title: The changing contours of experimental governance in European health care.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University, PO Box 15000, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2, Canada. Electronic address: k.fierlbeck@dal.ca.
authors.forename: Katherine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Fierlbeck
mesh_terms: D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D005062:European Union / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006291:Health Policy; D006801:Humans; D011057:Politics
keywords: Discursive institutionalism; European Union; Fiscal crisis; Health policy; Joint Action strategies; New governance; Open method of coordination; Soft governance