Actor-Networking European Union Mental Health Governance, 1999-2019

Abstract

Over the past three decades, processes of assessing and governing mental healthcare have emerged at the European Union level. Consisting almost entirely of ‘soft law’ instruments, EU mental health governance (EUMHG) has incorporated policy-makers, mental healthcare providers, research scientists, non-governmental organizations, and patients and families across Europe in processes of mental health governance. This paper explores the role of the European Commission in EUMHG. It proposes that recent attempts to theorise the Commission’s role in European integration over-emphasise EU-level institutional relations and thus neglect the knowledge relations that are central to policy areas such as mental health. It therefore adopts an analytic framework based on Actor Network Theory that enables more accurate understanding of those relations. Applying this framework to EUMHG over time, it identifies three distinct networks that have emerged in EUMHG, all built via Commission initiatives. This analysis reveals the Commission’s central but not independent role in EUMHG’s survival, and illustrates how different kinds of actors held ‘expert’ roles in EUMHG depending on the way in mental (ill) health was problematised in EUMHG. The paper therefore suggests a new concern regarding the nature of ‘soft’ EU law, namely, its influence on knowledge and authority in transnationally constructed policy.