Researchers have developed a toolkit to help address inequities produced by policymaking that upholds advantage. The Privilege Toolkit shines a light towards places that conventional policy analysis can leave in shadow, according to Associate Professor Ashley Schram.
It makes advantage as visible as disadvantage, connects accumulation with deprivation, examines what policy assumes as well as what it states, and brings excluded issues, interests and possibilities to public view.
Public policy is an arena in which societies define problems, allocate responsibility and decide which futures are worth pursuing.
Policy is never made on neutral ground, it emerges within existing distributions of wealth and influence and carries a powerful tendency to reproduce them.
What policy puts in the light is selective – its silences leave certain problems, people and possibilities in shadows.
The Privilege Toolkit was developed to bring analytical light to these shadowed spaces in the pursuit of equity: where powerful actors and interests remain obscured, marginalised people and perspectives are kept outside the frame, and alternative ways of understanding problems are excluded from view.
Health equity research, policy and advocacy have understandably focused on poverty, exclusion and deprivation.
But deprivation and accumulation are two ends of the same spectrum, and the capacity of some groups and sectors to define problems, shape decisions, secure resources and avoid harm is sustained through structures that advantage them – and in doing so, deepen the relative disadvantage of others.
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The Toolkit supports three shifts in analysis for health equity.
First, it provides a methodology for examining policy as a structural site through which inequity is produced or disrupted.
Second, it brings the systems of advantage that help produce disadvantage into focus.
Third, it examines not only what policy states, but also what it assumes, and what it leaves unsaid.
Iterative development of the Toolkit across four policy domains revealed that privilege was repeatedly left intact through its omission from policy documents.
Silence can strategically obscure those with the greatest existing advantage, such as investors seeking to accumulate additional wealth through investments made in the name of addressing disadvantage.
Silence can also obscure those facing the greatest disadvantage – people positioned so far beyond the policy spotlight that they disappear from view.
Not all silences – and thus not all shadows – are produced in the same way.
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Some may arise because affected groups have been excluded or an issue has been overlooked.
Others may reflect fragmented institutions, deeply embedded assumptions, human limitations, or deliberate efforts by powerful interests to keep certain questions and options outside political debate.
Our analysis can surface the existence and possible effects of a silence, but it cannot, on its own, establish how that silence was produced.
The distinction matters because different sources will likely require different responses, and they must be addressed to promote greater equity.
For people most affected by these policies, the toolkit’s development means that they can start to see how their experiences are shaped by the systems of advantage that are embedded in policy.
This can help them to better understand how to challenge and change these systems, and to advocate for policies that promote greater equity.
We invite researchers, policymakers, practitioners and communities to explore the Toolkit, test it in their settings and adapt it to different purposes.
They are keen to expand its concepts, examples and methods as it encounters broader perspectives and knowledge systems not currently represented, and it offers a way of directing light towards places that conventional policy analysis can leave in shadow.