ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the context of healthy ageing in the 21st century, including an ageing population and policy discourses of 'successful ageing'. It describes alternative ways of understanding health for older people and introduces the Capability Approach as a socially based and ethically oriented way to understand older people's health. Population ageing means that there is both a rise in the average age of the population as well as a growing proportion of older people within populations. Stereotypical identities that deny older people access to certain rights or full participation in society work together as ageism. Analysis of the media shows that ageing is largely represented by images of disability and dependence. Successful ageing discourse restricts the criteria for success to two dimensions: health and dependence. The ideals of successful ageing match the currently powerful neo-liberal economic and political ideology and the ideology of healthism.
