Bridging discourses on health promotion and social sustainability towards healthy community development.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to argue for the need to bridge the discourses of health promotion and social sustainability as an important step toward healthy community development. By building on theories and empirical knowledge from both disciplines, we advocate for the field of health promotion to take a more assertive role within the social sustainability discourse because the theoretical and empirical knowledge from health promotion research is needed. Likewise, we argue that the strong emphasis on social justice and contextual community factors within the social sustainability discourse could contribute to developing the health promotion discourse. Furthermore, we suggest that place-based methods and analyses used in current health promotion research could serve as tools to better integrate knowledge on both physical and social dimensions, thereby enhancing inter-disciplinary collaboration to develop socially sustainable communities.