Who is responsible for addressing obesity?

Sammanfattning: Obesity is a worldwide epidemic, affecting children as well as adults. Obesity is a major risk factor for number of chronic diseases, it is closely related to premature mortality and other negative effects on health-related quality of life. Obesity places great economic burden on states as well as obese individuals themselves. Addressing obesity seems an urgent matter, but who should be responsible for addressing this epidemic? This thesis discusses obesity from a public policy perspective. It focuses on how a problem representation, or problem framing, limits the interpretation of the problem and affects our understanding of responsibility and policy options. Taking a constructionist and interpretivist epistemological position, document analysis is used to study how obesity is interpreted and represented in documents from the medical journal The Lancet, the World Health Organization and the Icelandic parliament. The main findings are that obesity is being represented and framed in a number of ways. However, an environmental framing, representing obesity to as a result of social changes and as a symptom of unhealthy food and activity environments, was dominant among all the three actors. Addressing obesity was in all cases presented to be mainly a governmental responsibility.