Social Movements in Public Health: An Emerging Perspective Grounded in Collective Action, Health Justice, and Technological Innovation

Author: Starlin J. Martinez, M.Sc. in Scientific Research

Publication date: November 29, 2025.

Suggested Citation: Martinez, S. J. (2025). Social movements in public health: An emerging perspective grounded in collective action, health justice, and technological innovation. ResearchPublicHealth.net. https://researchpublichealth.net/articles/social-movements

Summary

A perspective exploring how contemporary social movements—driven by collective action, health justice, and technological innovation—are reshaping public health governance, exposing inequities, and redefining community participation in health systems.

Public health is undergoing a profound transformation driven by social movements that increasingly shape how health systems are interpreted, challenged, and reimagined. The dominant narrative—rooted in institutional authority and technocratic decision-making—has become insufficient in the face of contemporary crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed historical inequities and governance failures. This Perspective proposes a conceptual framework integrating collective action, health justice, and technological innovation. Evidence shows that communities are active co-producers of knowledge, surveillance, and solutions. This Perspective highlights the rising influence of social movements in building equitable, resilient, and participatory health systems.

Why a new perspective is needed. For decades, public health has been guided by an institutionalist paradigm that positioned governments, technocratic agencies, and international bodies as primary drivers of health outcomes. While this model served historical public-health structures, recent global crises demonstrated its limitations. Deeply entrenched inequities surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing disproportionate morbidity and mortality across racial, economic, and geographic groups (Williams & Cooper, 2020). These failures indicated that institutional narratives alone cannot explain or resolve the complex conditions shaping population health today. The growing disconnect between centralized public-health systems and local realities underscores the need for a new perspective—one that recognizes social movements as creators of knowledge, catalysts of justice, and central actors in actionable health governance.

Revisiting the dominant narrative. Traditional public-health frameworks viewed community participation as supplemental rather than structural. However, contemporary scholarship reveals a significant shift: communities are generating localized data, identifying inequities, mobilizing health resources, and driving policy debates (Yuan et al., 2021). Systematic reviews demonstrate that community-driven health-promotion initiatives produce measurable improvements in legitimacy, trust, and overall outcomes (Clark et al., 2024). This evidence contradicts the long-standing notion that social movements are reactive rather than generative. Instead, they represent organized forms of civic power that shape institutional accountability and influence governmental decision-making. The institutional paradigm—centered on hierarchical decision-making and top-down interventions—no longer reflects the empirical realities documented in contemporary public-health research.

Collective action as distributed governance. Social movements have evolved into mechanisms of distributed governance. Rather than relying solely on state-led directives, communities increasingly coordinate surveillance, disseminate health information, and manage local responses to social and epidemiological crises. Grassroots health networks, mutual-aid systems, and community-based monitoring emerged as rapid and flexible alternatives to institutional delays during the pandemic (Daphi et al., 2024). These forms of collective action do more than complement institutional resources; they reshape the structure of public-health governance itself. Through decentralized organization, communities demonstrate quicker response times, greater cultural and contextual sensitivity, and stronger local legitimacy. Distributed governance illustrates that public health is no longer solely produced by formal institutions, but through the relational power of community-level organization.

Health justice as an emerging ethical framework. Health justice has gained prominence as a central ethical framework for understanding how structural disparities shape health outcomes. The disproportionate burden of disease experienced by marginalized communities reflects systemic inequities that predate modern public-health structures. Social movements reframed these disparities as preventable consequences of political, economic, and social structures. Parallel to this shift is the rise of epistemic justice, which highlights how marginalized communities have historically been excluded from producing and validating health knowledge. Recent work on decolonial frameworks in global health emphasizes the need to recognize the legitimacy of community-generated expertise (Koum Besson et al., 2022). Health justice reinforces that public health must address not only access to care but also structural determinants, representation, and the redistribution of power in decision-making processes.

Technological innovation as an accelerator of social mobilization. Technological innovation has transformed the speed, scale, and methods of social mobilization. Digital tools—including mobile health applications, participatory-surveillance platforms, open-data networks, and AI-assisted mapping—enable communities to document inequities, organize collective action, and influence institutional agendas (Budd et al., 2020). However, the benefits of these tools are not evenly distributed. Digital inequality continues to create gaps in who can participate, who can mobilize, and who can be heard (Hargittai et al., 2021). These disparities reproduce existing social inequities in new digital forms. Thus, technology is both an amplifier and a potential barrier: it expands the reach of movements but also reinforces inequality when access and capacity are uneven.

The expanding scientific field of community participation. Community participation has transitioned from a programmatic element to a robust scientific field. Bibliometric analyses confirm rapid global growth in research centered on community engagement (Yuan et al., 2021). Furthermore, participatory interventions have been shown to strengthen legitimacy and long-term sustainability of public-health strategies (Gilbert, 2023). This marks an epistemic shift in which communities are recognized as co-creators—not merely recipients—of health knowledge and solutions.

Tensions and obstacles to consolidation. Despite its growing influence, this emerging perspective faces substantial barriers, including institutional resistance, economic precarity, misinformation, and digital exclusion (Hargittai et al., 2021). These challenges highlight the need for structural reforms that integrate, rather than marginalize, collective action in public health governance.

Toward a transformative narrative. Social movements now represent indispensable actors in understanding and shaping public health. Their convergence with justice-oriented frameworks and technological innovation forms a transformative narrative that redefines how health is governed and produced. Recognizing this shift is essential for developing equitable and resilient health systems aligned with twenty-first-century realities.

References

Budd, J., Miller, B. S., Manning, E. M., Lampos, V., Zhuang, M., Edelstein, M., Rees, G., & McKendry, R. A. (2020). Digital technologies in the public-health response to COVID-19. Nature Medicine, 26(8), 1183–1192. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1011-4

Clark, E. C., Baidoobonso, S., Phillips, K. A. M., Noonan, L. L., Bakker, J., Burnett, T., & Dobbins, M. (2024). Community-driven health promotion mobilization: A rapid systematic review. BMC Public Health, 24, 932. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-024-18443-8

Daphi, P., Flesher Fominaya, C., & Romanos, E. (2024). Mobilizing during COVID-19: Social movements in times of crisis. Social Movement Studies, 23(6), 667–675. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2024.2406697

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Hargittai, E., Piper, A. M., & Morris, M. R. (2021). Digital inequality and health information seeking during COVID-19. PLOS ONE, 16(9), e0258081. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258081

Koum Besson, E. S., Amer Fadhel, B., Fouad, F. M., & Bou-Karroum, K. (2022). How to identify epistemic injustice in global health research funding practices: A decolonial guide. BMJ Global Health, 7(4), e008950. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-008950

Williams, D. R., & Cooper, L. A. (2020). COVID-19 and health equity—A new kind of “herd immunity”. JAMA, 323(24), 2478–2480. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.8051

Yuan, M., Lin, H., Wu, H., Yu, M., Tu, J., & Lü, Y. (2021). Community engagement in public health: A bibliometric mapping of global research. Archives of Public Health, 79(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13690-021-00525-3