Resistance, regulation, and governmentality: interrogating the defunding of homeopathy in France and England (2000 to 2022)

This paper employs a governmentality framework to explore resistance by CAM sceptics to homeopathy’s partial settlement in the public health systems of England and France, resulting in its defunding in both countries in 2018 and 2021, respectively. While partly dependent upon long-standing problematisations (namely, that homeopathy’s ability to heal is unproven, its mechanisms implausible, and its consequences for patients potentially dangerous), the defunding of homeopathy was also driven by the conduct of CAM sceptics, who undermined homeopathy’s position in strikingly different ways in both contexts. This difference, we suggest, is a consequence of the diverging regulatory arrangements surrounding homeopathy (and CAMs more generally) in England and France—and the ambivalent effects of CAM’s regulation. If law and regulation have been a key component of CAM’s integration and (partial) acceptance over the past four decades, the fortunes of homeopathy in England and France highlight their unpredictability as techniques of governmentality: just as the formal regulatory systems in England and France have helped to normalise homeopathy in different ways, they have also incited and galvanised opposition, providing specific anchor-points for resistance by CAM sceptics.