International Association of Health Policy

A NOTE FOR THE IAHP´S HISTORY
Vinçen Navarro. August 13th 2007

Dear Colleagues and Friends of the International Association of Health Policy:
It gives me enormous pleasure to see that the International Association of Health Policy (IAHP) has now completed its XIV Conference in Salvador de Bolivia, Brazil. When many, many years ago, a few of us got together in Amsterdam at the European Center of the Institute for Policy Studies to establish the Association, we had no idea that it would become so large and so productive. It makes me think that maybe “history is on our side,” as we used to say many years ago.
The IAHP was started when several of us were tired of attending mainstream conferences where the conventional wisdom was produced and reproduced for public consumption. At these conferences, progressive scholars were ignored or marginalized in a dominant discourse that saw disease primarily as a biological and individual phenomenon and medicine as a biological intervention. Few of us challenged that ideological position, presented as a scientific one. We saw health and disease a