Health governance in Europe. Issues, challenges and theories

Abstract:

This book is one of the series Routledge/ECPR Studies in Political Science, which presents high-quality edited volumes on topics at the leading edge of current interest in political science and related fields, with contributions from European scholars and others who have presented work at ECPR workshops or research groups. The work focuses upon the health sector in presenting analysis of the close-knit relationship between the European Union and its Member States.

The book is organised over seven chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter one illustrates how the European Union, through the Commission and the European Court of Justice, has raised health policy to become one of the Community’s most important and scientifically challenging future policy fields. The clash between subsidiarity and the free movement requirements of the internal market is explored in chapter two. The third chapter examines European regulatory integration in the area of medical devices and the intrinsic dilemma of technology advancing at a pace too fast for national regulators to find and agree a solution. Chapter four concentrates upon EU health and consumer protection policy and the complex relationship between agricultural politics and health protection politics in Community policies. The fifth chapter explores the EU’s gradual involvement in blood policy following the HIV blood contamination crisis. Chapter six describes the pressure heaped upon the Council of Europe and the European Union by emotive issues such as artificial insemination, cloning and research on the human embryo. The Europeanisation of policies in the health field and the growing pattern of convergence are discussed in the final chapter. The conclusion draws together the research presented in the work, which might be summarised as showing that health integration is progressing well despite the political sensitivity of health being a national domain.

The work will interest scholars and students of health, European integration and policy-making.

Monika Steffen is Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and is affiliated to the Institut d'Études Politiques de Grenoble, University Pierre Mendès-France in Grenoble, France.