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Question: Towards a Critical Approach to Ecohealth Research, Theory and Practice

Answer: Ecosystem-based approaches to human health, also known as ecohealth approaches to human health, is an emerging field of study that bridges thinking in the social, health and natural sciences. These approaches recognize the interdependencies between human health and ecosystem health, and seek to understand the social, political, and economic factors that influence such interaction and the resulting health implications (Dakubo, 2010; Forget & Lebel, 2001). Ecohealth-based studies use participatory and transdisciplinary processes to work with various stakeholders and in the process develop interventions that aim to simultaneously improve human health and promote sustainable ecosystem management practices.
There are a number of conceptual elements that underlie ecohealth. First, is the recognition that human beings are integral to ecosystems, and ecosystem management decisions must always take human health concerns into account. Second, ecohealth calls for the integration of expertise from the natural, social, and health sciences with traditional knowledge systems to allow for a comprehensive understanding of environment and health phenomena. Such transdisciplinary integration of knowledge systems is intended to contribute to a better understanding of the problem at hand and increase the likelihood of developing interventions that are socially and ecologically sound. Third, ecohealth encourages the use of participatory research approaches that involve beneficiaries of a study in all aspects of the research process. Such active involvement allows for a better understanding of the causal processes through which human health is influenced by environmental conditions. Lastly, the ecohealth approach calls for the adoption of social equity and gender lens in its investigations, with the realization that exposure to environmental hazards is mediated by structural and institutional factors, and are not uniformly experienced by those affected.

However, the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying these principles and their deployment remain undertheorized. For example, the notion that people are integral to the ecosystem and therefore that environmental management decisions should take human health issues into account raises complex questions about people–environment relations that are often theorized from simplistic neo-Malthusian perspectives. Such theorizing sometimes leads to the attribution of environmental health problems to individual level factors, such as people’s reckless behavior, and “inappropriate” land use practices, and relieves of accountability the role of power relations, societal, and institutional factors in producing these environmental health risks. Also, there tends to be an uncritical adoption of a priori notions of environmental and health problems without evaluating how these problems came to be constructed as such, by whom and for whom. Concepts such as “community,” “participation,” “gender relations,” “ecosystem degradation,” and “human health” are sometimes constructed to suit the needs of the namers and should be “deconstructed” to reveal their social and historical locations. The failure to adopt a critical stance to analyzing environmental health problems risks producing interventions that will not only fail to address the underlying causes of ecological and public health problems, but also augment existing social inequities and vulnerabilities that we set out to address.

Examining issues from such perspectives draws on conceptual tools in poststructuralism, postmodernism, and critical theory. All three theories are critical of positivism and provide new ways to theorize and study contemporary society (Agger, 1991). As critiques of positivism, they interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about the ways in which science is written, read, and interpreted. They reject positivist notions of the possibility to represent the world without presuppositions, arguing that such representations are both politically imbued and philosophically impossible, and every knowledge must be contextualized by its historical and cultural nature (ibid.). While it is often difficult to cleanly separate the three overarching theories of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and critical theory, they differ with respect to their origins and areas of emphasis. I will discuss the central tenets of the theories and subsequently illustrate their application to the key concepts of ecohealth.

(Source: , 29 Sep 2021)

Source Link: https://doi-org.onlinedatabase.librarynet.com.my/10.1108/S1057-6290(2013)0000015005