The public health playbook: ideas for challenging the corporate playbook

Jennifer Lacy-Nichols, Robert Marten, Eric Crosbie, Rob Moodie. The public health playbook: ideas for challenging the corporate playbook. The Lancet Global Health. May 24, 2022. doi:10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00185-1.

Summary

Many commercial actors use a range of coordinated and sophisticated strategies to protect business interests—their corporate playbook—but many of these strategies come at the expense of public health. To counter this corporate playbook and advance health and wellbeing, public health actors need to develop, refine, and modernise their own set of strategies, to create a public health playbook. In this Viewpoint, we seek to consolidate thinking around how public health can counter and proactively minimise powerful commercial influences. We propose an initial eight strategies for this public health playbook: expand public health training and coalitions, increase public sector resources, link with and learn from social movements to foster collective solidarity, protect public health advocates from industry threats, develop and implement rigorous conflict of interest safeguards, monitor and expose corporate activities, debunk corporate arguments, and leverage diverse commercial interests. This set of strategies seeks to amplify inherent assets of the public health community and create opportunities to explicitly counter the corporate playbook. These strategies are not exhaustive, and our aim is to provoke further discussion on and exploration of this topic.

Recommendations for the public health playbook

Expand public health training and coalitions

Expand training provided to public health practitioners and actively recruit non-traditional public health personnel into the service of public health

Increase public sector resources

Promote policies and initiatives to ensure that governments have the financial and human resources to guarantee their citizens the right to fundamental goods and services

Link with and learn from social movements to foster collective solidarity

Learn from the countertactics and political knowledge of other activist organisations and foster collective solidarity through shared goals and coalition building

Protect public health advocates from industry threats

Develop a set of resources to inform and support health practitioners, researchers, and other public health actors

Develop and implement rigorous conflict of interest safeguards

Protect public health organisations and policies from inappropriate commercial influence

Monitor and expose corporate activities

Systematically gather intelligence on the market activities and political activities of corporations and share this information widely

Debunk corporate arguments

Provide a counter to corporate arguments that highlights the social and commercial determinants of health

Leverage diverse commercial interests

Identify divergent interests or tensions between commercial actors and strategically leverage these to weaken industry coalitions or individual companies

For the Spanish translation of this paper see Supplementary Materials section.

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