Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed health policy frontstage and exposed
the stark differences in government capacities to respond to the crisis.
This has created new demands for comparative heath policy to support
knowledge creation on a large scale. However, comparative health policy
has been ill prepared; studies have focused on health systems and used
typologies together with descriptive, quantitative methods. This clouds
the view for the multi-level nature of health policy, the diverse actors
involved and the many societal facets of governance performance. We
argue for health policy as a bottom-up process with diverse interests
and suggest researching these processes comparatively to support policy
learning. This calls for expanding the methodology of comparative health
policy to include approaches that make greater use of explorative,
qualitative research. We introduce possible developmental pathways to
illustrate what this may look like. Firstly, the Pan-European Commission
points to novel transnational and cross-sectoral collaborations, and a
coordinated policy response to global challenges like the pandemic.
Secondly, feminist networks show how to shift the focus towards social
inequalities and the health needs of women and vulnerable populations.
Thirdly, researchers demonstrate the value of new knowledge emerging
from small-scale bottom-up comparisons based on structured assessment
frameworks. Together, these developmental pathways demonstrate the
potential to refocus comparative health policy towards greater
responsiveness to the societal performance of governments, such as
social inequalities created by the COVID-19 pandemic. This also opens
opportunities for strengthening the global outlook of comparative health
policy.