The idea of innovation has become one of the most persistent and sought-after today. While too conceptually elusive to pin down to a single statement, innovation can be broadly understood as a process whereby new elements and approaches are introduced to existing ones, in an attempt to solve problems, add value, and contribute to knowledge. Being a problem-solving, value-oriented process, it is no surprise that the concept of innovation is increasingly finding footholds in different theoretical spaces within policy and political sciences, from collaborative arrangements, democratic practices, policy design and experimentation, to behavioural and cognitive theories. Within the public sector, innovation can be understood as the creation of new policies, services, advisory, governance and political arrangements, often leading to the development of novel shared views of what is acceptable and expected by the public as beneficiaries.
Intuitively, policy learning has a family resemblance to policy innovation. It seems almost self-evident that they should be considered together in the explanation of policy dynamics. Yet the two literatures have developed independently of each other. Studies which put them in conversation are few.
All articles featured in this blog post are free to access until 31 October 2024
It’s that time of year again when course syllabi are updated with fresh research. We hope to make this easier with the essential reading list below, which features some of the most significant research relevant to public policy students that we’ve published over the last year. We feature nine articles and a special issue for teaching topical themes such as health policy, policy learning and advocacy. All articles are ideal for Public Policy, Politics and Social Policy classes alike.
As always, we welcome your feedback on the articles featured, as well as future unit topics you’d like to see covered! Let us know what you’re teaching and how we can help!
Our first theme focuses on a substantive policy area that is increasingly taught in public and social policy courses, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and on-going climate crisis: health policy.
Our first article, “Analysing the ‘follow the science’ rhetoric of government responses to COVID-19” by Margaret Macaulay and colleagues, has been one of the most widely read and cited articles of last year and was the winner of our Best Paper prize for 2023. This is not surprising, as it advances bold and well evidenced claims on a hot topic in public health governance. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic – and in the face of widespread anxiety and uncertainty – governments’ mantra that they were “just following the science” was meant to reassure the public that decisions about pandemic responses were being directed by the best available scientific evidence. However, the authors claim that making policy decisions based only on scientific evidence is impossible (if only because ‘the science’ is always contested) and undemocratic (because governments are elected to balance a range of priorities and interests in their decisions). Claiming to be “just following the science” therefore represents an abdication of responsibility by politicians.
Our second featured article, entitled What types of evidence persuade actors in a complex policy system? by Geoff Bates and colleagues, explores the use of evidence to influence different groups across the urban development system to think more about health outcomes in their decisions. Their three key findings are: (i) evidence-based narratives have wide appeal; (ii) credibility of evidence is critical; and (iii) many stakeholders have priorities other than health, such as economic considerations. The authors conclude that these insights can be used to frame and present evidence that meets the requirements of different urban development stakeholders and persuade them to think more about how the quality of urban environments affects health outcomes.
Each time a crisis hits, be it a natural disaster, pandemic or a corruption scandal, several ad hoc units are assembled by governments for quick action, only to be dismantled soon after the crisis becomes manageable or settles. Are these groups deployed as a signal of assurance to the public that indeed some action is being taken, or to bypass long-drawn bureaucratic processes in favour of quick action or to efficiently assemble and utilise resources under crisis? Perhaps all of the above. The possibilities of how ad hoc groups can be structured and the range of functions these can offer are plenty.
The term ‘adhocracy’ first featured in the book titled ‘The Temporary Society’ (Bennis and Slater, 1968) to describe flexible, unstructured and adaptable organisational models, which operated in stark contrast to a typical bureaucracy. Owing to their transient nature, policy learning opportunities brought about by ad hoc groups, have received little attention in public policy literature. Our new article in Policy and Politics presents insights from an exploratory study to understand the diverse institutional roles played by ad hoc groups deployed during crisis.
Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis.
Peter Aagaard,Marleen Easton, and Brian Head
We are living in turbulent times. Governments have been confronted by multiple interacting crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, global warming, and economic instability. All over the world, governments face challenges beyond their control, ranging from financial and political disruptions to pandemics, climate change, natural disasters, and threats to national security. These crisis situations are compounded by inevitable gaps in knowledge and uncertainties. This calls for policy advisors. Policy advisors do not just seek to maximise the efficiency of governance during crises. Policy advising also has implications for democratic accountability and legitimacy.
Our article, just published, forms the introduction to a special issue on policy advising during crises. We collect, connect, and provide an overview of the literature in the field, and seek to build on this knowledge, offering new insights.
