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 as a population-based phenomenon that was politically, socially, economically, and culturally determined. While of different political traditions, all the founders of the IAHP believed - as our ancestors from Engels to Virchow said - that the main interventions to promote the health and quality of life of our populations are those aimed at transforming class–as well as gender and race­–power relations in our societies and in the world at large. We were in a very small minority indeed. And while wanting to continue the ideological struggle in the mainstream forums and conferences, denouncing the dominant ideology, we also felt the need to have our own meetings where we could discuss our own work in constructive debate among colleagues and friends who shared these views. That need was widely felt.
I sent a note to several colleagues (some I knew personally, others I did not) and then spoke with my friend Len Rodberg, who was working in a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), and made two requests – both of which the IPS granted. One was to get money to cover the travel expenses of our colleagues coming from developing countries. The other was to find a place to hold the first meeting. This place should be outside the U.S., since the U.S. government at that time would not grant visas to many of our colleagues from other countries. The IPS offered its European Center in Amsterdam, and this is how and why we met in Amsterdam. On a rainy day, we started three exciting days during which the IAHP was established. It was from June 28th to July 2nd of 1976, more than thirty years ago.
We soon chose three objectives for the IAHP. The first was to create a forum for progressive scholars (of many different political persuasions) who would critically analyze the world as a necessary step to changing it. Our commitment was to optimize the health of our populations through the elimination of class, as well as gender and race, exploitation. We were indeed creatures of the 60’s, and we had to speak quite loudly in order to be heard in a suffocatingly conservative academic environment. To give you an idea of how conservative the academic environment was at that time, I could relate some of the negative reviews that some of our work received in mainstream journals. One of them, Social Science and Medicine, accepted a paper of mine on the condition that I drop the use of terms such as “working class,” as too ideological! This was the environment in which we had to struggle in the 70’s. I did not abide by SSM’s request, and the article was not published. It was published later in the International Journal of Health Services (IJHS). We spoke loud and clear through the instruments we had at our disposal, of which the IJHS was the best known. Actually, most of the critical analyses and the debates among progressive scholars in the English-speaking world during those years (and this continues today) were found in the IJHS. All the board members of the IAHP were also members of the IJHS editorial board.
The second objective of the IAHP was to promote and support the work of progressive scholars. The overwhelming dominance of conservative thinking, reproduced through networks that systematically excluded critical thinkers, made the promotion of progressive scholarship particularly difficult. Here again, the International Journ