In this short article, we call for policy makers, activists and academics to take account of food aesthetics of economically and racially marginalised people – especially women – when understanding and intervening in food distribution. Although it may seem that aesthetics and poverty are mutually exclusive, and somewhat provocative to suggest that food aesthetics, when understood more expansively, aesthetics is an important aspect of domestic food work, as our findings from our research with British Bangladeshi women from Tower Hamlets on low incomes and responsible for social reproductive labour in their families and communities attest. We draw inspiration from feminist philosophy of food and taste, and everyday domestic aesthetics. Reflecting on our data, we combine these philosophies with Krishnendu Ray’s critique of food sociologists who imagine that people on low incomes lack a sense of beauty because their lives are dominated by their life of suffering. To conclude, we propose that food aesthetics should become part of the politics of food distribution and rights.
While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, they rarely consider what enables such reform. In this conceptual article, we suggest that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate how they operate when doing so is necessary to continue to serve key democratic functions. These functions include securing the empowered inclusion of those affected, collective agenda setting and will formation, and the making of joint decisions. Three current challenges highlight the urgency of adapting and innovating liberal democracies to become more politically robust: an increasingly assertive political culture, the digitalisation of political communication and increasing global interdependencies. A democratic theory of political robustness emphasises the need to strengthen the capacity of liberal democracies to adapt and innovate in response to changes, just as it helps to frame the necessary adaptations and innovations in times such as the present.
Media coverage plays an important role in generating knowledge about and shaping understandings of homelessness. Although families make up about 35% of all those without housing in the United States, they remain relatively invisible in the media. We examine the amount of coverage and content of representations of homeless families in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in 2017 and 2022. Families receive little media coverage in comparison to single, homeless adults, especially men. When newspapers do address unhoused families, they mainly do so without reference to the race, gender, or sexuality of homeless families. As a result of limited and trivial coverage, it is difficult to find articles that provide extended discussion of family homelessness or explain the multi-layered structural factors that cause families to lose housing.
Background:
In theory and practice, it is understood that personal relationships play a role in the effectiveness of translational models that bridge research and policy. These models can be made more efficient by understanding factors impacting relationships between policy-making players and third-party knowledge brokers.
Aims and objectives:
This study investigates a range of personal and office-level characteristics in predicting initial meetings and sustained relationships between federal staffers and knowledge brokers.
Methods:
A public affairs database, Quorum, was used to pull data on staffers who were contacted between September 2021 and August 2022 during an optimisation phase of the Research-to-Policy Collaboration (RPC). Logistic regression models were used to understand the impact of the characteristics on outcomes such as attending initial meetings and attending meetings facilitated by the RPC.
Findings:
Mid-level staffers and democratic staffers were more likely to meet with RPC staff. Office tenure was predictive of lower odds of meeting with RPC staff. For significant associations, the sample was stratified by political party to determine if the results differed by party.
Discussion and conclusions:
Together, these results suggest there are both personal and office-level characteristics affecting the federal staffers’ engagement with knowledge brokers. This work further informs efforts to bridge the gap between science and policy by informing knowledge brokers which offices and staffers they may want to approach.
Background:
The COVID-19 policy context was characterised by high levels of uncertainty, imperfect knowledge and the need for immediate action. Therefore, governments in Europe tended to rely on expertise provided by advisory bodies to design their crisis response. Advisory bodies played a fundamental part in policy making during the crisis to optimise policy formulation.
Aims and objectives:
During the COVID-19 crisis, the literature on policy advice grew considerably. To grasp the main research outcomes, we conduct a scoping review that interrogates the COVID-19 policy advice literature to answer the question ‘How did policy advisory bodies operate in Europe during the COVID-19 crisis?’ Our review builds on a strong theoretical and conceptual basis informed by the literature on policy advisory systems, while offering a new perspective by focusing on advice and policy making during crisis times specifically. We present a review of newly established knowledge and identify what merits further study.
Methods:
The scoping review follows a strict protocol informed by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to capture the literature published between 2020 and 2023. We searched two databases, Scopus and Web of Science. The grey literature was excluded.
Findings:
In total, 59 academic outputs inform this review. Overrepresented in our review were qualitative studies, studies about the UK and Sweden, and studies that examined the first half of 2020. Our review shows that the academic community has focused on advisory body composition, body structure and the advisory process.
Discussion:
Avenues for further research include the independence and influence of advisory bodies, and the fate of bodies set up during the crisis.
In this article, we respond to a critical review of Covering all the Basics: Reforms for a More Just Society, published in this journal (Smith-Carrier, T., Forget, E., Power, E. and Halpenny, C. [2024] ‘Covering all the [welfare] basics’: a critical policy study of the Expert Panel on Basic Income report in British Columbia, Canada, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, XX(XX): 1–27, DOI: 10.1332/17598273Y2024D000000016), by providing what we view as a more accurate description of the findings and arguments in that report. The result, we hope, is an alternative depiction of how a basic income would relate to the search for a more just society.
The links between policy learning and policy innovation seem self-evident. Yet these areas of scholarship have developed independently of each other. The articles in this Special Issue all address some aspect of the learning/innovation relationship. This introduction sets the scene by reviewing how innovation intersects with studies of policy learning. To do this, we explore the three key dimensions which characterise policy innovation, as defined by Sørensen, and its relationship with learning: political leadership, competition and collaboration. Viewed through a learning lens, we discern the interactions between these elements, and how they link forms of learning to innovative policy. Finally, through the lens of this learning/innovation framework, we summarise the contributions of the six articles and propose a future research agenda.
The Cuban population is going through a process of demographic change and accelerated ageing which, together with a difficult economic situation, places older adults in a particularly complex situation, especially in those vulnerable communities. The study analyses the economic situation, sources of income, and coverage of basic needs of a sample of people over 60 years of age (n = 325) from a vulnerable community in the city of Santiago de Cuba. The community had an inadequate urban structure and a high amount of solid and liquid waste in the streets, and its inhabitants had limited economic resources. A structured interview was used for data collection. The results show that the persons over 60 years of age who were interviewed had extremely low incomes, despite resorting to multiple strategies to try to obtain economic resources. A high percentage reported a lack of income to meet their needs, including such essential needs as food, housing, and health care. In relation to these issues, women and people over 75 years of age were particularly vulnerable. Decision makers need to take into account the needs of older adults in vulnerable communities when implementing social care policies and strategies, paying special attention to the most vulnerable groups such as women or older people.
The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has become instrumental in understanding how policy narratives impact public policy processes. This article presents a systematic analysis of the historical development of NPF research, drawing on a review of 189 NPF articles to investigate its evolution. The findings are presented across five temporal stages, examining the use of the NPF’s theoretical elements. The analysis indicates a consistent focus on the core theoretical components, demonstrating the framework’s robustness. Additionally, the article examines whether the NPF’s ambition to bridge positivist and interpretivist approaches has been achieved. The proposed future research agenda highlights areas for further exploration. First, researchers are encouraged to combine the NPF with interpretivist approaches in policy narrative research. Second, our findings show a need for more in-depth analyses of specific narrative components, such as narrative characters, to gain deeper insights into their effects on policy processes. Third, there is a clear need to investigate whether and how practitioners are using NPF research to inform their communication strategies. This systematic analysis highlights patterns and trends in the literature, identifies gaps and proposes future avenues for empirical applications and theory development. Thus, this article offers new insights into the NPF, contributing to existing knowledge in the field.
