Bridging conceptual “silos”: bringing together health promotion and sustainability governance for practitioners at the landscape scale

Abstract

Environmental health issues are examples of “wicked problems” that require cross-sectoral collaboration at the community level, yet health practitioners and environmental stakeholders find it challenging to see how and why they could be working together. Supportive organisations have been identified as the most vital enabler for individual professionals to participate actively in cross-sectoral initiatives. Ability to justify inter-professional cooperation makes it easier for practitioners to gain the necessary approvals within their institutional mandates. This paper introduces a new conceptual framework that bridges health promotion and sustainability governance to facilitate practical cross-sectoral collaboration that targets complex health-related environmental and social-ecological challenges. The proposed framework integrates six concrete overlapping themes linking health promotion and sustainability governance. The framework also highlights examples of areas where the fields could benefit from one another. Moreover, children's environmental health is proposed as a desirable overall outcome and an attractive venue for potential collaboration, because of its critical role in the public health and well-being of future generations. As a determinant of adult health, children's environmental health emphasises the vital interdependencies between health and the environment.

Keywords:

• sustainability governance
• health promotion
• bridging
• children's environmental health
• cross-sectoral collaboration
• sustainable development

Acknowledgements

This paper has been in progress and through several revisions for the past four years. Therefore I want to sincerely thank Robert Gibson, Neil Arya, John Garcia, and Marja-Leena Katila for their continued support and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The conclusions, arguments, and interpretations expressed in the document, as well as any remaining mistakes and inaccuracies are, however, all mine. I also want to thank the reviewers for their excellent feedback, which significantly improved the paper.

Notes

1 ‘Stable’ ecosystem was the term used in 1986. The term used in more recent literature usually refers to a ‘healthy’ ecosystem (e.g. Cole et al. 1999).