Over recent years and with a rising number of crises and complex policy issues, policymakers are increasingly engaging in systematic and continuous policy learning. These policy learning processes aim at reaching better understandings of policy issues and their contexts. One of the aims of this learning is to develop better ways of solving societal challenges (through forms of technical learning) or consolidating and cultivating political power (through political learning). In other words, policymakers face problems that are difficult to solve, so they seek out knowledge and information from different sources in order to learn how to effectively solve these problems.
With its longstanding tradition, policy learning research has illuminated several aspects, mainly focused on explaining how policy actors learn, what lessons they come out with, and the role that learning processes play in policymaking. During crises, policy learning can contribute to effective crisis responses. However, it can also cause confusion or induce policy failure.
Policy & Politics sponsored an international symposium on Ambiguity and Crisis: Disasters, Governance and Social Risk in February 2016 convened by Editorial Advisory Board member Professor Nikolaos Zahariadis from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, US (pictured below) and Professor Tom Birkland from North Carolina State University, US. You can read more about it in their article below.
While ambiguity is a fact of public life, scholarship on its implications for public policy is not yet well developed. The gap is particularly deep during periods of crisis because of rapid and turbulent change and the lack of adequate information and limited information processing capacities. We have a good understanding of the strategic use of ambiguity but do not fully comprehend its implications for creating winners and losers in public policy.
On February 28, 2016, Tom Birkland and Nikolaos Zahariadis convened a two-day symposium on ambiguity and its effects during crises. The symposium explored the implications of ambiguity on policy making as conceptualized through the multiple streams approach (MSA) during man-made crises and natural disasters. The approach draws inspiration from March and Olsen’s garbage can model of organizational choice and John Kingdon’s agenda setting framework. MSA contends there is a “right” (and “wrong”) time to propose solutions to pressing public problems. The likelihood of any one idea becoming official government policy has as much to do with when Continue reading →
While ambiguity is a fact of public life, scholarship on its implications for public policy is not yet well developed. The gap is particularly deep during periods of crisis because of rapid and turbulent change and the lack of adequate information and limited information processing capacities. We have a good understanding of the strategic use of ambiguity but do not fully comprehend its implications for creating winners and losers in public policy.
On February 28, 2016, Tom Birkland and Nikolaos Zahariadis are putting together a two-day symposium on ambiguity and its effects during crises. The symposium explores the implications of ambiguity on policy making as conceptualized through the multiple streams approach (MSA) during man-made crises and natural disasters. The approach draws inspiration from March and Olsen’s garbage can model of organizational choice and John Kingdon’s agenda setting framework. MSA contends there is a “right” (and “wrong”) time to propose solutions to pressing public problems. The likelihood of any one idea becoming official government policy has as much to do with when it is proposed as it does with the political ideology of policy makers and the ability of entrepreneurial individuals to advocate, broker, persuade, or coerce others into accepting it. The overall aim is to enrich and expand this literature, assess its value-added relative to other policy process approaches, and place the findings within the broader political environment. What does the approach tell us about governance (both in terms of capacity and performance) under crisis? Continue reading →
Jon Pierre is Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg and professor of public governance at the Melbourne School of Government, University of Melbourne. He serves on the editorial advisory board of Policy & Politics.
The two texts could not be more different in style and presentation. For me, reading Bob Jessop has always been like having a bowl of fettuccine al burro in an Italian restaurant; it is pure delicacy but at the same time so incredibly rich that in order not to choke you have to proceed very slowly. You read a paragraph or even just a sentence (sometimes that can be one and the same thing) and then find yourself forced to sit back to take in and digest Bob’s argument. His analysis covers several discourses and perspectives, then puts a diachronic spin on the analysis and ends up asking Continue reading →
Brisbane, Queensland’s capital city, did not escape this natural disaster. By the second week of January, residents and business owners in low-lying suburbs were caught off-guard as a flood moved rapidly down the Brisbane River. They hastily evacuated what possessions they could, then watched with a sense of disbelief as muddy waters rose through their streets and two days later receded. When they could return to their water and mud sodden homes, and began to pick through the chaos of destroyed belongings, the true extent of the emergency became real for many.
