Revisiting the social determinants of health agenda from the global South

ABSTRACT

In an effort to provide an overview of the conceptual debates shaping the mobilisation around social determinants of health and health inequities and challenge the apparent consensus for equity in health, this essay compares two of the most influential approaches in the field: the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health approach (CSDH), strongly influenced by European Social Medicine, and the Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health (LASM-CH) ‘Social determination of the health-disease process’ approach, hitherto largely invisibilized. It is argued that the debates shaping the equity in health agenda do not merely reflect conceptual differences, but essentially different ethical-political proposals that define the way health inequities are understood and proposed to be transformed. While the health equity agenda probably also gained momentum due to the broad political alliance it managed to consolidate, it is necessary to make differences explicit as this allows for an increase in the breadth and specificity of the debate, facilitating the recognition of contextually relevant proposals towards the reduction of health inequities.