Collaboration Committees between Municipalities and Health Enterprises: Arena for Power Struggle or Forum for Deliberation?

With the implementation of the Norwegian Coordination Reform from 2012, municipalities and health enterprises were legally obliged to enter into coordination agreements in various areas. At the same time they established collaboration committees in order to improve the transfer of patients between specialist health services in hospitals and primary healthcare services in the municipalities. The new agreements and committees were supposed to be built on similar arrangements established on a voluntary basis before the reform. This article analyses negotiation processes and power relations within the collaboration committees both before and after the Coordination Reform. Have there been any changes with regard to initiatives and agenda setting, agreement and conflict, or the partiesʼ influence? Theoretically, the study is based on different types of negotiations and power relations: strategic bargaining, deliberative negotiations and deliberation on the one hand, and «power over» and «power to» on the other. Empirically, the article is based on surveys among the members of the collaboration committees in Western Norway (the Helse Vest region), carried out respectively before and after the reform.