Paper long abstract:

In 2007, the national government in Denmark instituted municipal reforms that gave each of its 98 municipalities responsibility for health promotion and prevention. At the policy level, community-based health-promotion is meant to reduce mortality and improve health among the general population; at the local level, these strategies aim to encourage individuals to improve their functionality, perceptions of health and achieve a 'good' quality of life (cf. World Health Organization 2014).

With an ambition to improve health behaviors and minimize risk factors - such as diet, exercise, alcohol and tobacco use - Danish health policies often reiterate and reinforce non-heuristic conceptualizations of 'health' and 'aging' that are considered to be universally applicable. Based on ethnographic research in two contrasting municipalities in the greater Copenhagen area, we investigate how such policies are situated and enacted in different contexts.

Our paper asks: how have certain paradigms of 'health', 'aging' and 'the good life' been (re-)configured in the development and implementation of public-health policies?

We unfold the process of designing and implementing contemporary health policies as a form of normative standardization; i.e., a process of "constructing uniformities across time and space, through the generation of agreed-upon rules" (Timmermans & Epstein 2010: 71). Taking inspiration from Foucault, among others, we explore the ways in which governmental policies designed to improve public health - which may appear to be politically neutral on the surface - may in fact become normative and powerful means of organizing modern life.