The Politics of Social, Ecological, and Structural Determinants of Health in Canada

The Politics of Social, Ecological, and Structural Determinants of Health in Canada is the first Canadian book to examine intersections of social, ecological, and structural determinants of health as the crucial pathway to tackling growing health inequities in Canada.

Critical perspectives on the social and ecological determinants of health are explored using detailed and easily accessible case studies. Each chapter integrates how health and illness are rooted in social, economic, and political structures, with clear explanations of how societal power and ruling relations so strongly determine human and planetary health. Bringing together health, social, ecological, and political sciences, this text makes the case that the structural determinants of health are increasingly urgent and pivotal markers of who lives and who dies. The text also explores earth-centred policy and governance strategies to lessen and halt extreme inequities.

This powerful text will serve a broad scope of readers, including students and researchers in health, social, and geological sciences; practitioners and policy-makers; and people in non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations.

In The Politics of Social, Ecological, and Structural Determinants of Health in Canada, Elizabeth McGibbon takes health inequities—writ large—as the target of her action-oriented analyses. From the Alberta Tar Sands to the deep injustices exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, McGibbon examines Canadian public policy decision-making and its impacts within the scope of neoliberal capitalism. Throughout this wide-ranging text, the author contends that structural determinants of health are urgent and pivotal markers of who lives and who dies in Canada, in contrast to the sustained public and political rhetoric of individual blame and culpability for worsening health outcomes for marginalized and racialized peoples. Bringing together health, social, and ecological sciences, this text makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of power relations and the welfare state as they affect human and planetary health, including the health of all living things on Earth. Readers in health studies, policy and governance, nursing and medicine, environmental sciences, social sciences, and related areas will find this book immensely insightful.