Skills and Tools for Public Health Professionals to Address Corporate Power to Protect Human and Planetary Health

McKee and Stuckler¹ identified how corporations use visible, invisible, and hidden forms of power to influence political decision-making and societal norms that adversely affect population health. They highlighted four corporate strategies used to define the dominant narrative, establish the rules by which society and trade operate, commodify knowledge, and undermine the rights of people and communities.

This commentary is timely to inform deliberations about how to design comprehensive, inclusive, and effective solutions to address syndemics in populations.² Corporate engagement presents practitioners with a dilemma. On the one hand, they may be reluctant to associate with powerful corporations because of cases in which businesses have ignored legitimate science, intimidated scientists, created front organizations that prioritize commercial interests over human and environmental health, and influenced the public policy agenda.³ On the other hand, if practitioners do not engage, then they will lose the opportunity to protect the decision-making process from commercial interests to promote health for people and planet.

McKee and Stuckler¹ and Shiffman⁴ have emphasized that global actors exert power through public-private partnerships, networks, and alliances, in which corporate actors often initiate engagement to bring financial and in-kind resources to the negotiation table to solve global health problems. These interactions create power asymmetries or inequities. Global health involves power relations in which actors use different forms of capital to advance their interests.⁴

McKee and Stuckler discussed four actions but did not describe the specific skills and tools needed by practitioners to guide successful efforts. Public health practitioners should cultivate skills to identify, understand, and anticipate how corporate actors engage in complex systems based on their interests, positions, influence, and power. Practitioners also need to be specific about what to change; use killer facts to convey their points; become fluent in social media platforms to engage, inspire, and communicate real-time advocacy successes; and develop a thick skin to manage personal or professional attacks.^3,5

Tools are available, including a six-step decision-making process to prevent and manage conflicts of interest for policies and programs⁶ and a four-step accountability framework⁷ to help practitioners decide whether and how to engage and when to disengage with corporate actors. These are among the many tools that can illuminate steps that government and civil society can take to strengthen accountability systems to hold corporate actors to account for their practices and effects on systems and populations. Practitioners also can engage with social movements to make the corporate-driven narrative and status quo unappealing. Movements that address “malnutrition in all its forms” and promote “climate-justice actions” and the “right to well-being” may address the global syndemic challenges of undernutrition, obesity, and climate change targeted by the Sustainable Development Goals to end global poverty, protect human and planetary health, and ensure prosperity by 2030.