Re-assessing addiction policy: The governance of dependencies

Addiction policy is a major contemporary issue in most countries of the world. The tremendous changes occurring in this field within the past years, both at the national and the international level, make it a significant challenge to contemporary governance. Although the policy agendas of each government on these public health issues face very similar questions, they are too often subject to isolated analysis. In fact, drug, alcohol and tobacco regulations would considerably benefit from a systematic empirical and theoretical cross-examination. There is a growing need for bringing together the analysis of these regulatory areas in order to achieve a better understanding of the political, health, economic and symbolic challenges they face. This panel promotes a dialogue between different areas of study of addictions policies. We invite contributions that focus on the policy design, implementation processes as well as the results achieved through different mixes of policy tools. As a particular feature of addiction policies, specific attention will be paid to the tension between politics-like and expert-like modes of policymaking in this domain. By encouraging cross-national as well as cross-sector reflection, we hope this panel will contribute to a better theoretical integration of addiction policy studies.