 The changing contours of experimental governance in European health careKatherine Fierlbeck Social Science & Medicine, 2014, vol. 108, issue C, 89-96 Abstract: For over a decade, beginning in the late 1990s, discussion over softer modes of governance animated academic scholarship in the fields of law, politics, and public policy. This debate was especially pronounced in Europe. Since the late 2000s, however, discussion of this approach has declined precipitously. Is the “soft governance” model dead? Or, more precisely, has the economic crisis killed it? This article argues that, to the contrary, the EU's austerity measures have made softer governance more relevant in two quite distinct ways. Administratively, new mechanisms of health policy coordination are able to provide policy solutions in a much more effective way than could more formal and rigid forms of legal harmonisation. Politically, it establishes a normative perspective which unifies actors across a number of administrative units and challenges the dominant ideological force of the market-based principles upon which the EU's austerity policies are constructed. Keywords: Health policy; European Union; New governance; Soft governance; Fiscal crisis; Discursive institutionalism; Open method of coordination; Joint Action strategies (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:108:y:2014:i:c:p:89-96 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.02.040 Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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