Abstract
What emerges is the picture of a stalled ‘war on obesity’. The continued deference to scientific evidence, and the impact that this has on how actors interact with each other, the public, and the policymakers they are trying to convince, results in a confusing stalemate. It not only engenders an inadequate policy response, it risks removing the impetus for further contestation and debate. As such, this conclusion focuses on four lessons that can be gleaned from this analysis in order to reignite policy debate. First, I advocate moving beyond expert delegates and instead promote the value in affective embodiment, via efforts to ensure that obese individuals have a visible presence and audible voice across sites of debate. Second, I also advocate a concerted effort to produce and disseminate more social science evidence on the emotions of obesity, with a view that doing so will sustain visceral, affective discussion of lived experience of obesity right through both debates. Third, I emphasise the importance of structuring and practising policy debate in such a way that emphasises the contingency and ambiguity of policy compromise, and affords opponents in civil society impetus to voice ongoing reservations with policy settings. Fourth, I emphasise the importance of helping such actors to effectively ‘stay’ with the issue through the policy process, so that they can better scrutinise the way ambiguous, contingent compromise is actually put into action.
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- 1.
There are important parallels to my findings in the complex connections between discursive politics and issue and agenda management in the excellent recent analysis by Griggs and Howarth (2013) of the ongoing debate about aviation policy in the UK.
- 2.
It is worth noting that there are affinities between my appeal to reciprocity and the emphasis on ‘boundary work’ deployed by policy scholars like Hoppe (2005, 2013) and Korinek and Veit (2015). Boundary work in this sense draws on insights from science and technology studies, and in particular insights into practices of regulatory governance where the divergent discourses or ‘sacred stories’ of scientists, professionals, and policymakers intersect (see Jasanoff 1990, 1996). Evidence is, likewise, a crucial part of what enables boundary work to actually work in practice. I prefer the term reciprocity here because it is avowedly normative and points to underappreciated democratic benefits associated with the supposedly technocratic pursuit of EBPM (see Boswell 2014 for much more on this).
- 3.
I thank Michael for allowing me to quote him by name, or else his identity would not be obvious and I would not be able to use this remarkable insight.
- 4.
See Lang (2010) for a knowledgeable insight into the neutering of the FSA’s responsibilities in relation to public health.
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Boswell, J. (2016). Conclusion. In: The Real War on Obesity. Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58252-2_9
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