A new toolkit designed to help English local authorities manage their commercial relationships with health-harming industries has been described in a peer-reviewed paper published in Public Health in Practice, offering one of the most detailed accounts to date of how academic evidence can be translated into a practical governance instrument. The toolkit, published by the Association of Directors of Public Health, was developed by Anna Brook and Katherine Körner to support councils in improving the governance of commercial interactions, relationships and influence so that benefits to population health are maximised and harms minimised. Its creation comes against a stark backdrop: analysis from the Lancet series on the commercial determinants of health estimates that health-harming industries contribute to at least a third of deaths globally, making the governance of commercial engagement a public health issue of the first order.
The rationale for the work rests on the recognition that commercial actors shape health far beyond the sale of harmful products. Industry influence can permeate policymaking processes themselves, from lobbying and partnership arrangements to sponsorship and the framing of evidence. The Lancet series identified preventing undue influence on policymaking as one of the key mechanisms for interrupting commercial harm. In the United Kingdom, local authorities are considered natural agents of change in this landscape because they hold varied powers, statutory duties, assets and resources that shape the determinants of health, from licensing and planning to procurement and public estate management. Yet until now, there has been a gap between the growing academic literature on the commercial determinants of health and the pragmatic, day-to-day decisions that council officers and elected members must make about engaging with the private sector.
The developers set out to produce what they call a Research-Derived Actionable Tool, or RDAT: a resource distilled from academic knowledge into clear, actionable and pragmatic guidance that local authorities can align with their own values. Four principles guided the entire development process. The first, concise sufficiency, dictated that only material directly useful to local authority colleagues tackling local issues should be included. The second, getting started over perfection, prioritised a timely, actionable output that could be iterated and improved through practice and evaluative research rather than waiting for a flawless product. The third principle, guidance rather than direction, reflected the fact that local authorities are independent, varied and democratically accountable bodies, meaning the toolkit should help each organisation develop the right policy for its own population rather than imposing a single template. The fourth, evidence-informed, required drawing from existing evidence on harms and on how to address them in different contexts.
The methodology behind the toolkit combined document searching and analysis, expert workshops, individual stakeholder input, iterative drafting and structured dissemination. The document search was purposive, built on the research team’s existing knowledge, stakeholder recommendations, internet and key website searches, and snowballing techniques to identify examples of existing policies, comparable toolkits, and research on governance and conflicts of interest. In November 2022, a 90-minute online workshop brought together sixteen stakeholders, four from local authorities, seven from non-governmental, regional or national policy organisations and five from academia, to explore three questions that the published evidence base could not answer: what organisations need in place to introduce policy, what challenges implementation might pose, and how organisations should determine the scope of their policy. Crucially, the workshop aimed to map the breadth, divergence and convergence of views rather than force a consensus. Twelve further stakeholders contributed individually by video call or email, sometimes offering off-the-record insight that would not have surfaced in a group setting.
Editorial decision-making rested with the two authors, both of whom had extensive experience working within local authorities and had been engaged in academic work on the commercial determinants of health. Their approach to weighing conflicting input was systematic: practitioners’ expertise was prioritised for questions of accessibility, ease of use and pragmatic concerns; academics’ expertise carried the greatest weight for research evidence; and NGO and national or regional colleagues’ expertise informed questions of coherence and cross-contextual variation. Data analysis and synthesis were carried out throughout using reflective writing and discussion, and the process was explicitly non-linear, with expert input sought at the planning stage, again during analysis where gaps in the evidence demanded judgement calls, and finally during feedback on content and format.
The drafting process unfolded across three versions between December 2022 and October 2023, with the toolkit finalised in January 2024 and launched in April 2024. The first draft set out the structure and expected content; the second put key content in place while highlighting gaps; and the third was circulated for red-line comments from four key peer reviewers charged with guarding against major errors or harm. The resulting toolkit is modular, comprising seven sections, a foreword and an accompanying set of flow-charts to inform policy and decision-making. Its sections cover how to use the toolkit, the case for using good governance to protect health, issues to consider and evidence for managing private-sector engagement in governance policy development, benefits and key issues, principles and content considerations for policy and process, frequently asked questions, and a glossary. Separating the guidance from the supporting evidence was a deliberate design choice, allowing time-pressed readers to grasp key points quickly while retaining a transparent evidence base behind each recommendation. The launch event attracted 128 online attendees, with 160 registrants receiving follow-up information, and the design was funded by the University of Stirling and the SPECTRUM consortium.
