Introduction by Croakey: Researchers have developed a toolkit to help address inequities produced by policymaking that upholds advantage.
The Privilege Toolkit shines a light towards places that conventional policy analysis can leave in shadow, according to Associate Professor Ashley Schram, from the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University and Co-Director of The Australian Research Centre for Health Equity (ARCHE).
It makes advantage as visible as disadvantage, connects accumulation with deprivation, examines what policy assumes as well as what it states, and brings excluded issues, interests and possibilities to public view, she says.
“The capacity of some groups and sectors to define problems, shape decisions, secure resources and avoid harm is sustained through structures that advantage them – and in doing so, deepen the relative disadvantage of others,” Schram writes below.
Researchers, policymakers, practitioners and communities are invited to explore and test the toolkit, as the researchers are keen to expand its concepts, examples and methods as it encounters broader perspectives and knowledge systems not currently represented.
Schram says production of the Toolkit is a starting point, and “an invitation to make visible what policy leaves unseen, and to keep expanding how we understand and challenge privilege in Australia and globally”.
Timely reading in a week when those with political power are making decisions in many areas of policy that are likely to exacerbate inequities.
Ashley Schram writes:
At a time of intersecting crises, societies must confront a fundamental question: are our public policies equal to the scale and urgency of the challenges we face?
This is particularly true of the inequality emergency – and the health, social and environmental crises it drives and deepens.
Public policy is an arena in which societies define problems, allocate responsibility and decide which futures are worth pursuing.
But policy is never made on neutral ground. It emerges within existing distributions of wealth and influence and carries a powerful tendency to reproduce them. What policy puts in the light is selective – its silences leave certain problems, people and possibilities in shadows.
The Privilege Toolkit was developed to bring analytical light to these shadowed spaces in the pursuit of equity: where powerful actors and interests remain obscured, marginalised people and perspectives are kept outside the frame, and alternative ways of understanding problems are excluded from view.
Shining a light on policy silences brings its assumptions and exclusions into clearer view – and opens them to evidence-based and public value scrutiny.
Bringing advantage into view
Health equity research, policy and advocacy have understandably focused on poverty, exclusion and deprivation.
But deprivation and accumulation are two ends of the same spectrum.
The capacity of some groups and sectors to define problems, shape decisions, secure resources and avoid harm is sustained through structures that advantage them – and in doing so, deepen the relative disadvantage of others.
The Toolkit supports three shifts in analysis for health equity.
First, it provides a methodology for examining policy as a structural site through which inequity is produced or disrupted.
Second, it brings the systems of advantage that help produce disadvantage into focus.
Third, it examines not only what policy states, but also what it assumes, and what it leaves unsaid.
The Privilege Toolkit was developed by an interdisciplinary research team through an NHMRC Ideas Grant between 2022 and 2026.
It grew from earlier work among team members investigating public policy as a structural determinant of health equity and calling for the development of complexity-informed approaches to trace policy’s contribution to equity outcomes. It also reflects the team’s conviction that those who occupy positions of privilege have a responsibility to examine and dismantle the structures that unfairly sustain their advantage.
The Toolkit combines critical theories and methodologies from public health, sociology, political economy, policy studies and systems thinking: providing a pluralist framework for examining how policy produces, maintains or disrupts economic, political, sociocultural and epistemic privilege.
In developing the Toolkit, our research team conceptualised privilege as structurally produced advantage that accumulates unevenly, reproduces itself over time, and compounds across generations.
We also described privilege and power as mutually reinforcing but separate concepts: societies value certain resources, identities and forms of knowledge; those advantages confer power; and that power can be used to preserve the arrangements from which the advantage arose.
The Toolkit traces these dynamics across several dimensions of policy, including how problems and solutions are positioned; how identities, resources and distributions are understood; and how policy instruments translate embedded ideas into action – or not – by interpreting policy content, assumptions, and silences.
Naming silences
Iterative development of the Toolkit across four policy domains (agriculture, infrastructure, investment, and labour) revealed that privilege was repeatedly left intact through its omission from policy documents.
