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Systemic Governance Challenges and Well-Being

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Intelligent Health Policy

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the role of contemporary systemic governance challenges in society. Of particular interest is the question of how these challenges affect human health and well-being. By definition, health is a rather difficult concept since it contains many elements and dimensions. In this chapter, we argue that today we need a much broader understanding about human well-being than the ‘mere’ definition of health. Well-being addresses human life more comprehensively. Systemic governance challenges, based on the ongoing and pervasive technology revolution, exist as a result of changes in the quality and quantity of human beings, the stock of human knowledge particularly as applied to human command over nature and the institutional framework that defines the deliberate incentive structure of a society. These changes have an effect on the way we think, our ability to understand societal problems and our health and well-being. Governance challenges redefine the role of governance. We suggest that there are definitely limits for governing because of the complexity of society. Consequently, this affects how health policies and healthcare organisations operate in local, regional, national and transnational service spaces—service ecosystems consisting of public, private and non-governmental healthcare service providers. This also means that public sector management paradigms transform towards a new framework—a framework in which the role of government is to coordinate, integrate and set guidelines and meta-level societal objectives. This view holds that the current public sector management paradigms of the NPM and NPG have not only reached their maturity but will eventually come to an end. The complexity of society calls for complex public policies and a new understanding and analysis of the integrative role of the government. This, in turn, requires the competence to carry out a system-level redesign of healthcare.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA, Helsinki, Finland

    Petri Virtanen

  2. School of Management, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Jari Stenvall

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  1. Petri Virtanen
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Virtanen, P., Stenvall, J. (2018). Systemic Governance Challenges and Well-Being. In: Intelligent Health Policy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69596-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69596-9_2

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