The role of civil society in health policy processes

The HEPVIC project aims to identify and generate knowledge about a variety of different themes and their influence on policy processes in the area of maternal health through a comparative study in three Asian countries, Vietnam, India and China. One of the selected themes is the role of civil society in maternal health policy processes. The aim is to look at what civil society is in a specific context, how it emerges and the different roles it plays in the policy process. This presentation will focus on the impact of civil society on policy outcomes and how actively and representatively civil society was engaged during the policy process in the three study countries. One of the findings of the HEPVIC research is that policy actors and their relative power is emerging as one of the key determinants in health policy processes, even more so than the strength of evidence or other factors that have been studied. This outcome will be looked at through the role of civil society at different levels and moments in the policy process. The results that will be presented will focus primarily on the Vietnam case study. The findings of this research form an important contribution to the current literature on this topic because it tries to empirically locate civil society in a specific social and political context. Further this presentation attempts to empirically locate the emergence and role of civil society in health policy processes through an examination of the relationship between the nature of civil society emergence/ engagement and the content of the policy; the institutions that are initiating it (legislative or bureaucracy) and the characteristics of the ‘policy makers’. The outcomes of the study will be used to provide recommendations to enhance the health policy making process in developing countries.