Silence can strategically obscure those with the greatest existing advantage.
In social impact investment policy, for example, people experiencing entrenched disadvantage were highly visible as intended beneficiaries.
Far less visible were the investors seeking to accumulate additional wealth through investments made in the name of addressing disadvantage. Although public financial support was a proposed instrument to grow the investment ecosystem, investors were rarely named or scrutinised as beneficiaries of that support.
Silence can also obscure those facing the greatest disadvantage – people positioned so far beyond the policy spotlight that they disappear from view.
A labour policy, for example, strengthened conditions for care workers: an essential, heavily feminised workforce with a high proportion of workers born overseas.
Yet it largely overlooked people in gig, platform-based, and highly informalised employment. Important protections were therefore advanced for some populations, while those experiencing the least secure forms of work remained outside the visible frame.
The shadows contain more than unnamed people – they also contain excluded ideas and alternative ways of defining problems.
Agricultural policy, for example, pursued greater productivity, export development and biodiversity trading without adequately confronting agriculture’s contribution to climate change.
Nor did it engage meaningfully with alternative traditions – such as agroecology, permaculture or biodynamic farming – that might have illuminated different relationships between food production, land, ecological sustainability and community wellbeing.
These forms of silencing people and perspectives are also deeply intertwined: public policy remains grounded in colonial economic paradigms that marginalise First Nations knowledge systems and world views, underscoring a recent call to decolonise economics.
Recognising these exclusions requires us to confront the political choices embedded in evidence-based policy: which evidence, causal explanations and starting points are brought into the light – and which remain beyond its view.
These silences cannot be identified from the policy document alone. They become visible when policy is placed alongside community and lived-experience accounts, First Nations statements, alternative policy blueprints, rejected proposals, and approaches from alternative places, historical periods or intellectual traditions.
The purpose of the Toolkit is not to list everything that is missing. It is to understand the shadows that selective policy attention creates: whose interests disappear from scrutiny, whose experiences become peripheral, which explanations lose authority and which possibilities become difficult to imagine.
Casting policy shadows
Not all silences – and thus not all shadows – are produced in the same way.
Some may arise because affected groups have been excluded or an issue has been overlooked. Others may reflect fragmented institutions, deeply embedded assumptions, human limitations, or deliberate efforts by powerful interests to keep certain questions and options outside political debate.
Our analysis can surface the existence and possible effects of a silence, but it cannot, on its own, establish how that silence was produced.
The distinction matters because different sources will likely require different responses. Better participation may address exclusion but not organised obstruction. Additional evidence may illuminate a blind spot but not shift an ideological boundary.
Policy studies examine framing, agenda-setting and the power to determine what enters political debate. Treating silence more systematically as part of policy’s architecture extends this work.
The Privilege Toolkit offers a way of directing light towards places that conventional policy analysis can leave in shadow: making advantage as visible as disadvantage, connecting accumulation with deprivation, examining what policy assumes as well as what it states, and bringing excluded issues, interests and possibilities to public view.
Invitation
We invite researchers, policymakers, practitioners and communities to explore the Toolkit, test it in their settings and adapt it to different purposes. We are keen to expand its concepts, examples and methods as it encounters broader perspectives and knowledge systems not currently represented.
We will establish a forum for contribution and collaboration, alongside applications of the Toolkit across policy domains as they are published – watch this space.
As the funded research that produced the Toolkit draws to a close, its wider life is only just beginning. It is a starting point – an invitation to make visible what policy leaves unseen, and to keep expanding how we understand and challenge privilege in Australia and globally.
Author details
Ashley Schram is Associate Professor, School of Regulation and Global Governance, The Australian National University, Co-Director of The Australian Research Centre for Health Equity (ARCHE), and an interdisciplinary researcher investigating the structural drivers of social stratification that produce social and health inequities. Her research asks fundamental questions about who holds power, who shapes the rules, institutions, and ideas that organise society, and whose interests these ultimately serve. A central focus is understanding how public policy and market practices sustain or disrupt existing patterns of advantage.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on health inequalities
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