Catherine Durose discusses her latest article with co-authors Jonathan Justice and Chris Skelcher. Catherine is on the Editorial Board of Policy & Politics and is based at the University of Birmingham, UK.
What is the best way to organize the design and implementation of public policies and services? We do not pretend to know. Further, we would argue that a meaningful answer can be provided only contingently. It might therefore be more productive to ask a slightly different question: How can we go about figuring out – in a given situation at a specific time with respect to a specific complex of decisions and services – what the best way might be?
A century ago, industrial engineer Frederick Taylor famously argued that managers ought to determine the one best way to do any given task, and then train their subordinates to do things in precisely that best way. Contemporary scholars of organization, however, tend to agree that activities for which a single best way can be prescribed and implemented are very rare. In the 1950s, scholars in the rapidly suburbanizing U.S. debated whether local -government policies and services were better organized through a multiplicity of jurisdictions or through unitary consolidated metropolitan governments. Versions of that debate continue to this day, not only in the U.S. and Continue reading →
The research reported in our article UK Employment Services: understanding provider strategies in a dynamic strategic action field was carried out in 2012 as part of the ESRC-funded Third Sector Research Centre’s programme on the third sector’s role in public services. From the outset, we were aware that the third sector had long played a significant role in the mixed economy of employment services, and this was at a point when the UK Coalition government’s new Work Programme was being implemented. Our key interest was to explore the ways in which the third sector was involved in this new programme, and to examine to what extent its contribution could be seen as distinctively different to that of other sectors.
Internationally, few studies have directly addressed the role of sector of organisations, and where they do, they rarely do so in a comparative manner: focusing for instance on the third sector in isolation. Instead, we set out to explore how private, Continue reading →
We were delighted to welcome Lord Anthony Giddens on 17th March 2015 to speak on The Politics of Climate Change. The event was fully booked some weeks beforehand and the Great Hall was packed on the night. Lord Giddens did not disappoint in presenting a clear and pressing case for the need for urgent action to address the problem of climate change.
Below is a film of the whole lecture in case you want to listen again, or if you were not able to get a ticket. We are most grateful to Lord Giddens for allowing us to use it.
Recently, there has been much debate about the best approach to take with those returning from the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Various proposals have been mooted, from forcing them to attend ‘deradicalisation programmes’ to banning them from returning to the UK. Relatively few of these ideas are rooted in a strong evidence base. That is in part because we still have much to learn about what might motivate someone to permanently reject violent extremism.
Although knowledge about what might inform the movement away from terrorism has developed in recent years, we have only a limited understanding of the aims of this work. Questions remain over what it is that interventions with those who have been involved in terrorism should seek to achieve. Is it ‘deradicalisation’, commonly understood as attitudinal change? Or is it disengagement, focusing more on behavioural change? And by what measures might we recognise ‘successful deradicalisation’? This last question is the focus of my recent paper: ‘Conceptualising ‘success’ with those convicted of terrorism offences’.
These questions are not only of concern to policy makers and academics, they are a significant issue for those on the frontline of this work, those organisations, such as the probation services, who are tasked with supervising convicted ‘terrorists’ when they have been released from prison. In my research with statutory and community-based organisations working with former prisoners, this question of what the work was seeking to achieve represented a significant gap in the knowledge base.
To better understand this issue, I spent many hours interviewing and observing practitioners. Through this, I developed a framework for understanding what the work was trying to achieve. Grouped under two broad headings of public protection and reducing the risk of reoffending/encouraging desistance, I identified 13 measures by which to interpret the processes involved with trying to move someone away from extremism. Three broad conclusions about what might constitute effective engagement emerged from the research:
Rather than attempting to explicitly ‘deradicalise’ or ‘deprogramme’ individuals, there was a concerted effort to reintegrate them back into society. For example, helping them to develop more positive social networks or supporting them as they tried to find work.
Instead of focusing exclusively on trying to deconstruct the motivation to reoffend, there were attempts – particularly from community-based organisations – to redirect this motivation. For instance, if someone was concerned with issues around social justice, there were efforts to find an outlet within the local community that might enable the individual to pursue these goals in a way that contributed to, rather than threatened, society.
Finally, attention was paid to developing resilience to negative influences that might undermine any growing commitment to reintegrating back into wider society. Developing former prisoners’ critical thinking skills was one way practitioners tried to do this, enabling them to interrogate the information designed to motivate them to re-engage in extremist networks in a more critical light.
Importantly, the processes involved with moving people away from extremism are complex and highly individualised. Practitioners therefore reflected the need to listen carefully to each person’s account of his or her involvement, and understand the particular issues relevant to their journey into and out of extremism. The need to approach the person holistically rather than focusing on specific ideological, attitudinal, or behavioural measures of ‘risk’ also emerged as an important part of best practice. Finally, taking into account the significant barriers faced by these former prisoners was vital. People convicted of ‘ordinary’ crime face challenges finding work and being accepted into the community, those convicted of terrorism offences face even tougher hurdles.
