Coordination of a complex welfare system case: rehabilitation entity in Finland

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to analyse the institutional and political structures of the Finnish rehabilitation entity and the governmental efforts to improve the governance of the rehabilitation policy. Rehabilitation in Finland is a complex welfare system which has undergone several coordination attempts during the last two decades. The centrality of the coordination of this welfare system is obvious. Based on the content analysis of three Government's rehabilitation reports from 1994 to 2002 and their background papers, this article provides two main findings. First, the rehabilitation entity seems to be based on different funding strategies, different governing and different coordination models between the rehabilitation subsystems. Second, the governance discourse in the reports seems to be unchanging with a predominantly hierarchical mode. The article concludes with a discussion on the challenges to coordinate this kind of a complex welfare system as an entity and also how to overcome those challenges.