Reframing Health and Health Policy in Ireland: A Governmental Analysis

Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning of an international literature which develops the potential of Foucauldian-inspired notions of governmentality in order to understand the construction of health problems, policies and practices. Reframing Health and Health Policy in Ireland is the first book to bring these insights to bear on the Irish health policy arena. Drawing on a range of examples, including smoking, obesity, child health, ageing and disability, the collection explores how specific health issues have been constructed as problematic and in need of intervention in the Irish state. The book considers the strategies, discourses and technologies involved in the art of governing health in advanced liberal democracies, and makes an exciting and original theoretical contribution to the study of Irish health policy. Through accessible empirical examples it demonstrates how governmentality can be operationalised and utilised in heath policy analysis. Building on this dialectic between policy and social theory, the authors reflect on the potential of govermentality for developing a critical politics of health policy in Ireland. This study will be of interest to students and academics in social policy, sociology, political science and health-based disciplines, including public health and nursing, and to those concerned with exploring how social theory can be used to re-orientate and develop our understandings of health and social policy agendas and practices. It will appeal to those working within the field of public health who are directly involved with the social and political relation between health problems and policy.