Global Health and Local Places: what are the relationships?

William D. ColemanUniversity of Waterloo

Local place (1)

Local place 2: Nemaska

Commission on Social Determinants of Health

1. Improve Daily Living ConditionsImprove the well-being of girls and women and the circumstances in which their children are born, put major emphasis on early child development and education for girls and boys, improve living and working conditions and create social protection policy supportive of all, and create conditions for a flourishing older life. Policies to achieve these goals will involve civil society, governments, and global institutions.

Social Determinants of Health (2)

2. Tackle the Inequitable Distribution of Power, Money, and Resourcesit is necessary to address inequities . . . To achieve that requires more than strengthened government – it requires strengthened governance: legitimacy, space, and support for civil society, for an accountable private sector, and for people across society to agree public interests and reinvest in the value of collective action. In a globalized world, the need for governance dedicated to equity applies equally from the community level to global institutions.

Manuel Castells

The Rise of the Network Society (2nd ed., 1999)Those who function within the dominant networks are said to be part of the “space of flows” and their situation contrasts with the excluded, who live in “spaces of places”“space of flows” = the global “space of places” = the local

Roland Robertson

Glocalization:What happens locally and what happens globally are mutually constitutive- By invoking the “local”, one is already thinking of the local as being shaped by the global and the potential for the local to change the global.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

1. Modes of production of globalizationTwin processes:a. Globalized localisms: processes by which particular

localisms is globalized.Example: the fur trade

Santos cont.

b. Localized globalisms: the specific impact on local conditions produced by transnational practices and imperatives that arise from globalized localismse.g. trading posts, exchange economy, diseases, missionaries

Fort EdmontonFur trade outpost

Hydro-Quebec Power development pathwaysMap lays out the global localisms: dam sites and power lines that take hydro-electric power from the James Bay area to urban Quebec and New England states of the US

Arturo Escobar

Territories of difference : place, movements, life, redesPlace: “engagement with and experience of a particular location with some measure of groundedness (however unstable), boundaries (however permeable), and connections to everyday life, even if its identity is constructed and never fixed”

Escobar continued

Studying the impacts of global localisms:EconomyEcologyCulture

Escobar continued

“the transformation of local diverse economies, partially oriented to self-reproduction and subsistence, into a monetized, market-driven economy. [They involve] changes of complex ecosystems into modern forms of nature . . . And [they are] changing place-based, local cultures that increasingly (have to) resemble dominant modern cultures . . “

Victor Diamond Mine, de Beers CanadaLocated approximately 90 km west of the coastal community of Attawapiskat First Nation

Conclusion: the Quebec Eeyouch

Creation of the Grand Council of the Cree (Eeyouch)Collaboration with environmentalist NGOs in Canada and the USEnlisting the support of the United Nations: Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples

Conclusion: UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Article 24: a new global localism (?)1. Indigenous peoples have the right to their traditional medicines and to maintain their health practices, including the conservation of their vital medicinal plants, animals and minerals. Indigenous individuals also have the right to access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services.2. Indigenous individuals have an equal right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health . . .

Commission on Social Determinants of Health

Is there something missing? Communities? The people themselves?1. Improve Daily Living ConditionsImprove the well-being of girls and women and the circumstances in which their children are born, put major emphasis on early child development and education for girls and boys, improve living and working conditions and create social protection policy supportive of all, and create conditions for a flourishing older life. Policies to achieve these goals will involve civil society, governments, and global institutions.