The present discussion on governance issues assumes that in the light of an increasingly pluralistic world society can no longer be governed in a classical hierarchical way. In order to guarantee an optimal allocation of public goods, among which we subsume health, increasing attention is being paid to other mechanisms of governance. One of the decisive questions in the discussion of alternative modes of governance is how to gain political coordination in the decision making process. This question applies as well to health politics. Governance issues in health politics have so far been a neglected field of research. In order to better understand the mechanisms of governance in this health politics the research project focuses on the degree of political coordination capacity defined as the capacity to direct resources of different governmental as well as non-governmental actors to a common political goal.