social justice

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

policypressblogLeave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

Introduction to Spotlighting interpretive approaches to public policy scholarship

policypressblogLeave a comment

Stephanie PatersonProfessor Stephanie Paterson

Professor Stephanie Paterson, one of the curators of our blog series spotlighting interpretive approaches to the study of policy and politics, explains our motivations behind the series and expands on the study of intersectionality from within critical policy studies…

Critical policy studies envelopes diverse approaches to the study of public policy, spanning institutionalist, materialist, and discursive approaches. A common feature, however, is their attention to power and commitment to social change.

Within this broad family of scholarship is intersectionality, a research paradigm originating within Black feminism that aims to expose and interrogate the intersectional or interlocking systems of oppression that shape lived experiences. Intersectionality has a long history that is rooted in Black feminist experience and thought (Bilge 2014; Hancock 2016). The paradigm began to take shape in the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), which identified an “integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” From this, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) articulated the concept of intersectionality with reference to the metaphor of a traffic intersection (see Hancock 2016 for an overview).

Continue reading →

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

policypressblogLeave a comment

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 →

Spotlighting interpretive approaches to public policy scholarship – Dr Tiffany Manuel on intersectionality

policypressblogLeave a comment

New Policy & Politics blog feature by Dr Tiffany Manuel.

In this video, Dr Tiffany Manuel (or Dr T as she prefers to be called) provides an excellent challenge to public policy researchers to think about the ways in which intersectionality needs to be woven into their research, that is not just driven by members of minority groups. In her talk, Dr T refers to her paper: How Does One Live the Good Life?: Assessing the State of Intersectionality in Public Policy: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10….

This video is part of a new feature on the Policy and Politics blog which aims to spotlight interpretive approaches to the study of policy and politics. This spotlight series hopes to encourage a greater range of scholarship. Continue reading →

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

policypressblogLeave a comment

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 →

Virtual issue on Central-local relations

policypressblogLeave a comment

Sarah_Brown_credit_Evelyn_Sturdy
Image credit: Evelyn Sturdy at Unsplash

Sarah Brown
Journal Manager, Policy & Politics

In our second virtual issue of 2021, we focus on central-local relations and feature some of the latest research on that topic from a range of different perspectives and three quite different political systems. Against a backdrop of austerity coupled with an imminent global recession resulting from the pandemic, the politics of central-local relations and their impact on policy are, we believe, even more topical than ever. So we hope that you enjoy this short collection featuring some of our most recent scholarship on this theme. Continue reading →

Why social inequality persists

policypressblog4 Comments

IMG_3926by Tessa Coombes, guest blogger for P&P Conference 2015.

The second plenary session of the Policy and Politics Annual Conference was delivered by Prof. Danny Dorling, who provided a shocking and somewhat scary analysis of the increasing levels of inequality in the UK. The big question for us all to consider is why there is no consistent challenge to this situation and why we appear to accept the disparities that exist. Why is it acceptable and why would anyone think inequalities are a good thing?

One answer to the question is that we don’t actually realise how unequal we are as a society. But a quick look through some of the statistics soon provides the evidence we need. Danny took us through graph after graph that more than adequately demonstrated just how big the problem is and that it is increasing. One example to illustrate the point, in 2010 the best off tenth of the population in the UK were nearly 14 times better off than the worst off tenth. By 2015 this had grown to more than 17 times better off, and if the trend continues on a similar course in less than 20 years the best off will have over 24 times as much disposable income as the worst off. The problem is that the change is gradual, we don’t notice it so much and we get Continue reading →