TY - JOUR

T1 - Local enactments of national health promotion policies

T2 - A Danish case

AU - Wimmelmann, Camilla Lawaetz

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - Governments of welfare states are firmly committed to public health, resulting in a substantial number of public health policies. Given the multi-level structure of most welfare systems, the influence of a public health policy is related to its ability to spread geographically and move across organisational levels. Visiting, observing and interviewing 15 policy workers from 10 municipalities during a two-year period, this study investigated what happened to a Danish national health promotion policy as it was put into practice and managed in the Danish municipalities. The analysis reveals that the policy was practiced in at least five different ways: as an ideal, a cookbook, a tangible artefact, a creative deconstruction and a mapping. The various practices each enacted a different version of this policy, and some of these enactments brought unintended but valuable effects. Without recognising the concrete enactments and their locally experienced effects, our understanding of national public health policies risks becoming detached from praxis and unproductive. Public health policy-makers must pay methodological and analytical attention to the policies' multimodality and their concrete locally experienced effects.

AB - Governments of welfare states are firmly committed to public health, resulting in a substantial number of public health policies. Given the multi-level structure of most welfare systems, the influence of a public health policy is related to its ability to spread geographically and move across organisational levels. Visiting, observing and interviewing 15 policy workers from 10 municipalities during a two-year period, this study investigated what happened to a Danish national health promotion policy as it was put into practice and managed in the Danish municipalities. The analysis reveals that the policy was practiced in at least five different ways: as an ideal, a cookbook, a tangible artefact, a creative deconstruction and a mapping. The various practices each enacted a different version of this policy, and some of these enactments brought unintended but valuable effects. Without recognising the concrete enactments and their locally experienced effects, our understanding of national public health policies risks becoming detached from praxis and unproductive. Public health policy-makers must pay methodological and analytical attention to the policies' multimodality and their concrete locally experienced effects.

KW - Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences

KW - Health Policy

KW - Implementation

KW - Enactments

KW - Policy workers

KW - Health promotion

KW - Guidelines

KW - Translation

KW - Local

U2 - 10.1002/hpm.2638

DO - 10.1002/hpm.2638

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 30198591

VL - 34

SP - e219-e229

JO - International Journal of Health Planning and Management

JF - International Journal of Health Planning and Management

SN - 0749-6753

IS - 1

ER -