Balans för jämlik hälsa : En analys av Sveriges strävan efter jämlik hälsa utifrån ett governmentalityperspektiv.

Sammanfattning: This paper sets out to conduct a critical policy analysis of the government report SOU 2017:47 with a focus on Sweden’s pursuit of equal health. This is done within a theoretical framework based mainly in governmentality theory, with a focus on governing through self-regulation. This theoretical framework identifies a need for a balance between people’s ability to problematize their behaviour (self-regulation) and their ability and capacity to act on their problematization for equal health to be possible. Due to Sweden’s pursuit for equal health the assumption is made that this balance must be absent form Swedish policies. This problem is made operationalized by searching for indications of a focus on “the individual” or “the system”.Hence the goal of this paper is to identify how and if this balance can be identified in SOU 2017:47. This is done with the method “What’s the problem represented to be?” (WPR) based on Bacci’s (2009) approach to analyse public policy. The method is structured after six questions that sets out to find and analyse how problems are represented in policies. The problem representation shows the problem of unequal health as resource based which can be solved with the help of the Swedish welfare system. The analysis shows that no balance can be identified in SOU 2017:47. Instead the results show that focus lies on various systematic changes in regards to public and welfare institutions. Therefore it can be concluded that focus lies on people’s abilities and capabilities to act and no clear balance can be identified.