Putting the Politics Back into ?Public Engagement?: Participation, Mobilization and Citizenship in the Shaping of Health Services

Centre. 2 It seeks to offer reflections on some of the emphases and silences in contemporary debates about public participation in the delivery of primary health care services.Through case studies from a diversity of global contexts, we reveal and explore a series of themes with high salience for contemporary debates, which have been underplayed in mainstream understandings of public engagement in health.In part this reflects a persistent disconnect between literatures and understandings of institutionalised participation in the governance and management of health, and of mobilization and activism -a division which this article suggests is unproductive and needs to be overcome.As our cases show, practices and trajectories of public engagement and citizenship in relation to health are necessarily plural, contingent and…