ABSTRACT
In the first chapter, we wrote that health promotion is now understood as empowerment, takes the form of community development and makes partnerships between the public, private and voluntary sectors’ important tools in the development process. This can be interpreted as an attempt by the public sector to involve other sectors in the health promotion work, to share the responsibility for people’s health with the other sectors, and to stimulate people to take more responsibility for their own health. This is similar to a process known from regional development and is often called the ‘governance turn’ in regional policies. In this chapter, our intention is to explore to what extent experiences from regional planning and develop - ment work can be transferred to public health work and become relevant knowledge for problem-solving there. In order to address this question, we first of all discuss the terms ‘government’ and ‘governance’. Then, we sum - marize some of the findings from research done on implement ing governance in public health, and we compare these findings with experiences from regional planning and development.
