(Re)considering Discourses of Risk and Responsibility Through the Lens of Healthism: Interpreting the International Response to a Global Health Strategy for Noncommunicable Diseases

Public health crises such as the global epidemic of so-called 'lifestyle diseases' are often framed as the failure of individuals to make the right health-related choices or to take responsibility for managing their bodies in ways that promote the health of present and future selves. Through his early writings on healthism, Robert Crawford was one amongst a number of scholars who documented the emergence of neoliberal logics of self-care in response to these perceived failings. Although these debates are well covered in the critical literature, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the central tenets of healthism were and are received as ideology travels from place to place. This paper seeks to address this lacuna through a detailed analysis of the discourse surrounding the World Health Organization's 'Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health'. Chosen for its framing of lifestyle diseases as a global public health problem whose causes are rooted in the spread of the 'western lifestyle', the paper argues that a focus on the strategy and the international response to it is revealing for what it tells us about what happens when ideas and theories travel.