Discourses in the European Commission’s 1996–2000 Health Promotion Programme

Abstract

This article is a discourse analysis of ‘The Community Action Programme on Health Promotion, Information, Education and Training 1996–2000’. The analysis uses six stages to discourse analysis. A religious discourse is used to construct the Programme and a military discourse is used to construct its implementation. These discourses are embedded in a scientific discourse. This analysis reveals that despite rhetorical endorsement of the concept of empowerment in health promotion, this Programme disempowers through vagueness, clear hierarchies of power and an emphasis on scientific methods of evaluation. The analysis also reveals that there has been a shift in blame in recent health promotion policy, the reflection is now on the collective as opposed to individual behaviour.

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