Paper short abstract:

This paper calls for a need to make more space for evoking love as a political force within policy-making worlds . It draws on ethnography of global health policymaking practices on podoconiosis, a debilitating stigmatising disease of poverty affecting millions of people.

Paper long abstract:

When people imagine how policy gets made, they tend to think about bureaucracy and bureaucrats - the ‘rule of desks’, documents, and the faceless people who make them. The concepts are too huge to think about, so the human-side of policymaking is hidden. Anthropology, with its attention to social relationships and human connection, can offer insight into the everyday lives of those engaging in policy work. Lately, a lot of talk about global health policy practices has highlighted the awful side of humanity: annihilation, the ways policy practices can add up to the condemnation of whole segments of population to death or to half-lives, often called necro-politics, or power over death. However, ethnography of global health policymaking practices on podoconiosis, a debilitating stigmatising disease of poverty affecting millions of people, caused by walking barefoot on volcanic soil, offers some counter-narratives to this outlook. Ethnography revealed how love, in multiple forms, was a central driving force that helped both individuals and groups find ways to keep going when confronted with overwhelming feelings of impossibility of how to fix awful problems. This paper calls for a need to make more space for evoking love as a political force within policy-making worlds .