Roundtable:
Theory and Tools: Comparative Health Systems and Policies in Practice
(Global Health Policy)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
There are some notable features setting health systems and policy research apart from other areas of public policy. These include delegated responsibility and private provision; professionalism and the street-level bureaucrat problem; and the relationship between state and organized medicine. These features have fuelled a sub-speciality in public policy studies that is focussed on health systems and policies, and within those, there is a growing area of specialization in comparative health policy.  The proliferation of research and policy attention in this subspecialty has not been met with the concomitant set of tools and methodologies to support this work. This roundtable will feature leading international scholars who will each present a major theoretical or methodological challenge with comparative health policy research along with some potential solutions to address it. Topics include: why governance is a necessary concept to consider in comparative policy research; moving beyond agenda setting to understand the scale and pace of health reform across countries; applying the decision space analysis tool to decentralized health systems; and understanding how ideas and intuitions play an explanatory role in comparative health policy research. This roundtable should be of considerable interest to scholars and students alike in undertaking comparative policy research in health sector and well beyond in other policy domains with distributed modes of delivery and regulation, as they will gain insight into the cutting edge theoretical and methodological debates and developments.