However difficult it is to talk about ‘rehabilitating terrorists’, if the aims of successful reintegration and long-term public protection are to be met, it is a conversation we need to have. Not least because meaningful reintegration demands not only a commitment from the individual, but also one from society, that they will accept the individual back into the community and allow them to move on.
Early in my studies a supervisor recommended that I replicate a key publication in my research area on the relationship of public opinion and social welfare policy. Throughout my entire dissertation studies I couldn’t do it. This is how I arrived at the following conclusion:
Different researchers (or teams) who work with the same data and employ the same statistical models will not arrive at the same results.
My study was actually a reanalysis, not a replication because I took the same data and methods as the original researchers. Of course in true replication studies researchers do not expect to arrive at identical or even similar results. The subjective perceptions of the scientists and the unique observational contexts lead to variations in results. But with secondary data and reproduction of statistical models how are different outcomes possible?! These secondary observer effects, as I label them,
How can we measure leadership? What makes a leader succeed or fail? Dr Mark Bennister at Canterbury Christ Church University has been gathering scholars together to investigate the idea of ‘leadership capital’ and offer a way to understand why some leaders ‘spend’ their ‘capital’ successfully and others squander or waste it. Dr Bennister is co-convenor of the PSA Political Leadership Specialist Group and is leading a section on political leadership at the 2015 ECPR general Conference in Montreal in August.
2014 was the year of ‘Capital’ thanks to Thomas Piketty. Piketty’s weighty tome breathed new life into economic analysis of economic inequality. Capital, for Piketty is a stock – its wealth comes from what has been accumulated in all prior years combined. So what happens if we take a concept of accumulated capital and apply it to political leadership? This presents us with alternative method of understanding why political leaders succeed or fail, how they remain in office, and how they win elections.
If we take the definitions of capital by Piketty and others and apply them to leadership we can think of political capital as a stock of ‘credit’ accumulated Continue reading →
Elected in 2011 and 2012 respectively, George Ferguson (Bristol) and Sir Peter Soulsby (Leicester) have been working hard to show what mayors can do for our cities. At a recent event hosted at the Institute for Government, Tom Gash heard them raise two questions that any government after May 2015 will have to answer. Should we have more mayors? And should they have more powers?
Elected mayors were first established in England following the election of the Mayor of London in 2000. Later that year the Local Government Act paved the way for votes to set up mayors in a number of other local authorities. Eleven more mayors had been introduced by 2002.
Lord Anthony Giddens presented the Policy and Politics Annual Lecture, in Bristol, on Tuesday 17th March. The theme of the lecture was to consider what recent progress has been made on climate change and what stops us doing more. Lord Giddens concluded his lecture with a proposal for the need for a new paradigm to provide the change needed to generate the radical solutions that are now necessary.
Lord Anthony Giddens first wrote “The Politics of Climate Change” in 2007/08, a time of optimism and hope, when change to reduce carbon emissions seemed top of the agenda both nationally and globally. It was a time of opportunity, seized by politicians like Al Gore who published his book and produced the film “An Inconvenient Truth” to great acclaim. It was also the time of the biggest United Nations meeting on climate change in Copenhagen where over 100 nations met to discuss measures to address the problems of climate change and reducing carbon emissions.
Lord Giddens moved us through this period of optimism to one of dashed hopes and increasing fears following the lack of agreement in Copenhagen. He talked about the difficulties of measuring climate change and the range of indicators needed to assess impacts. He argued that despite the advancements in science and knowledge, there are still many sceptics who refuse to acknowledge the very real changes we are experiencing. Indeed, one of the problems with climate change, he explained, lies in its irreversible nature, the fact that once greenhouse gases are in Continue reading →
A longer version of this article was originally published on LSE’s EUROPP blog
National officials working in international bureaucracies regularly invoke the fear that member-states strategically use such officials for influencing decision-making to their advantage. Using ones national officials as ‘Trojan horses’ naturally implies a lack of autonomy of such officials working in international organizations, which critically threatens the independence of the organization as such. While national officials’ potential lack of autonomy has been extensively discussed in both academic and public circles, the underlying mechanisms are less well understood. Our analysis takes one step in this direction.
A key factor that is often brought forward to explain any (potential) lack of autonomy among national officials in international Continue reading →
It is curious how little traction the idea of the social investment welfare state (SIWS) has had in British social policy discussion. The basic idea behind SIWS is that some forms of public social spending contribute positively to creating an innovative economy. Spending on education, skills and active labour market policy are the most obvious elements, but spending on high-quality childcare is also part of the concept. This is partly for its contribution to early-years education but also for making life reasonable for the two-parent-earner family that increasingly characterizes the most productive economies. Of course, elements of this enter British discussions, especially education, but it comes in piecemeal, whereas it gains most strength Continue reading →
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