ABSTRACT
Some ten years ago, towards the end of the 1980s, the concept of promoting community health status through a process of careful review and adjustment of public development policies gained considerably in popularity. It was a period when intersectoral action for health had taken on important dimensions in the World Health Organization (WHO) under the inspired leadership of the responsible officer in the Division of Strengthening of Health Services, Dr Aleya Hammad El Bindari. The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) had just published its report, Our Common Future (WCED 1987). In its wake, sustainability was rapidly becoming a new guiding principle in development. The motivation of many workers in the development arena was strengthened by the ideas put forward in the report: no ‘after-the-fact’ repairs, full integration of environmental considerations into the planning of natural resources development, a focus on multidisciplinarity and intersectoralism, and rational and effective interagency collaboration between United Nations (UN) specialized agencies that for too long had focused on their core mandate without truly linking into the larger development picture.
