Active Living and the Politics of Implementation: A Review Article

Drawing on five case studies, Lawrence D. Brown's Political Exercise: Active Living, Public Policy, and the Built Environment (2022) examines the complex path to fruition of comprehensive policy approaches. The health-promotion approach called active living, or modifying the built environment to encourage physical exercise in everyday life, experienced a peak of interest in parts of two decades. Looking at five very different places (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Louisville, Kentucky; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sacramento, California; and New York, New York), Brown explores how difficult it is to implement active living in practice. Brown argues that active living is perceived by many to be a good thing. However, few organizations or parts of government see it as their main focus. It requires substantial collaborative work, which is typically difficult. Implementing active living requires strategies beyond the typical public health toolkit, including those from urban planning. Brown introduces the term implementation sensitivity to explain policies that are susceptible to dissonance between policy aims and political realities. Obstacles faced by policy proponents include local particularities that make it hard to transfer or scale up solutions, intersectoral pluralism or multiple lines of authority, and the need for effective champions. The path from policy to implementation is not linear but iterative.