Smart Governance for Health and Well-being: the Evidence

Book excerpt: Governance for health describes the attempts of governments and other actors to steer communities, whole countries or even groups of countries in the pursuit of health as integral to well-being. This study tracks recent governance innovations to address the priority determinants of health and categorizes them into five strategic approaches to smart governance for health. It relates the emergence of joint action by the health and non-health sectors, public and private actors and citizens, all of whom have an increasing role to play in achieving seminal changes in 21st century societies. The chapters presented here were initially commissioned as papers to provide the evidence base for the new European policy framework for health and well-being, Health 2020. Calling for a health-in-all-policies, whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach, Health 2020 uses governance as a lens through which to view all technical areas of health.