Compostable Intervention: a hopeful, humble reimagining of health behaviour change

Lifestyle intervention is presented as a positive practice contributing to health promotion and non-communicable disease prevention. Behaviour change research forms the bulk of its evidence base, informing neoliberal policies of self-improvement and prosumption for the greater good. Despite its widespread adoption as an effective public health investment, outcomes from health behaviour intervention are variable and tend not to last. The practice has been extensively critiqued for its negative consequences such as labelling, exclusion, and widening inequalities.

New materialist scholars acknowledge the real and varied impacts behaviour has on health, but they argue that it matters, materially and meaningfully, how we think problems like inactivity, diet, mental health, and the like, because the stories that story them and the knowledges that know them shape the practices for changing them and how that change is understood. For example, Donna Haraway’s (2016) compost has been proffered as a useful concept for thinking physical activity intervention. Compost refers to relational practices of living and dying, and when used to make sense of how interventions function, behaviour change becomes more of a making and unmaking than a direct and measurable outcome of technique.

This paper is a speculative fabulation of health behaviour change that reimagines the function of a typical digital intervention to improve physical activity based on the NHS’s Couch to 5K app. Modelled on Haraway’s (2016) The Camille Stories, three vignettes trace the encounter and string-figuring of physical activity through the living/dying relations the intervention enacts. We conclude by proffering that evaluating compostable interventions requires humility and aesthetic skills.