Decentering Humans in Health Governance

Promoting health and wellbeing equitably and within planetary boundaries is one of the most pressing contemporary challenges. Scholars increasingly argue that this requires a non-linear understanding of health which collapses the binary distinction between human and Nature, in other words, a decentering of humans in our understanding of health. The notion that environmental and human wellbeing are inseparable is not new, but it has gained considerable traction in Western academic research over the last decade. The ‘planetary turn’ in global health and international relations stems from recognising that the anthropocentrism of (inter)national and global frames prevents meaningfully integrating the environment in contemporary health governance. This point is amplified by decolonial studies that argue that collective loss of connection to nature is at the root of the climate crisis and the health harms that derive from it. Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders from around the globe have developed a consensus perspective of the ‘determinants of planetary health’. Despite the growing recognition of the limits of anthropocentric health governance in the context of the environmental and climate crisis, governance practices and policymaking processes tend towards siloing issues and are ill-equipped to reflect systems thinking, let alone systems thikning which challenges the distinction between humans and Nature. Technical recommendations for promoting policy integration exist, often following an evidence-based policymaking logic derived from medical sciences. However, this depoliticised and technical logic is proving of limited use for a meaningfully integrated way of governing health and wellbeing equitably and within planetary boundaries. Arguably, the concept pertaining to the integration of human and environmental health that has been most successfully uploaded in the policy space is the notion of OneHealth. OneHealth is defined as ‘an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals, and ecosystems’. Using critical disocurse analysis, this article compares the use of ‘OneHealth’ at the WHO and at the EU level. The objective of the discourse analysis is to understand to extent to which, and the ways in which, OneHealth reinforces an anthropocentric understanding of health despite its aim to integrate the health of people, animals, and ecosystems. A broader aim of the article is also to propose a conceptual contribution to understanding the limits of anthropocentric health governance.