policy implementation

Can policy conflict be productive? Insights from a systematic review 

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by Ilana Schröder & Eva E.A. Wolf

In a recent article published in Policy & Politics, Ilana Schröder & Eva Wolf examine a topic that is central to policymaking but often receives less explicit attention than it deserves: policy conflict. While conflicts are an inherent feature of policy processes, the authors argue that research on what policy conflicts are, how they unfold, and what consequences they produce remains fragmented across different research traditions. 

Through a systematic review of 85 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2024, the article brings together insights that are currently dispersed across policy process theories, interpretive policy studies, collaborative governance research, implementation studies, and conflict scholarship. In doing so, it offers a more integrated understanding of how conflicts shape policy processes and produce different kinds of consequences. 

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How Crisis Discourse Shapes UK Asylum Governance: From Framing to Administrative Practice 

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By Nasar Meer and Emma Hill

In their recent article, Nasar Meer and Emma Hill examine how narratives of “crisis” have become embedded within the everyday governance of asylum in the United Kingdom. Bringing Teun A. van Dijk’s concept of the ideological square into conversation with framing and political communication scholarship, the article argues that crisis discourse is not simply rhetorical. Rather, it has become administratively productive, shaping procurement systems, evidentiary practices, and the lived experience of asylum accommodation itself. 

From crisis discourse to crisis ordinariness 

The article begins from a core insight in policy studies: before governments can act on a policy “problem”, they must first frame it as such. In the field of asylum governance, this increasingly occurs through narratives of emergency, invasion, and loss of control. While concepts such as the Overton window help explain shifts in political possibility, Meer and Hill argue that they can understate the communicative power through which migration is continually reproduced as crisis. 

To address this, the article turns to van Dijk’s ideological square, which foregrounds how discourse systematically emphasises “our” virtues and “their” failings, while minimising countervailing evidence. The authors extend this beyond discourse analysis to show how evaluative asymmetries become embedded within the epistemic and administrative architecture of governance. The result is what they term “crisis ordinariness”: a condition in which emergency becomes the routine operating logic of asylum governance. 

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Smokefree Public Places Policy in Scotland: Rethinking Policy Work in Multiple Streams and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

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by Katherine E. Smith

In this article, author Katherine E. Smith revisits Scotland’s landmark smokefree public places legislation to ask not only how policy change occurred, but how it was actively made. Drawing on a 2024 witness seminar with ministers, civil servants, advocates and researchers, the article builds a collectively constructed, retrospective account of how this major reform was developed, designed and implemented.  

Existing analyses, particularly those based on Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, are broadly supported. As Smith shows, a policy window opened as problem, policy and political streams aligned, while wider shifts in policy image and venue helped enable a significant punctuation in tobacco policy. However, the article’s central contribution lies in demonstrating that these theories under-specify the policy work through which such conditions are produced and translated into outcomes. 

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Policy & Politics Highlights collection on Gender Policy: free to access from 1st May – 31st July 2025

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by Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton

Welcome to this quarter’s highlights collection featuring a range of our most popular, recent research on different aspects relating to gender policy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on gender policy or are interested in keeping up to date with the latest research in that area, we hope you will find the articles we’ve featured of interest!

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Intended and unintended effects of cannabis regulation in Uruguay 

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by Rosario Queirolo, Lorena Repetto, Joaquín Alonso, Eliana Álvarez, Belén Sotto and Mafalda Pardal


Based on a qualitative design, our article recently published in Policy & Politics analyses the intended and unintended effects of the regulation of cannabis in Uruguay over the last ten years, and identifies the distance between its design and implementation. 

The results are grouped into four key points: 

1-      The access mechanisms (homegrowing, cannabis social clubs (CSCs) and pharmacies) and the mandatory registry, designed for preventing the increase in cannabis consumption, had the unintended effect of excluding various types of users from the legal market. Examples include:  

  • lower socioeconomic level users who cannot afford expensive memberships to CSCs or buying at a pharmacy; 
  • those who live further away from urban areas where legal selling points are primarily located 
  • younger users, who do not always meet the formal requirements for registration.  