In the days that followed, flood waters were replaced by floods of citizen-volunteers who gathered spontaneously in affected Continue reading →
Here’s a sneak preview of our October edition which will be published at the end of this month. Read on to scan this post for links to the articles in this forthcoming edition. If you have difficulty accessing the full text, it may be because your institution doesn’t subscribe to Policy & Politics. If that’s the case, do try our free trial or recommend the journal to your librarian.
Bob Jessop
Opening with a tour d’horizon entitled Crises, crisis-management and state restructuring: what future for the state?, Bob Jessop provides an insightful critical overview of what constitutes ‘the state’. In exploring a range of challenges to the state, some of which ‘condense’ into crises, he offers some thoughts on the future of the state, its management of crises and its challenges.
Peter Taylor-Gooby
Continuing with the theme of the state, but with a specific focus on welfare, Peter Taylor-Gooby argues powerfully about the critical need for a welfare state, particularly in the context of harsh spending cuts which affect the poorest and most vulnerable groups in society. In his article Making the Case for the Welfare State, he argues for more inclusive discourses around welfare, so reframing the way people think about work, reward and welfare.
Craig Berry
Craig Berry’s article also addresses the issue of welfare. In Citizenship in a financialised society: financial inclusion and the state before and after the crash, he unpacks the ‘financial inclusion’ agenda which has been extensively promoted by successive UK governments. This agenda, he argues, can ‘empower’ individuals to play an enhanced role in ensuring their own financial security without relying on the state. However, in his subsequent critical analysis, he reveals its more covert aspects, such as the increased hidden risks that ‘financial inclusion’ exposes individuals to, in order to secure macroeconomic growth at all costs.
Allan Cochrane
There is further exploration of the role of the state, this time in relation to the markets, in Allan Cochrane and Bob Colenutt’s piece on Governing the Ungovernable: spatial policy, markets and volume house-building in a growth region. They deconstruct the global rhetoric promoting the role of private markets in the provision of new housing and how it masks a more complex reality. They offer perceptive critical reflections on the consequences of policies that sanction ‘light touch’ state involvement in a housing development market shaped by the priorities of powerful corporate actors.
Deborah Wilson
Exploring a wide-ranging array of other policy issues, this edition of Policy & Politics also includes an article by Gary Bridge and Deborah Wilson called Towards an interactive sociological rational choice approach to theorising class dimensions of school choice. By exploring the value of two established perspectives on decision-making, they develop a third framework for explaining how school choices are made by parents in the UK. They argue that using this new framework could result in policy benefits such as reducing social class differentials between schools and subsequent educational outcomes.
Annette Hastings and Peter Matthews
In a similar vein, Annette Hastings and Peter Matthews proffer a new approach for analysing middle class service use in their article on Bourdieu and the Big Society: empowering the powerful in public service provision? Building on Bourdieu’s theory of practice to theorise middle-class use of public services, they proffer a new theoretical framework and evidence how engagement with the state is a classed practice, producing benefits for those already empowered. They conclude with a call to action to policy scholars and practitioners to fully understand how advantage comes about, so that it can be challenged if it is unfair and leads to detrimental outcomes.
Jitske Verkerk, Geert Teisman and Arwin van Buuren
On a different topic, Jitske Verkerk, Geert Teisman and Arwin van Buuren explore the challenges of a complex, multi-governance setting in their article on Synchronising climate adaptation processes in a multilevel governance setting: exploring synchronisation of governance levels in the Dutch Delta. They analyse how the concept of synchronisation helps actors to connect multilevel governance processes that all have their own development, logic and self-organising dynamics. Using a case study based on the Dutch Delta, they demonstrate how the concept of synchronisation helps to understand the self-organising coordinative capacity within multilevel governance processes and produce a coherent adaptation strategy.
Keerty Nakray
Last but not least, Keerty Nakray explores the concept of gender budgeting and the challenges to operationalising gender justice in India in her article on Gender budgeting and public policy: the challenges to operationalising gender justice in India. In a thorough analysis of the Indian gender budget statement of 2005, Nakray demonstrates how incomplete the process was. It failed to take into account all the gender budget procedures that needed to be implemented in order to achieve tangible gender equality outcomes, despite being viewed as a progressive development by the transnational feminist movement. She highlights that gender budgets should be further consolidated within central administrative mechanisms to result in more gender sensitive approaches to governance.
That was rather a whistle-stop tour through this month’s edition packed with impactful research findings. I do hope it’ll encourage you to click through to read the articles themselves.
I hope you enjoy the issue. Feedback always welcome!
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 