The International Journal for Equity in Health have launched a new series on understanding the everyday practice of governance in low- and middle-income country health systems. The papers in the series:
- address governance through diverse health policy and system issues
- consider actors located at multiple levels of the system
- draw on multidisciplinary perspectives
- present a detailed examination of experiences in a range of African and Indian settings, led by authors who live and work in these settings
The overall purpose of the papers in this series is to provide an empirical and embedded research perspective on governance and equity in health systems. RESYST research has fed into the series with a selection of papers about health system devolution in Kenya.
RESYST papers in the series
- Devolution and its effects on health workforce and commodities management – early implementation experiences in Kilifi County, Kenya
- How does decentralisation affect health sector planning and financial management? a case study of early effects of devolution in Kilifi County, Kenya
- “We are toothless and hanging, but optimistic”: sub county managers’ experiences of rapid devolution in coastal Kenya
Challenging health system inequity by practicing everyday governance
RESYST’s co-Research Director, Lucy Gilson, has written a blog discussing the importance of this series that she co-edited to provide an empirical and embedded research perspective on governance and equity in health systems. Her blog describes how the series is unusual in three key ways:
- It presents a set of empirical papers reporting on real world governance experiences from a range of African and Indian settings.
- The studies all focus on what we call the everyday practice of governance, or the daily decision-making and meaning-making that governs and influences how health systems work and how they develop.
- The studies are all authored by embedded researchers working in the settings from which they report.
The blog addresses the ‘myth of governance’ and calls for governance to be understood in practical rather than abstract or theoretical terms.
