Interscalar health: From Hawaiian fishpond to planet (and back)

This article explores the utility of the ‘planetary health’ framework for identifying and solving problems of social-environmental health and wellbeing. While we value the planetary health agenda, we question the framework’s efficacy in producing health. We outline three problems that it shares with other kinds of ‘globalocentric thinking’: an over-emphasis on quantitative styles of reasoning, the compression of needs and erasure of the (political) relations that matter. These problems obfuscate social, political and ecological specificities critical to creating health. Based on ethnographic and ecological research with land stewards in Maui, HI, and building on scholarship about biocultural stewardship and sustainability transformations, we call for alternative frameworks. We introduce ‘interscalar health’ as a theoretical lens to guide research, advocacy and governance toward supporting the embodied social-ecological and political relations that produce and propagate health across interacting systems and scales. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .