive obligations
(PRSPs) 115 aid as 139
power referenda 85
definition of 25–6 Regional Intersectoral Committees
relationship of health with 28–9 (RICS) 62
preventive medicine 140–1 relationships
primary commodities developing 35–6
fall in prices of 112 research
primary education financed by pharmaceutical
MDG 131 companies 179
private banks 113 research skills 41
Index 213
resource broker social clauses

health promotion 10 proposed for trade agreements 169
role of 29 social determinants of health (SDH)
tensions in role of 12–13 23, 25–52
resource mobilisation social environment
empowerment domain 31, 34–5 health and 48
local empowerment 99 social exclusion
restraining trade 168–70 social determinant of health 45
risks social gradient
exposure to 51 social determinant of health 45
road maintenance social insurance 114
local involvement in 82 social interactions
Rougham, John 101 characteristic of community 37
social justice 7–9
Sachs, Jeffrey David 116, 136 health and 8
Saskatchewan social status
health promotion partnership in 62 social determinant of health 44
school drop-out rates 110 social stratification
Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich health and 51–2
[1911–77] 57 social support
security social determinant of health 45
global health interventions and social support networks 46–7
155 Solomon Islands
health as 127–9 village development in 101
Seedhouse, David 42 South Africa
Selective Primary Health Care (SPHC) HIV in 70–2
22–3 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)
Self-Employed Women’s Association 68, 70–1
(SEWA) 161–2 South Korea
self-help groups 58 economic growth in 116
self-interest 57 medical tourism 149
Sen, Amartya Kumar 29, 42, 116 Southern African Development Cone
severe acute respiratory syndrome 177
(SARS) 128 Soviet Union
shared needs collapse of 128
characteristic of community 37 Spahn, Paul-Bernd 173
shareholder activism 66–7 Spahn tax 173
Singapore spatial dimension
economic growth in 116 characteristic of community 37
medical tourism 149 spider web configuration 101
skills stakeholders
facilitating 41 definition of 76
small groups 58–9 state
Smith, Adam [1723–90] 21, 57 theories of 10–11
Snow, John [1813–58] 17 Stiglitz, Joseph Eugene 114
social action strategic rationality 75
health promotion and 65–8 stress
social capital 179 social determinant of health 45
214 Index
sub-Saharan Africa transport

HIV/AIDS 109, 134 provision of 84
suicide social determinant of health 45
among cotton farmers in India 143 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)
supply 68, 70–1, 153, 179
demand not matched by 75 Tri-State Coalition for Responsible
Szreter, Simon 129 Investment 66–7
Truman, David Bicknell [1913–2003]
Taiwan 60
economic growth in 116 tuberculosis 141
Tanzanian Essential Health
Interventions Project (TEHIP) unemployment
22 social determinant of health 45
tax benefits UNITAID (International Drug
EPZs 105 Purchasing Facility) 157
Tax Justice Network 157 United Nations 169, 172
taxation 120 proposals for democratising 167
consumption of natural resources United Nations Environmental
176 Programme 163
consumption rather than income United Nations Millennium Project
114 136
currency transactions 180 Universal Declaration on Human
technical intervention 135–6 Rights (UN) (1948) 128
Thailand universal tariffs 177
economic growth in 116
medical tourism 149 Vancouver Agreement 64
tiger economies 116 Virchow, Rudolf Ludwig Karl
tobacco industry 84 [1821–1902] 17
Tobin, James [1918–2002] 172 visual representation
Tobin tax 172–3 local empowerment 97, 101
tokenism Voluntary Health Association of India
threat of 77 (VHAI) 61
toy factories volunteer time 79
China 104–5 vulnerable peoples
tradable carbon emission permits needs of 130
177
trade agreements 107, 168 wages
proposed social clauses in 169 in EPZs 105
trade in goods and services Wal-Mart Stores Inc 160
liberalisation 143–4 Wallerstein, Nina 35
trade liberalisation 105, 110 ‘war on terror’
trade restraint 168–70 aid linked to stance on 133
trade treaties Watchworld Institute 57
effect on health 142–50 water 176
trade unions 126, 160 wheel configuration 101
forbidden in EPZs 105 women
training 41 employment of in EPZs 105
transnational companies see multina- MDG 131
tional companies Woodward, David 175–7
Index 215
work World Health Organization (WHO)

