The latest issue of Policy & Politics is now available on shelves and online.
Our April issue opens with an article on The Politics of Climate Change based on the inspirational Policy & Politics Annual Lecture given by the world renowned sociologist, Lord Anthony Giddens. During the lecture, which attracted over 800 people, Lord Giddens presented a clear and pressing case for the need for urgent action to address climate change. He outlined a paradoxical trend where many will do little to address climate change until there are palpable and visible impacts – by which time it will be too late. Lord Giddens persuasively called for a renewed, digitally-enhanced global activism, to stimulate and to change attitudes to climate change risks, to promote alternative technologies, and to mobilise pressure on governments to take rapid action to reduce carbon emissions, thus saving the earth from impending catastrophe. You can also view the film of the lecture at http://www.bris.ac.uk/sps/policypolitcs/annuallecture2015/.
Bearing in mind the profile that the issue of housing has taken on in the election campaign, Danny Dorling’s is a particularly prescient article. In a typically provocative and engaging style, Dorling links housing tenure to matters related to inequality, health, and life expectancy, and concludes with a critique of housing policy that draws on historical and international sources for inspiration. Again with direct relevance to the election campaign, Owen Corrigan offers a paper that examines immigrant participation in the labour market. Corrigan’s is a quantitative analysis using multi-level modelling of data from sixteen European countries. He argues that measures taken by policy makers around legal status acquisition of migrants often impact later on labour market participation and then on to a range of other issues, such as poverty and welfare.
Christoph Arndt and Kees van Kersbergen offer a commentary on the Third Way, using Denmark as a case study. They analyse why social democratic parties return to Third Way policies even in the face of electoral defeat. Their work has broad relevance for other European countries where such political parties face similar dilemmas. Brendan Murtagh discusses Community Asset Transfer in Northern Ireland. With the ambiguities and contestedness of the process in mind, he suggests that the inclusiveness implied or suggested by the process are likely to be held back by a lack of policy, legislation, and skills in that part of the UK.
Of perennial interest to scholars of public policy and to many readers of this journal are issues of implementation. Kathryn Ellis’s analysis takes forward implementation studies in her article that uses the personalisation of adult social care, and a perspective from symbolic to political implementation, to enable a more fine-grained understanding of the forces at play.
Local government is the focus for two articles in the issue. For those interested in issues related to multi-level governance, service improvement, and central-local relationships, the piece by Michael Lewis and colleagues offers a novel perspective. The authors draw on empirical analysis in Wales, and relationships between local authorities and the Welsh Government in Cardiff to illustrate different trajectories of intervention by upper tier authorities. Keeping with the theme of local government, Rhys Andrews and Tom Entwistle examine local authority relationships in England with business. They argue that benefits from working in partnership with the business sector are only likely to be realised by those authorities with strong management capacity.
The final contribution in the issue is a Review Article, from Michael Howlett, Ishani Mukherjee, and Jun Woo. Review Articles attempt to crystallise a literature and move the debate on, and this one does so in tracking the emergence of a new design orientation in policy studies research.
We hope you enjoy the issue! Feedback always welcome 🙂
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