Barriers to Co-Governance: Examining the “Chemistry”

This article aims at studying the dynamics of organized home care and particular problems in the delivery of social services, analyzed against the background of the international recasting of welfare systems. Challenging an influential academic discourse on the advent of new forms of network governance thought to improve service provision, three jurisdictions—Germany, England, and Quebec—are compared with regard to how home-care networks are actually configured and the rationales which appear to shape the interaction between network members. The article argues that notwithstanding the extensive literature extolling the virtues of network governance or the possibility of reconciling different governance modes, home care operates through arrangements embracing con-flicting rationales. Rather than providing for mutual adjustment and shared perspectives, contempo-rary home-care networks tend to produce tensions and outcome problems as a result of the “biased” interplay between various steering rationales within given institutional arrangements and different meta-governance regimes. KEY WORDS: mixed governance, welfare systems, home-care services, comparative social polic