In this paper we introduce a theoretical and conceptual framework to analyse the role of monetary and non-monetary incentive schemes in the field of health services and their connections to human resources for health policies. The incentives that we will consider can be divided into four categories: (1) direct financial incentives; (2) indirect financial incentives; (3), non-financial incentives; (4) broader social incentives. Specifically, we stress the relevance of configurations that articulate different kinds of incentive conjointly from a bottom up and from a top down perspective (...).