The role of local authorities

The EEN project examines the effectiveness of community-based interventions for childhood obesity prevention. According to the contingency theory, the effectiveness of an intervention or programme depends on the characteristics of the programme on the one hand and on several factors in the environment or context in which the intervention or programme is implemented on the other hand (Lammers et al., 2000). Hence, three parts of the EEN research relate to the characteristics of the community-based interventions for childhood obesity prevention, that is (1) the nature of the social marketing models on which the programmes are based, (2) the nature of the cooperation between the authorities and private companies, and (3) the approach of the evaluation and monitoring of the programmes or community-based interventions. A fourth part of the EEN research relates to the context in which such an intervention or programme is implemented, and more specifically to the role of local governments. According to a recent OECD obesity prevention report, there is a consensus about the fact that “community-based interventions with multiple components, and the participation of multiple stakeholders” obtain the highest effectiveness score to handle obesity prevention (Sassi, 2010). From the EEN case studies in two Flemish cities – mentioned as “city A” and “city B” – we have also gathered information on the nature of the interventions for promoting healthy food and sufficient physical activity. This information showed that in city A obesity prevention is handled by carrying out projects. Conversations with key people from this city made it clear that the town council particularly responded to the offer of projects and campaigns coming from higher public authorities or private organisations. In the past, the projects or actions were of a rather ad hoc nature and lacked a necessary form of coherence. The question is whether the recent health policy plan will alter this in the future. In city B, we diagnosed a rather incoherent approach of obesity prevention, which, like in city A, was also based on isolated projects. Since 2007, this has changed, owing to the cooperation with Viasano Belgium. The format of a Spring action (on healthy food) and an Autumn action (on sufficient physical activity) brought order and thematic coherence to the obesity prevention projects in city B. Moreover, the Viasano logo was meant to boost recognisability. All the same, there were also a lot of questions concerning the surplus value of the cooperation model. Most questions related to whether there was enough creative intellect to develop topics (for the Spring and Autumn actions) into effective and easily implementable complementary components in order to make the inhabitants of city B change their behaviour