What types of health evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system?

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by Geoff Bates, Sarah Ayres, Andrew Barnfield, and Charles Larkin

Good quality urban environments can help to prevent non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, mental health conditions and diabetes that account for three quarters of deaths globally (World Health Organisation, 2022). More commonly however, poor quality living conditions contribute to poor health and widening inequalities (Adlakha & John, 2022). Consequently, many public health advocates hope to convince and bring together the stakeholders who shape urban development to help create healthier places.

Evidence is one tool that can be used to convince these stakeholders from outside the health sector to think more about health outcomes. Most of the literature on the use of evidence in policy environments has focused on the public sector, such as politicians and civil servants (e.g., Crow & Jones, 2018). However, urban development decision-making processes involve many stakeholders across sectors with different needs and agendas (Black et al., 2021). While government sets policy and regulatory frameworks, private sector organisations such as property developers and investors drive urban development and strongly influence policy agendas.

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The many meanings of policy instruments: exploring individual and structural determinants in obesity policy

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by Robert Ralston, Charlotte Godziewski and Lauren Carters-White

How can obesity policy move away from individual-centred blaming or nudging and meaningfully address the political-economic root causes of poor diets? For many health inequalities researchers, policy instruments that regulate industry are seen as a promising way to target those root causes. More than a simple tweak, such policy instruments are implicitly expected to finally move public health policy away from a focus on individual responsibility characteristic of neoliberal governance. But is a change in policy instrument – even a substantive one – capable of sparking change in the underlying policy paradigm? Does proposing structure-targeting instruments (eg. industry regulation) necessarily mean that policymakers now think differently about the policy issue? This is the puzzle we explore in our article recently published in Policy & Politics entitled The many meanings of policy instruments: exploring individual and structural determinants in obesity policy. Our research focuses on the case of the UK’s 2020 Tackling Obesity Strategy. This strategy has been welcomed precisely because it proposes ‘harder’ regulation of commercial actors. While this may sound promising to many, we argue that the Tackling Obesity Strategy unfortunately lacks the radical change of past strategies.

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New citation metrics for Policy & Politics

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To all our authors, reviewers, readers, friends and supporters,

We’re delighted to announce that Policy & Politics has achieved a 2-year impact factor of 4.7, further improving its position in the top quartile of Political Science journals (16th out of 187 journals) and Public Administration journals (7th out of 49 journals).

In other citation metrics announced in 2023, Scopus’ CiteScore has ranked Policy & Politics in the 94th percentile (76 out of 1,415) of Public Administration journals and the Scimago Journal and country Rank (SJR) rankings place Policy & Politics in the top quartile (20 out of 199 journals) in Public Administration.

We are so grateful to all of you in our scholarly community for helping us achieve these excellent results. Thank you!

To celebrate the achievements of our authors, we have created a free collection of highly cited articles. All of the articles below are free to access until 31 July 2023. Read the Highly Cited Collection here.

With best wishes,

Oscar, Claire, Elizabeth and Chris

Policy & Politics Co-Editors

Policy & Politics at the International Conference on Public Policy #ICPP6, Toronto

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By Sarah Brown

Representatives from the Policy & Politics journal team are delighted to be attending the 6th International Conference on Public Policy #ICPP6 at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. We are looking forward to meeting up with many members of our community who are attending, as well as reaching out to scholars who don’t yet know the journal.

So, if you are attending #ICPP6 in person, please stop by the Bristol University Press stand in the exhibition area just in front of room KHE127 in Kerr Hall to say hello. Alternatively, track down one of our editors attending:

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Environmental governance: Staying the same but in different ways?

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by Christopher Galik

Times are changing. Rapidly. New, increasingly complex environmental problems continue to emerge. Yet, it would seem that the tools we have to manage that environment often lag behind the need.

In our recent article published in Policy & Politics, Institutional stability and change in environmental governance, we set out to better understand if, how, and why existing governing frameworks—or, as we call them, institutions—seem to persist.

Institutions can be defined as ‘integrated systems of rules that structure social interactions‘. We can think of these institutions as both the formal laws that govern management of a particular environmental problem or resource, but also the informal norms and understandings that influence the ways we interpret and implement those laws. There is a rich body of research that can help us how to understand how and why these institutions might change. On the flip side, much less attention has been paid to why these institutions might stay the same.

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What role should charitable funding play in the provision of public services?

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by Helen Abnett, James Bowles and John Mohan

Our recent research, published in Policy & Politics, shows that in the English and Welsh National Health Services (NHS), support from NHS-linked charities funds a wide range of goods and services. This includes substantial spending on amenities intended to make hospital visits more comfortable for patients and staff. Charities pay for newspapers, toiletry packs, toys for play areas, cushions and books. Charity support also funds education and wellbeing activity and medical research.

We also find that support from charities funds basic hospital equipment and furniture, such as vital signs monitors, bladder scanners, pulse oximeters, mattresses, and chairs, as well as some larger pieces of medical equipment (x-ray machines and ultrasounds).

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Understanding how policymakers respond to problems by learning from abroad

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by Umut Aydin

Policymakers frequently introduce policies originating in other countries, even when they are initially sceptical that they will work in their own country. Researchers have called this phenomenon ‘policy transfer’ and have sought to explain why and how it happens. However, frequently it is hard to distinguish why policymakers in one country adopt a foreign-inspired model: Is it because the policy is imposed by a powerful country or an international organization as part of a trade deal or membership negotiations? Or do policymakers imitate other countries’ policies voluntarily but rather automatically, without reflecting on whether it is appropriate for them? Alternatively, do they learn from other countries, observing how they tackle similar problems and borrowing from successful examples? 

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Design of services or designing for service? The application of design methodology in public service settings

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by Kirsty Strokosch and Stephen P. Osborne

The design of public services has traditionally been conducted by managers who aim to improve efficiency. In recent years though, human-centred design has been used increasingly to improve the experience of public service users, citizens and public service staff (Trischler and Scott, 2016). Design also encourages collaboration and creativity to understand problems and develop solutions (Wetter-Edman et al., 2014). This can include user research to understand current experiences and/or testing prototypes through quick repeated cycles of re-design.

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