Governing Public Health: EU Law, Regulation and Biopolitics

Description

This book contributes towards EU studies and the growing discourse on law and public health. It uses the EU’s governance of public health as a lens through which to explore questions of legal competence and its development through policy and concrete techniques, processes and practices, risk and security, human rights and bioethics, accountability and legitimacy, democracy and citizenship, and the nature, essence and ‘future trajectory’ of the European integration project. These issues are explored first, by situating the EU’s public health strategy within the overarching architecture of governance and subsequently by examining its operationalisation in relation to the key public health problems of cancer, HIV/AIDS and pandemic planning. The book argues that the centrality and valorisation of scientific and technical knowledge and expertise in the EU’s risk-based governance means that citizen participation in decision-making is largely marginalised and underdeveloped – and that this must change if public health and the quality, accountability and legitimacy of EU governance and its regulation are to be improved. Subsequently the book goes on to argue that the legitimating discourses of ethics and human rights, and the developing notion of EU (supra-)stewardship responsibility, can help to highlight the normative dimensions of governance and its interventions in public health. These discourses and dimensions provide openings and possibilities for citizens to power ‘technologies of participation’ and contribute important supplementary knowledge to decision-making. Mark L Flear is a Lecturer in Law at Queen’s University, Belfast. ’In defending the case for making public health policies more responsive and robust through citizen participation, the author charts the growing role of the EU as an actor in this domain and its formal legal competence. The discussion on the overarching EU health governance architecture and health strategy is accompanied by wonderfully written case studies on cancer, HIV/AIDS and other pandemics and serious cross-border threats to health. Risk, security, regulation, human rights and bioethics, all receive careful attention … Governing Public Health defies disciplinary boundaries; it brings together insights from sociology, political science, law and critical legal studies in order to uncover the complex regulation of public health in the European Union. It is a timely book which will appeal to scholars of the European Union in many disciplines. It provides an indispensable roadmap to the links between law, (bio)politics and citizen engagement in the regulation of public health’. From the ’Foreword’ by Professor Dora Kostakopoulou, School of Law, University of Warwick ’Governing Public Health stands on its own, as it masterfully blends together law, politics, sociology and numerous other disciplines to come up with a picture of the EU as an agent of biopolitics, which is as plausible as it is potentially disturbing. The book is an attack on the distortions and pitfalls of the dominant risk-based model of public health governance, representing the first – long overdue! – biopolitical analysis of EU law. Flear’s crusade is to overturn our accepted vision of managing public health by arguing that the governed have the capacity to contribute important supplementary knowledge on the distortions and pitfalls in order to improve governance. This book deserves all respect and admiration.’ Professor Dimitry Kochenov, University of Groningen ’This book focuses on participation as a possible mediator of the relationship between law, on the one hand, and science and technology on the other. It argues that the tension between the democratic and technocratic aspects of regulation could, perhaps, be reduced by the use of participatory processes. That argument has a wider resonance than the public health field on which the book concentrates. EU scholars in the diverse fields where expertise and preferences circle each other nervously will want to study and apply the book’s central ideas, and will find that they are clearly and attractively presented, and gain authority from the range of theory on which Flear relies.’ Professor Gareth Davies, VU University Amsterdam