Abstract
This article examines the promotion of a regional strategy of physical activity for public health in Sweden. Based on focus group interviews, we explore the rationality of governing public health through the strategy and consider how the strategy and its rationality become intertwined in contemporary forms of governing welfare. The strategy operates through the dissemination of good examples and spotlights the role of various forms of cross-sector and inter-agency cooperation, underpinned by notions of trust and complementarity. We analyze the non-coercive and subtle modes of power, in terms of how facilitation and inspiration are assumed to operate. We conclude that the policy discourse promoted forms a biopolitics of inspiration. This rationality provides an intelligible response to a range of policy problems, of how the public health of the population can be governed in a time marked by social inequality, financial austerity, and decentralized and constitutionally limited government.