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Poor health and disease and the nature of interventions to ameliorate them typically generate opportunities and costs. What diseases are prevalent, which interventions are favoured and what factors fuel the nature of health interventions are recurrent concerns for political economists. This paper examines the prevailing viewpoints about what health policy works and what does not. Drawing on evidence from developing countries, it shows that there are many deficiencies in the prevailing orthodoxy which emphasises state, market, and civil society solutions. The paper suggests that health policy debate must be refrained around poverty and social inequality, constructs which are often subordinated to attaining grand ideological goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decades, public health has increasingly addressed what has been called the children's obesity 'epidemic', most notably through large-scale initiatives promoting physical activity. Through a discourse analysis the current paper critically examines such efforts in Canadian and Australian public health. Public health websites in Canada and Australia were examined for information concerning children's health, physical activity and obesity and explored for how these issues were represented in the discourse. Bacchi's (2009) 'What's the problem represented to be?' approach to discourse analysis guided our interrogation of the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying Canadian and Australian public health discourse, the ideological and political influences involved in its construction, and the knowledge base upon which it rests. The article calls for critical reflection on how children's physical and leisure activities are being advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food security is an evolving concept with various definitions and associated meanings. The way food security is understood by policy-makers impacts on how it gets addressed in public policy. This research uses an interpretive approach to uncover how food security is represented by stakeholders. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 stakeholders in South Australia between June and September 2010. The findings reveal four dominant representations for food security that locate responsibility for the issue across different stakeholders, namely individuals, governments, communities and private enterprise. These representations hold different underlying assumptions about the role of government in addressing the issue; the neo-liberal perspective supports a reduced role for government whereas the social determinants of health perspective calls for greater government intervention. Food security activists may need a greater awareness of how they represent the issue in order to change public policy action in this area. The approach taken in this research is relevant to other public policy problems and contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]