Glocalisation: Health Promotion’s Next Grand Challenge?

Abstract

This final chapter discusses competing ideas about how to improve health equity at both a local and global scale. It begins by revisiting the story of the two women factory workers in Bangladesh and Pakistan in Chapter 5, and how individual choices by those of us in the rich world are necessary, but insufficient local, strategies. It then discusses three approaches to empowering the local, globally: relocalising the economy, democratising global governance, and overhauling the very bases of economic practices. It concludes with some thoughts on what this means for health promoters committed to an empowering practice.

Certain things cannot be achieved, but this is not a reason to give up seeking them.

Mário Quintana, Brazilian poet.

(Becker et al. 2007)

[T]oday no place is constituted wholly by local or global factors. At the same time glocal spaces … have tremendous potential as a base for new and transformative politics and identities.

(Harcourt & Escobar 2002)