We are delighted to announce this year’s prizes for award winning papers published in Policy & Politics in 2024.
The Ken Young Prize for the best article judged to represent excellence in the field is awarded to Claire Dupont, Jeffrey Rosamond and Bishoy L. Zaki (University of Ghent, Belgium) for their article: Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy. Well deserved, Claire, Jeffrey, and Bishoy!
The Bleddyn Davies Prize recognising scholarship of the very highest standard by an early career academic, is awarded to Leah McCabe, University of Edinburgh, UK for her article: An intersectional analysis of contestations within women’s movements: the case of Scottish domestic abuse policymaking. Congratulations Leah!
In celebration of these winning articles, the co-editors’ elucidate the distinct and important contributions these articles make to their fields.
Dupont et al’s best paper of 2024 takes a historical view of the development of EU knowledge architecture relating to climate policy over time. The article’s aim is to explore whether developments in these knowledge exchanges reflect shifts in the politicisation of climate change.
This historical analysis is especially timely, given the urgency of action on climate change, and the central role of diverse knowledge in shaping our understanding of the problem. Additionally, the article offers a valuable empirical dataset – a longitudinal study spanning over a decade, featuring multiple interviews with a range of hard-to-reach people, and covering approximately 30 years of policy development.
To explore this issue, the authors outline a conceptual model of politicisation of political issues that accounts for two different effects: (i) prioritisation leading to enabling conditions for knowledge exchange, and (ii) polarisation leading to constraining conditions. Their analysis of the politicisation of climate change in the EU since the 1990s identifies two key ways in which knowledge exchanges develop: formal and informal. More specifically, in relation to knowledge exchange within the European Commission, their analysis reveals that, when the politicisation of climate change led to a negative or constraining context, informal knowledge exchanges stopped. This made it more challenging for multidisciplinary scientific knowledge to be included. However, formal knowledge exchanges such as expert groups, remained active, even under constraining conditions.
In this way, the article provides a nuanced assessment of the connections between the effects of politicisation and the potential for meaningful scientific-policy knowledge exchange. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of both the politicisation of climate change and the development of knowledge exchanges at the policy-science interface.
A worthy winner indeed of our Best Paper prize!
Our prize for the Best Paper by an Early Career Researcher goes to Leah McCabe for her article on contestations of intersectionality within women’s movements, importantly spelling out their policy impact.
To introduce her topic, McCabe reminds us that women’s movements often play a crucial role in highlighting the problem of violence against women and girls (VAWG) and driving policy change. But what happens when feminists cannot agree on the most effective way forward, she asks?
The process of shaping and shared understandings and constructions of policy problems is often a site of epistemic power struggles, leading to disagreements and even conflict. However, as movements seek to present a united front to strengthen their legitimacy, internal struggles frequently remain behind closed doors. This dynamic helps explain why framing conflicts within movements remains understudied. Consequently, there is a pressing need for sharper analytical tools to uncover and examine these internal contests.
This article provides such tools by advancing and applying a feminist institutional (FI) approach. FI bridges new institutionalist theory with gender analysis to illustrate the power dynamics shaping policymaking and movement strategies. By applying this framework, we can better understand how dominant frames and institutionalised perspectives are excluded in the process.
McCabe’s analysis illustrates this dilemma within the Scottish VAWG movement, which has made significant progress in incorporating feminist concerns in domestic abuse/VAWG policy. While the movement effectively leveraged new political structures enabled by Scottish devolution, it struggled to reach a consensus on defining domestic abuse, exposing persistent internal disagreements over the dominance of single-axis gendered approaches. This policy framing conceptualises domestic abuse as a cause and consequence of gender inequality and patriarchal structures – a perspective subsequently integrated in national policy in 2000. However, organisations supporting Black and minority ethnic victims/survivors have argued that this conceptualisation of the problem oversimplifies the issue, failing to account for the complexity of violence. Instead, feminists from these organisations have advocated for intersectional frames which acknowledge the interlocking gendered, classed, and racialised dynamics of violence. Ultimately, these actors have not been granted similar access to policymaking processes, resulting in the marginalisation of their perspectives.
McCabe concludes that, while gendering the problem of domestic abuse in Scottish policy marks a substantial win for the women’s movement (in contrast to gender-neutral definitions used in England and Wales), emphasising gender as the central focus in policy has closed off opportunities to apply more inclusive and intersectional approaches.
McCabe’s analysis focuses on the consequences of this dissension, arguing that resistance towards gendered and feminist understandings of the problem by actors outside the movement has fed into internal disagreements. She shows that feminists frequently emphasised the necessity of ‘protecting’ gendered frames from ongoing efforts to de-gender the policy debate. Consequently, they were cautious of adding further complexity to the problem by, for example, applying intersectionality. In a counterpoint to these views, McCabe argues that such resistance has created a self-policing dynamic within the movement, causing an unintentional barrier to engaging with intersectionality.
In a time of rising anti-gender political movements in Europe and beyond, this article provides crucial insights for feminists and policymakers on the short and long-term effects of resistance to feminist strategies and policy development. By emphasising the importance of feminist activists reflecting upon internal debates and refining their shared perspectives to successfully counteract resistance and promote inclusivity within their agendas, McCabe advances our understanding of this important issue and its policy impact.
Congratulations Leah!
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You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Dupont, C., Rosamond, J., and Zaki, B. L. (2024). Investigating the scientific knowledge–policy interface in EU climate policy. Policy & Politics 52, 1, 88-107, available from: < https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16861511996074>
McCabe, L. (2024). An intersectional analysis of contestations within women’s movements: the case of Scottish domestic abuse policymaking. Policy & Politics 52, 3, 521-545, available from: < https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2023D000000021>
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