摘要：While European States insist on the necessity to develop environmental health policies, mainly at the international level, a careful analysis of national policy processes, focused on national environmental health action plans (NEHAPs) and national strategies of sustainable development (NSSDs), tend to show that results obtained are particularly limited. This study investigates the reasons for this surprising “environmental health paradox”. Data used in this study come from interviews of experts in Swiss, German, and Belgian environmental health policies and from survey results provided by the WHO Regional Office for Europe (WHO/Europe) and its Environmental Health Center in Bonn. Findings show that the major obstacles to more ambitious environmental health policies are the lack of political recognition at the national level, notably vis-à-vis the concept of sustainable development, their confinement to measures of scientific research, which limits their ability to reach policy actors situated outside dedicated “epistemic communities”, and the absence of any substantial system of indicators capable of correctly assessing environmental health issues and policy outcomes. These results, also compared to corresponding French and Austrian policies, provide an explanation for the difficulties faced by this relatively new field of public policy and highlight the most common difficulties in developing complex, cross-sector environmental health policies.
关键词：environmental health; Switzerland; Germany; Belgium; France; health policies
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