Cities, health and wellbeing: global governance and intersectoral policies

‘Cities, Health and Wellbeing’ was published as part of the Palgrave Macmillan Sustainable Urban Futures Series in 2021. The book uses the case of Portugal to offer a critical reflection on the adoption of health and urban development goals into national policy, and local level implementation. National and local governments need to develop plans for resilient growth in response to globalization, rapid urbanization, the climate crisis, and rising urban mental health challenges. Soeiro uses the 2030 Agenda framework to identify indicators for tracking progress across health and spatial planning sectors. She further outlines how these indicators would be implemented across multiple levels of governance, including local and regional governments, national, and supra-national levels. The book is divided into three key sections. The first explores the influence of multilevel governance, including the role of global and transnational goals and priorities on national-level policymaking. Soeiro highlights the increasing importance of bottom-up approaches and local actors in the achievement of policy goals. At the local government level, policy implementation also relies on mediation and negotiation across a wide array of actors operating on multiple scales. The second section uses the health and spatial planning sectors in the European Union (EU) and Portugal to unpack processes of inter-sectoral policy evolution and coordination. Soeiro demonstrates the increasing influence of the ‘transnational’ scale on national-level policymaking. The EU increasingly influences Portugal’s country-level strategies, while also aligning its programs and initiatives to those of global agencies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations (UN). The case study enables an exploration of how national historical, political, and socio-economic development trajectory shapes how global and transnational policies are locally adapted. Focusing on Portugal, Soeiro delves into the factors that hamper the country’s ability to align institution and governance frameworks with global aspirations. She therefore highlights the need to explore how local institutional frameworks might be better aligned to enable effective implementation. The third section demonstrates the importance of reliable data and indicators in informing interdisciplinary policy and decision-making. Soeiro assesses available indicators relating to health and wellbeing, sustainable urban development, institutions, and partnerships to identify the challenges experienced in aligning local data and statistics to global development metrics. In Portugal, these include data unavailability, varied levels of detail, and the failure to account for regional imbalances. Soeiro underscores the increasingly dominant role of cities, municipalities, and local governments in data collection and management, noting that greater responsibility would require increased budgetary resources. With a more dominant role, local governments would enable more effective data collection and reporting processes, underpinning data-informed policy formulation. Soeiro provides a clear and well-presented argument and evidence on how the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Agenda could be applied to review regional, national, and local level policies and priorities. She also highlights the importance of enabling multi-level and intersectoral institutional coordination and monitoring driven through local governments. The book focuses primarily on policy, with evidence from Portugal and the European Union, but nonetheless offers insights that would benefit a wide audience of academics and practitioners alike.