Policy & Politics Highlights collection on Transformational Change in Public Policy Special Issue: free to access November 2022 – January 2023

Sarah Brown

Sarah_Brown_credit_Evelyn_Sturdy

This quarter’s highlights collection focuses on three of our most widely read and cited articles this year. All three were featured in our special issue published in July on Transformational Change in Public Policy which was guest edited by our co-editors: Oscar Berglund, Claire Dunlop, Elizabeth Koebele and Chris Weible.

Our first article is the introduction to the special issue entitled Transformational change through Public Policy written by our four co-editors.

The authors highlight how significant time and effort has been spent seeking to understand policy change around the major societal issues we face. Yet their findings show that most change tends to be incremental. The consequent challenge they set out is whether or not public policy scholarship is up to the job of developing a coherent research programme to build knowledge and enable necessary, positive transformational change.

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Updating your course reading lists? Check out our essential reading recommendations for teaching Public Participation, Gender and the Policy Process, and Policy Innovation from Policy & Politics

Elizabeth SarahElizabeth Koebele with Sarah Brown

Are you planning a new policy or politics-focused course? Or maybe you’re updating your existing syllabi with some of the newest research on policy and politics? We’re here to help! In this blog, we provide recommendations for new Policy & Politics articles (as well as a few older favorites) that make excellent contributions to syllabi for a diversity of courses. We hope this saves you time and effort in mining our recent articles while also ensuring your course materials reflect the latest research from the frontiers of the discipline. Continue reading

New Special Issue Blog Series : Blog 3 – Lessons from policy theories for the pursuit of equity in health, education and gender policy

Special issue blog series on Transformational Change through Public Policy.

 

CairneyPaul Cairney, Emily St.Denny, Sean Kippin, Heather Mitchell

Could policy theories help to understand and facilitate the pursuit of equity (or reduction of unfair inequalities)? We are producing a series of literature reviews to help answer that question, beginning with the study of equity policy and policymaking in health, education, and gender research, which has just been published in Policy & Politics. Continue reading

How diverse and inclusive are policy process theories?

Tanya Mike BlogTanya Heikkila and Mike Jones

The various approaches to studying policy processes differ by their attention to distinct questions, issues and theoretical emphasis. Some zoom into particular “stages” of policymaking such as agenda setting (Multiple Streams Analysis), while others pay attention to long term patterns in policy evolution (Punctuated Equilibrium Theory). Several explore how policy actors form coalitions, communicate, strategize, and influence policy outcomes (Advocacy Change Framework, Narrative Policy Framework, Social Construction Framework). Continue reading