Thus, the regulation has pushed many cannabis users to seek supply via the illicit and grey markets. 

2-      The controlled prices in pharmacies, designed for competing with illicit market prices, provided little incentive to new pharmacies to join the dispensation system, due to the low profit margin, resulting in limited coverage across the country. 

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Policy & Politics Highlights collection on new Special Issue on Policy Learning and Policy Innovation: Interactions and Intersections by Claire Dunlop, Claudio Radaelli, Ellen Wayenberg and Bishoy Zaki

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by Sarah Brown, Journals Manager


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.  

Our motivation then is simple.  

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How and why equal pay remains on the EU agenda?

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by Sophie Jacquot
UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles 


In my recently published article in Policy & Politics, I ask how and why equal pay remains on the EU agenda, and, relatedly, if policy failure can be useful in policymaking. 

Equal pay for equal work between women and men has been enshrined in European treaties since 1957. It is one of the EU’s founding principles, and, even though the EU’s action against gender inequalities has expanded to include areas as varied as domestic violence, integration of gender equality in external relations, gender budgeting or the articulation between private and working life, equal pay certainly remains the flagship and most symbolic policy domain of the EU gender equality policy. Equal pay can be considered as an identity marker for the EU.  Implementing the principle of equal pay has regularly been on the European policy-making agenda since the 1970s with new legislation, case law, soft regulation, etc. However, the gender pay gap in the EU is 13% in 2022. It means that women would need to work 1.5 extra months to make up the difference. It also means that progress in closing the gender pay gap is extremely slow: it decreased by only 2.8% pp in 10 years.  

Source: Extract from Equal Pay? Time to close the gap! (European Commission, November 2022, https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2022-11/equal_pay_day_factsheet_2022_en_1_0.pdf). Reproduction allowed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. 

Given these (poor) results, the EU equal pay policy could be assessed as a failure and its existence questioned. But, on the contrary, the EU equal pay policy seems unaffected by failure. Recently, the von der Leyen Commission has put equal pay at the heart of the Union of Equality programme and has proposed a Directive on pay transparency, which was adopted on 10 May 2023. My recent article “Can failure be useful in policy-making? The case of EU equal pay policy” explores this paradox: Why and how, despite repeated implementation failure, is the EU equal pay policy still up and running? 

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Policy & Politics highlights collection May – July 2022 – free to access.

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BROWN_SarahQuarterly highlights collection 3rd May – 31st July 2022

In this quarter’s highlights collection, we feature three articles that provide a range of insights from different contexts on the politics of governance. Continue reading →

Analysing boundaries of health and social care in policy and media reform narratives: the epic and tragic narratives of policy reform.

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Duijn Bannink NiesSarah van Duijn, Duco Bannink & Henk Nies

When we wrote this blog, Ukraine had not yet been invaded by Russia. However, it would feel inappropriate to us to publish this blog without acknowledging it. We are aware that we are no experts in the field of geopolitics or international relations. However, we cannot help but remark that the strategies we found in our article have become amplified in the rhetoric that surrounds the war in Ukraine. Indeed, the epic-tragic mechanism is part and parcel of democratic processes – as we show in our article – but it is also a part of incomparably worse phenomena such as (threats of) war. Continue reading →

How do Street-Level Bureaucrats categorise citizens to decide who should receive services?

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Lotta and KirschbaumGabriela Lotta and Charles Kirschbaum 

Street-level bureaucrats (SLB) are those workers who have direct contact with citizens while delivering services to them, for example teachers, police, counsellors, and health workers. They are very important both for the state and for citizens for several reasons. for example, they are the “face” of the state for many citizens, they are the “last mile” individuals in the policy implementation process and in the hierarchy of the organisation, and they also have significant power to allocate resources. Consequently many research studies, including ours, analyse street-level bureaucrats’ behaviour and how they interact with citizens. In our recent research article in Policy & Politics on How street-level bureaucrats use Conceptual Systems to categorise clients, we observe one specific aspect of SLBs’ work: how they classify types of citizens to decide who should receive each kind of service. We analyse this phenomenon by observing teachers. Continue reading →