Sustainable Healthcare Education as a Practice of Governmentality?

Abstract

Sustainability as a concept is found across a multitude of sectors in today’s society. This ‘sustainability turn’ as we might call it, has made its entry into educational paradigms such as ‘education for sustainable development’. The healthcare sector has embraced the notion of sustainability primarily by emphasizing how climate change impacts human health. Epitomized in the new paradigm of sustainable healthcare education (SHE), or education for sustainable healthcare (ESH), the sustainability turn has arrived with full force within medical education. This article will argue that sustainable healthcare education may be analyzed as a governmental practice. We ask: by what governmental techniques does one seek to create sustainable health subjects, i.e., self-leading future doctors? On the one hand, sustainability is a call for global engagement that goes beyond the health of the singular patients within the paradigm of SHE. On the other hand, it can risk producing individual doctors and students that are responsibilized in the name of sustainability to take on ever-increasing tasks to foster human and planetary health. In this way, we argue that the SHE paradigm might risk transferring responsibility from the state to the individual to achieve ‘sustainable health’.