Nasjonale veiledere – «soft governance» og «nudging»?

Abstract

This chapter examines how addiction and mental health policy can be designed to meet the objective of the new paradigm of community-based services applying soft governance tools while maintaining the balance between hierarchical governance and local autonomy. Nudging is a specific tool within the framework of soft governance. Furthermore, such instruments leave great latitude for local authorities. We explore how we can understand the development towards today’s dominant ideological perspectives, i.e. normalization, empowerment, towards recovery and “the patient first”, as a development process where soft governance is the overriding concept, increasingly providing room for development of more specific strategies characterized by nudging. Finally, we discuss some implications of using such instruments in practice.