P44- Puzzling Publics in 21st Century Public Health
PANEL Organizers :
• Mah Catherine (catherine.mah@mun.ca), Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University (Canada), Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto (Canada)
• Bekker Marleen (marleen@emls.nl), Dep. Public Administration and Political Science at Radboud University (Netherlands), Maastricht University, dep. Health Services Research (Netherlands)
SUMMARY
Public health is a policy arena that has carved out a unique definition of what constitutes a public problem over the 20th century, with an associated set of relationships between state, market, experts, and citizens. The origins of public health were highly local, with policies emerging directly from problems and practices in the field. The rise of the welfare state has been characterized by an ongoing specialization and technocratization of health functions, represented in a highly professionalized civil service and practitioner infrastructure to deal with public health issues. Currently, public health actors have been motivated to coordinate intersectoral and globalized forms of policymaking on pressing population health issues, with communicable diseases alongside emergent priorities and framed priorities (e.g., noncommunicable diseases, environmental influences on health, social and spatial inequities, aging populations). We propose a panel session based on 3-4 empirical papers to analyze the publics and politics of public health for the 21st century. We invite papers to address what we see as the related puzzles of: 1) what's public for health authorities and practitioners who are increasingly divorced from the political, as well as acting at a distance from citizens in policy processes; 2) negotiating competing ?isms' in public health; 3) public sector retrenchment and the implications for exemplary practice in promoting health; and 4) citizen engagement in public health policy deliberation in a networked governance context. We wish to draw the papers together into an interactive discussion in which we apply an international comparative lens -at least between Canada and the Netherlands- to identify trends of convergence or divergence, as well as case- or country-specific features that may explain differences in policy trajectories. Analyses of what makes public health different from environmental policies or other issue areas with which it intersects are also welcome.
KEY WORDS
Problem definition, practice, public health, networked governance, intersectoral action, comparative policy
ROOM
Faculty E2.13
SESSION 1 : 9/07/15 : 09:00-10:30
Chairs:
Catherine Mah (catherine.mah@mun.ca), Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University (Canada), Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto (Canada)
Marleen Bekker, (marleen@emls.nl), Dep. Public Administration and Political Science at Radboud University (RU), Maastricht University, dep. Health Services Research (UM-HSR)
• Public health policy practices and the issue of food advertising to children
Catherine Mah, (catherine.mah@mun.ca), Division of Community Health and Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University (Canada), Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto (Canada)
• Representing Fat
Boswell John, j.c.boswell@soton.ac.uk, University of Southampton -
• Constructing protected spaces for engaging the more marginalized in health research
Maarten Kok, maartenokok@hotmail.com, VU University and Desmond & Leah Tutu Heritage Foundation (Netherlands)
• Experimentalist public health governance : engaging new publics of health ?
Marleen Bekker (marleen@emls.nl), Dep. Public Administration and Political Science at Radboud University (RU), Maastricht University, dep. Health Services Research (UM-HSR), Netherlands
• The introduction of the Child Index in Dutch child welfare. Where is the public ?
Inge Lecluijze (I.Lecluijze@maastrichtuniversity.nl), Maastricht University (NL)