One of the most instructive episodes in the development process involved a fundamental disagreement about scope. Some stakeholders recommended starting narrowly, with a set of specific health-harming industries where the evidence of harm related to conflicting interests is strongest, particularly tobacco and alcohol. Academic evidence, however, highlighted the risks that so-called tobacco exceptionalism, the practice of singling out one industry for restrictions, may paradoxically slow progress in other policy areas by implying that other commercial actors are benign. Rather than choosing between these positions mechanically, the team used the workshop format to explore the reasoning underpinning each perspective and then resolved the conflict through their guiding principles and expertise weightings. They opted for a broad approach covering commercial interactions in general, reasoning that this prioritised research evidence, added value over existing approaches that had focused on single industries, and respected the democratic accountability of local authorities by giving them tools to suit their own contexts.
Recognising that a broad approach might feel overwhelming to some councils and lead to less progress rather than more, the developers built in mitigations. The modular structure allows readers to pick and choose which parts of the toolkit to use depending on context and need, and the dissemination strategy explicitly states that people may use the toolkit in different ways, suggesting starting points that could include choosing a limited number of industries or policy processes. Whether these mitigations work as intended is now an open empirical question: an evaluation of the process and impact of implementation is underway, led by the Local Health and Global Profits research consortium, part of Population Health Improvement UK. That evaluation is expected to feed lessons, including resource implications, into future iterations of the toolkit.
The authors are candid about the central limitation of their work: at the time of publication, the toolkit had not been fully implemented, meaning its feasibility had not been tested in the real world and testimonies from direct application could not be incorporated. Nevertheless, an expert panel judged that the toolkit meets many criteria considered highly relevant for planning system-level health promotion, including a clearly described target audience, adaptability to context, prioritisation of action, an adequate range of supporting evidence, and alignment with existing structures and systems. The authors argue that toolkits for public health practice are subject to a different set of standards and priorities than academic work, and that the methods for producing them must therefore differ as well. By publishing their methods, they hope to encourage timely, evidence-informed action in emerging fields of public health where more rigorous evaluation approaches inevitably lag behind practice needs, and to contribute to broader debate about the methods and standards appropriate for research-derived actionable tools. For local authorities, the toolkit is positioned not only as a policy-development instrument but also as material for learning and education, for building a case for change, and for supporting ad-hoc decisions, with wider use potentially opening the policy window for full policy adoption in councils that are not yet ready to act on the commercial determinants of health.
Subject of Research: Development of a research-derived Good Governance Toolkit to help UK local authorities govern commercial interactions and influence to protect and improve public health
Subject of Research: Medicine
Article Title: Developing the good governance toolkit: a research-derived actionable tool
Article References: Brook, A., & Körner, K. (2026). Developing the good governance toolkit: a research-derived actionable tool. Public Health in Practice, 12, Article 100823. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100823
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100823
Keywords: commercial determinants of health, good governance, local authorities, public health policy, research-derived actionable tool, conflicts of interest, knowledge mobilisation, health inequalities, Association of Directors of Public Health, toolkit development
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Courtney Benton. (September 3, 2026). Researchers create actionable toolkit grounded in governance studies. Scienmag. https://scienmag.com/researchers-create-actionable-toolkit-grounded-in-governance-studies/
Courtney Benton. “Researchers create actionable toolkit grounded in governance studies.” Scienmag, 3 September 2026, https://scienmag.com/researchers-create-actionable-toolkit-grounded-in-governance-studies/. Accessed 3 September 2026.
Courtney Benton. “Researchers create actionable toolkit grounded in governance studies.” Scienmag. September 3, 2026. https://scienmag.com/researchers-create-actionable-toolkit-grounded-in-governance-studies/
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Tags: commercial determinants of healthgovernance of industry influence on healthhealth-harming industries regulationindustry influence on public health outcomesindustry regulation in public healthlocal government health governance strategiesmanaging commercial relationships in local authoritiespeer-reviewed public health interventionspublic health governance toolkitpublic health policymaking and industry lobbyingreducing harm from commercial sectorstranslating academic evidence into policy tools
