Temporalités (Jun 2014)
L’articulation des temporalités dans les politiques de prévention du vieillissement
Abstract
The prevention of ageing is at the heart of public health policies. As a result, on the different levels of public action, several strategies are proposed to promote successful ageing, active ageing and healthy ageing. In the various plans and programs put forward, three main axes stand out amidst the preventive measures to preserve the health of the elderly: nutrition, social life, and physical activity and sports.We are especially concerned with the anti-ageing policy in general as well as with the use of physical activity as a privileged tool to keep seniors healthy. These two axes enable us to question temporalities from many different standpoints, to highlight how they work together, and how they may get distorted.Raising the issue of temporality invites questioning long-term economic, social and scientific changes along with the shorter-term incitements coming from international organizations as well as national plans and programs. Besides, as preventive policies, they entertain a particular relationship with temporality in terms of anticipating risks. Thus public action must juggle with both urgency and anticipation, and be carried out in the short-term while integrating projection into a relatively near future. Lastly, temporalities are also significant considering the target public and expected results: for plans are based on changes in behaviour which have a very different time impact from that of the reforms and compared to the scope of the longer and more subjective temporality of actors’ life span.
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