Mapping the future of health promotion

Abstract

Abstract The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was launched in 1986, and ten global conferences later its key calls to action have never been more poignant. To see health as a resource for everyday life in settings where people live, love, work and play, and recognizing equity and the social determinants of health as core to the success of healthy societies remains important. In the nearly 35 years since the Charter was published, we have seen a proliferation of health promotion research with ever greater insights in what drive the health and well-being of populations. Yet, at the same time we also witness a strong tendency to ground health (care) policy in biomedical and clinical evidence alone, and attribute health potential to lifestyle alone, rather than adopting a systems and social perspective of where health is created, grown, and celebrated. The causes for these diverging perspectives are complex, and are grounded in complexity. Humans and their socio-political systems, including the educational and political machines, tend to suffer from what the political scientist Charles Lindblom reputedly identified as the “Big Problem, Small Brain vs Small Problem Big Brain” phenomenon: researchers and intellectual are really good at pouring great volumes of thought and creative power into studying clearly defined issues, whereas politicians and bureaucrats face enormous problems and can get their heads around the multi-faceted solutions that need to be put in place. So - how do we make the complex palatable to the small brain? In this case - how can higher education systems be turned around to truly address the challenges of our and our children's time? The solution partially lies in the deployment of multiple network analyses of key stakeholders and the language they use to construct future realities: unless we have a clear map of the present and a much wider terrain before us to enter we will forever find it hard to navigate in the environmental and conflict dimension.