by Robert Ralston, Charlotte Godziewski and Lauren Carters-White

How can obesity policy move away from individual-centred blaming or nudging and meaningfully address the political-economic root causes of poor diets? For many health inequalities researchers, policy instruments that regulate industry are seen as a promising way to target those root causes. More than a simple tweak, such policy instruments are implicitly expected to finally move public health policy away from a focus on individual responsibility characteristic of neoliberal governance. But is a change in policy instrument – even a substantive one – capable of sparking change in the underlying policy paradigm? Does proposing structure-targeting instruments (eg. industry regulation) necessarily mean that policymakers now think differently about the policy issue? This is the puzzle we explore in our article recently published in Policy & Politics entitled The many meanings of policy instruments: exploring individual and structural determinants in obesity policy. Our research focuses on the case of the UK’s 2020 Tackling Obesity Strategy. This strategy has been welcomed precisely because it proposes ‘harder’ regulation of commercial actors. While this may sound promising to many, we argue that the Tackling Obesity Strategy unfortunately lacks the radical change of past strategies.

Continue reading →