Ways of Doing: Restorative Practices, Governmentality, and Provider Conduct in Post-Apartheid Health Care

In this article, we consider the conduct of post-apartheid health care in a policy context directed toward entrenching democracy, ensuring treatment-adherent patients, and creating a healthy populace actively responsible for their own health. We ask how tuberculosis treatment, antiretroviral therapy, and maternal services are delivered within South Africa's health system, an institutional site of colonial and apartheid injustice, and democratic reform. Using Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian notions of governmentality, we explore provider ways of doing to, for, and with patients in three health subdistricts. Although restorative provider engagements are expected in policy, older authoritarian and paternalistic norms persist in practice. These challenge and reshape, even 'undo' democratic assertions of citizenship, while producing compliant, self-responsible patients. Alongside the need to address pervasive structural barriers to health care, a restorative approach requires community participation, provider accountability, and a health system that does with providers as much as providers who do with patients.