ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the utility of the concepts of risk and governance, as developed by Foucauldian scholars, in the analysis of the health promotion strategies of the so-called new public health. It begins by examining some problems and limitations with the influential, and conventional modernist, perspectives on risk and the self proposed by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, before moving on to examine an approach, suggested particularly in the work of Robert Castel, which analyses risk and prevention as aspects of contemporary techniques of governance. Castel’s view is that in many contemporary ‘neo-liberal’ societies there has been a broad shift in forms of surveillance and control from those based upon the direct, face-to-face relationship between experts and subjects to those based upon the abstract calculation of risk. The chapter shows how this development has been manifested in a number of recent health promotion strategies of the new public health, and then concludes with a discussion of some implications of the governmentality concept for the further analysis of the new public health.