social determinant of health 45 6, 28, 68, 135, 172
working conditions 125 constitution of 127–8
export clothing factories 103–4 definition of health 7
health and 47 World Intellectual Property
in EPZs 105 Organisation (WIPO) 168
workplace inequalities 143 World Representative Parliament
World Bank 2, 7–8, 109, 113–15, (WRP) 170
136, 170 proposals for 167
measures of poverty reduction 132 World Trade Organisation (WTO)
pressure on to remove conditions 16, 66, 107, 143–6, 168
on loans 138 democracy and 171
World Commission on the Social role of 144–6
Dimensions of Globalization Wright, Ronald 43
(WCSDG) 122
World Economic Forum 66 Zambia
World Health Assembly (1981) 68 HIV in 109
World Health Assembly (1997) 20 manufacturing base 110

Ronald Labonté, Glenn Laverack (Auth.) - Health Promotion in Action - From Local To Global Empowerment-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2008)

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Health Promotion in Action

Also by Glenn Laverack

Also by Ronald Labonté

Introduction: Localising the Global 1

1 Health Promotion: Concepts and Context 6

2 Health Promotion Practice: Power, Empowerment and the

3 Pathways to Local Empowerment 53

4 Working to Build Empowerment: The Local Challenge 73

5 Pathways from the Local to the Global 103

6 Working to Build Empowerment: The Global Challenge 127

7 Glocalisation: Health Promotion’s Next Grand Challenge? 159

Democratising the global economy 166

3.1 The local empowerment continuum 55

1.1 Health education or health promotion? 18

2.1 Judgemental assessment 26

theories of behaviour change. The social theories woven through this

it will recommend. This movement is already gaining momentum

The average plate of food eaten in western industrial

In a Canadian city, a ghettoising enclave of high-rise apartments holds

Chapter 2, is a recurring theme in human life, from its expression in

An overview of the book

Chapter 1. Health promotion: Concepts and context

Chapter 2. Health promotion practice: Power, empowerment and

Chapter 3. Pathways to local empowerment

Chapter 4. Working to build empowerment: The local challenge

Chapter 5. Pathways from the local to the global

Chapter 6. Working to build empowerment: The global challenge

Chapter 7. Glocalisation: Health promotion’s next grand

All diseases have two causes: one pathological, the

The meaning of health promotion remains dynamically ambiguous. In

1. Develop personal skills (whether traditional forms of lifestyle health

2. Create supportive environments (from the esteem-building support

Health, equity (social justice) and empowerment

which championed a selective approach to health care based on narrowly

Health promotion roles

Health promotion has struggled to define itself as a discipline or profes-

1. Educator/watchdog: A combination of increasing public awareness of

2. Resource broker: Making internal resources (personnel, finances, mate-

Health promotion tensions

Each of the above-mentioned roles is also riddled with tensions. This

the arena of un-coerced collective action around shared interests, pur-

Markets, and the relationships they create, are inherently ‘disequalising’,

behavioural risk factors. Rather than change social structures, a risky

to afford healthier foods. They might even participate in networks deal-

Setting the historical context

The concept of local empowerment as a means to improve health dates

Public Health Act through British parliament, Rudolf Virchow, a pas-

From biomedicine to health behaviourism

The germ theory eventually triumphed over competing explanatory

Box 1.1 Health education or health promotion?

to lessen taxation and liberalise the economy, which in turn fuelled

to focus on individuals in ways that became victim-blaming (Brown &

Health promotion on the ascendancy

The maturing of many of these progressive movements during the 1960s

Health promotion in decline

in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British liberal theorists such as

instances of SPHC rested increasingly with foreign consultants with

The new millennium

Practice fields and their discursive constructions are dynamic; in popu-