RHP&EO is the electronic journal of the International
Union for Health Promotion and Education
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Bangkok Charter: criticizing but backing WHO Maurice B. Mittelmark, Professor, University of Bergen and President, IUHPE
Mittlemark, Maurice B., Bangkok Charter: criticizing but backing WHO, Reviews of Health Promotion and Education Online, 2005. URL:22/index.htm. The focus on the wording of the Bangkok Charter, while important, has tended to obscure what I feel are other important issues. As I stated in my previous contribution to this discussion, the test of the Bangkok Charter will be a test of time. Will it excite debate in 20 years? I hope so. Will that in any way diminish the significance of the Ottawa Charter? I think not. However, that there will be a Bangkok Charter at all IS significant. Immediately after the Mexico City conference in the series started in Ottawa, it seemed sure that Mexico City would the last in the series. WHO leadership in Geneva at that time told me there were no plans for continuing, and that upset me. Without question, the WHO health promotion conference series has pumped air into the health promotion balloon at regular and needed intervals. IUHPE conferences do so, too, but in a different way. At the professionals' conferences, there are many points of activity that energise virtually all who attend -- and the numbers are in the thousands and growing. WHO conferences, with attendance by invitation and with relatively few participants, serve a different function. These WHO 'happenings', including their Charters, Declarations and other pronouncements, provide advocacy opportunities that are priceless. For example, after Mexico, the Norwegian government launched an important in-country review of, and discussion about, the state of its health promotion efforts. That would hardly have happened without Mexico City. Today, the WHO Director General and senior staff are emphasising health promotion again by holding the Bangkok conference. In this, they need and deserve our support and encouragement. Many of us are helping them with the Bangkok conference, even as we exercise our right to criticise aspects we are uncomfortable with (that Bangkok intends to adopt a 'Charter' seems the main point of contention; issues of wording are mostly being worked out, I think). I have been ambling along toward my central point, and it is this: WHO in Geneva has far too few resources to accomplish all that its stakeholders, constituents and critics demand. As politics is the sweet science of deciding how too-scarce resources should be distributed, decisions about how much emphasis health promotion will receive in Geneva are political decisions -- influenced by other factors, but political decisions at the core. We in health promotion need to do all we can to influence those decisions. Grumbling about various inadequacies to one another and adopting a confrontive style with WHO will get us nowhere. Only advocacy -- by us -- at the State level has a chance of helping. In our countries, we need to advocate for health promotion with a simple message: Health promotion is the cutting-edge action arm of public health. It works at low cost, and works well, when done with seriousness of purpose and in a sustained way. A strong core of professional expertise in health promotion at WHO in all its regions and in Geneva can help States do health promotion effectively. Therefore, Member States are committed to investment in a critical mass of health promotion expertise in WHO, that is at present sorely lacking. The very good, but very few, health promotion experts at WHO need more help!
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