Citation

Kickbusch I. Health Promot. Int. 2015; 30(2): 197-200.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/heapro/dav025

PMID

25887668

Abstract

When the Ottawa Charter in 1986 had called on health promoters ‘to advocate for a clear political commitment to health and equity in all sectors’, foreign policy was not on the agenda. This changed as health promotion began to concern itself with the impact of globalization on health. Indeed, the recommendations from the 2nd international health promotion conference with a focus on ‘healthy public policy’ in Adelaide 1988 already stated: ‘in view of the large health gaps between countries, which this conference has examined, the developed countries have an obligation to ensure that their own policies have a positive health impact on developing nations. The conference recommends that all countries develop healthy public policies that explicitly address this issue’. That is a political agenda.

Twenty years later, a group of seven foreign ministers from around the world—Brazil, France, Indonesia, Norway, Senegal, South Africa and Thailand—declared global health a goal of foreign policy: ‘We believe that health is one of the most important, yet still broadly neglected, long-term foreign policy issues of our time. ...We believe that health as a foreign policy issue needs a stronger strategic focus on the international agenda. We have therefore agreed to make impact on health a point of departure and a defining lens that each of our countries will use to examine key elements of foreign policy and development strategies, and to engage in a dialogue on how to deal with policy options from this perspective’ (Oslo Ministerial Declaration, 2007).

On the most part the responses of global health advocates to this initiative have been positive—after all the explicit goal of the new public health is to have health high on the agenda of policy makers, to integrate health into as many policy arenas as possible and to move it from ‘low’ to ‘high’ …

Language: en