Governmentality, discourse and space in the New Zealand health care system, 1991–2003

This paper considers recent health care reform in New Zealand in the context of the continuing evolution of the ‘neoliberal project’. It advocates the adoption of a Foucauldian governmentality approach to analysis as a productive way to extricate the changing understandings of space within evolving New Zealand health discourses. We analyse two policy documents released 9 years apart which, when examined together, encapsulate the changing discourses of the health care system in the 1990s. We note that through the 1990s the central governing rationality has shifted from competition towards cooperation in health care delivery. While place was held to be subservient to the market at the beginning of the decade, health care has been increasingly re-territorialised through ‘community’ and its associated constructions.