Research

 

You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.

Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
 

Books: Research

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Complexity Based Research and Practice for Social Transformation

In today’s world, there are interwoven crises affecting us at every level. This book explores the impact of these crises on applied social research. It shows how using a complexity framework in research is key to tackling global challenges effectively.

By featuring illustrative examples from the UK, China, Brazil, South Africa and the US, the authors demonstrate how an action research programme based around the use of existing social research methods embedded in processes of co-production and participation can drive real-time social change.

In doing so, the book highlights the transformative role of action-oriented research in addressing today's complex global challenges.

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Inertia, Emergence and Transformation in Swedish Cities

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Pathways to Sustainable Welfare critically examines how cities can address the dual challenges of climate change and sustainability while ensuring the welfare of their populations.

Focused on three Swedish cities, it explores the integration of environmental and welfare concerns in local policies, urban movements and public opinions. Based on theories of inertia, emergence and transformation, it identifies factors driving or obstructing sustainable welfare advancements.

This book is a crucial resource for scholars interested in sustainable transformation, urban governance and social policy. It offers frameworks and empirical evidence relevant to academics, policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand and engage in urban sustainable welfare development.

Open access
Water Security in the Global Context
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This book investigates and analyses places in Europe, North America and Asia that are facing the immense challenges associated with climate change adaptation. Presenting real-world cases in the contexts of coastal change, drinking water and the cryosphere, Michael Buser shows how the concept of care can be applied to water security and climate adaptation.

Exploring the everyday and often hidden ways in which water security is accomplished, the book demonstrates the pervasiveness and power of care to contribute to flourishing lives and communities in times of climate change.

Open access
Ambitions of Just Solar Energy Transitions

Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.

Portugal is among the best-placed European countries to take advantage of solar power, having achieved a five-fold increase in installed capacity during 2017–2023 despite financial constraints. In 2023, its National Energy and Climate Plan set an ambitious target for a further eight-fold increase from 2.5 GW to 20.4 GW by 2030.

How can such fast-paced deployment secure sociospatial justice? What insights do political economic dynamics hold for future transitions? Drawing on long-term, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this book is a one-stop resource for policy makers, practitioners, scholars, and anyone interested in just solar energy transitions.

Siddharth Sareen won the 2024 Nils Klim Prize, recognising his exemplary work in the search for renewable and sustainable sources of energy.

Open access

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

In recent years, climate litigation has become an important subject of global scholarly and policy interest. However, developments within the Global South, particularly in Africa, have been largely neglected.

This volume brings together an international team of contributors to provide a much-needed examination of climate litigation in Africa. The book outlines how climate litigation in Africa is distinct as well as pinpointing where it connects with the global conversation. Chapters engage with crucial themes such as human rights approaches to climate governance, corporate liability and the role of gender in climate litigation.

Spanning a range of approaches and jurisdictions, the book challenges universal concepts around climate and the role of activism (including litigation) in seeking to advance climate governance.

Open access

Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death.

This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments.

Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures.

Organised around three themes – Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power – this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.

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Perceptions, Actors, Innovations
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EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND license.

With Agenda 2030, the UN adopted wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that integrate development and environmental agendas. This book focuses on the political tensions between the environmental objectives and socio-economic aspects of sustainable development.

The collection provides an introduction to interlinkages, synergies and trade-offs between the ‘green’ and other goals, such as gender equality and economic growth. It also considers related goals on cities and partnerships as crucial for implementing environmentally sound sustainability. Identifying governance failures and responsibilities, it advocates for a shift towards cooperative economics and politics for the common good.

Open access
A Primer for Social Scientists

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Bringing together divergent approaches to justice theorising, this volume connects normative and philosophical theories with the more empirically focused approaches emerging today in the social and political sciences and policy scholarship. The chapters overview a variety of mainstream approaches and radical critiques of justice to illustrate their value in addressing the pressing problems of climate change and economic development.

Stressing the value of assessing justice theories in light of the material conditions of our changing world, the book concludes with an in-depth synthesis of how these wide ranging approaches to justice will be useful for students, scholars and practitioners concerned with realising justice.

Open access

The first volume in green criminology devoted to gender, this book investigates gendered patterns to offending, victimisation and environmental harms. Including feminist and intersectional analysis, and with original case studies from the Global North and Global South, the book also examines actions that have been taken in response to gendered crimes and harms, together with insights on the gendered nature of resistance.

The collection advances debate on green crimes, environmental harm and climate change and will inspire students and researchers to foreground gender in debates about reducing and transforming the challenges affecting our planet’s future.

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Environment, Society and Governance

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Offering a unique introduction to the study of justice in the European, North American and Russian Arctic, this collection considers the responsibilities and failures of justice for environment and society in the region.

Inspired by key thinkers in justice, this book highlights the real and practical consequences of postcolonial legacies, climate change and the regions’ incorporation into the international political economy. The chapters feature liberal, cosmopolitan, feminist, as well as critical justice perspectives from experts with decades of research experience in the Arctic. Moving from a critique of current failures, the collection champions an ethical and sustainable future for Arctic development and governance.

Open access