This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This book analyses the considerable variation in the shares of private provision for core services in education, health and social services, in the Scandinavian countries.

The chapters compare countries, service areas, and the for-profit, non-profit and public sectors. Each focuses on different levels of change: the mix of welfare providers, national laws and regulations, governance in municipalities, nursing homes and schools, and finally, the consequences experienced by the users of the services. 

The authors ask which combinations of governance structures, service sector providers, and user choice give the best results for active citizenship. Promoting Active Citizenship will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Public Administration and Management, Non-Profit Management, Social Policy, Innovation in Public Service, Social Care and Education and School Research.

“Karl Henrik Sivesind and his colleagues have given us a worthy successor to Richard Titmuss’ classic Gift Relationship by providing a serious contemporary analysis of the consequences of different patterns of reliance on nonprofits, for-profits,  and states in providing crucial protections against the vagaries of old age, ill-health, and inadequate education,  showing in the process how important is  the  preservation of a common commitment to core values of equal access and universal protection reinforced and protected by a caring state.” (Lester M. Salamon, Johns Hopkins University, USA)

Offers internationally relevant insights drawn from experimental Scandinavian welfare policies Provides conclusions based on analysis between different sectors, including public and for-profit service providers Addresses the voucher system and competition between schools as a key case study Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.