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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- Type: Book x
- International Development x
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This book examines the progress of the development of public policy evaluation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region from multiple perspectives. It describes both past developments and the current state of evaluation across the region, focusing on how political regimes, administrative traditions and policy advisory systems shape evaluation processes in different contexts.
With contributions from a diverse list of international authors, it investigates the historical development of evaluation across the MENA region and analyses the political landscape, highlighting emerging trends and potential challenges that could influence the future of the field.
An essential resource for researchers and practitioners in evaluation, public policy and the MENA region, the book also provides students with the practical knowledge and essential skills needed for careers in evaluation and policy analysis.
This book explores how girls negotiate girl power discourses in international development, taking a campaign focused on fundraising for girls’ education and adapting it to match their own activist goals within their communities. The book traces the evolution of the UN Foundation’s Girl Up campaign in its first decade from 2010 to 2020, showing how it has developed from a focus on fundraising for girls’ education in the Global South to supporting girls’ activism globally. Using focus groups with Girl Up members in the UK, the US and Malawi, the book shows how they negotiate participating in the campaign, and the stigma they often face as a result, with creativity, humour and pragmatism. They gave talks on feminism to their fellow students, supported and mentored other girls, resisted hostility towards Girl Up and engaged in the wider feminist movement, despite the many barriers to their activism that adults placed in their way. Unlike spectacular media and nongovernmental organization (NGO) narratives of girls saving the world all by themselves, these girl activists frequently struggled to be heard and respected. They continued their activism regardless, and the book concludes with suggestions for some of the many ways in which adults, schools, NGOs and allies might better support them to make the world a fairer place for girls.
This book delves into the intricate landscape of citizenship practices in Central and Eastern Europe, an area often overlooked in research.
Through an interdisciplinary lens, the contributors explore how education and political participation shape these practices in a region marked by historical and social complexities. The book offers fresh insights into how citizenship is perceived and practiced, highlighting the role of civic education in fostering political engagement.
By addressing both the challenges and opportunities of citizenship in this dynamic region, this volume contributes to broader debates on democracy and civic participation across Europe and beyond.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.
Development and environmental challenges are often framed at the global or planetary scale, but in a vague or apolitical manner. This book develops a theoretically rigorous and politicized concept of the planetary to intervene in contemporary debates on global development, and to enhance our critical understanding of development as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Chapters explore key themes and processes including urbanization, demographic change, health, financialization, and infrastructure development. Referencing diverse cases and examples drawn from across the world, the book argues that the futures of global development are inseparable from environmental challenges and transformations.
This book traces the process of producing testimonio with the children of Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), an insurgent group during Peru’s internal war (1980-2000). It examines how the group navigates the postwar struggles over memory while dealing with “the children of terrorists” stigma.
Drawing from a cycles of inquiry approach, the book theorises three movements for memory work: a realist presentation of testimonial narratives, a ‘politics of memory’ engaging with the conditions of production, and a ‘poetics of memory’ that troubles memory, voice, and representation for qualitative inquiry in postwar contexts.
Challenging the notion of war-torn countries as pure devastation, the author invites readers to see them as sites of knowledge and creativity with much to offer for education, peace studies, and social justice research.
Bringing concepts from critical transitional justice and peacebuilding into dialogue with education, this book examines the challenges youth and their teachers face in the post-conflict settings of Bougainville and Solomon Islands.
Youth in these places must reconcile with the violent past of their parents’ generation while also learning how to live with people once on opposing ‘sides.’ This book traces how students and their teachers form connections to the past and each other that cut through the forces that might divide them. The findings illustrate novel ways to think about the potential for education to assist post-conflict recovery.
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is recurrently depicted as an enterprise that unites humanity in a common pursuit of a more just and sustainable world. But how is this enterprise pursued on a planet that is enormously unequal? Drawing on biopolitical theory and rich empirical data from different contexts around the world, this book explores how ESD is unpacked depending on whether people are rich or poor.
The book demonstrates how ESD is adapted to the lifestyles and living conditions of different populations. The implication of this depoliticized sensitivity to local ‘realities’, the book argues, is that inequality becomes accommodated and that different responsibilities are assigned to rich and poor. Ultimately, the book considers alternatives to this biopolitical divide.
This book provides an important lens for understanding how interlocking humanitarian crises caused by armed conflict, natural disasters, forced displacement and, more recently, a global health pandemic have adversely impacted teaching and learning.
It brings together evidence from multiple, diverse research-practice partnerships in seven countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. The authors provide a clear account of the key academic, policy and practice questions on education in crisis contexts and consider our capacity to develop just and resilient education systems.
International Organizations (IOs) have been at the forefront of responding to crises in the 21st century, and yet there is little comparative research on how, and how effectively, they have done this.
This book fills this gap by exploring what roles IOs take in response to global crises and to what effect. Bringing together a range of international contributors, the book examines a vast array of international and regional organizations, including the International Organization for Migration, World Health Organization, African Union and European Union. Aiming to answer key questions about IO behaviour, the book investigates these IOs’ responses to pressing issues including the global COVID-19 pandemic, the liberal order and security, and the climate crisis.
It is vital that we decolonise community education and development – learning from the past in order to challenge current discrimination and oppression more effectively. In this book, Marjorie Mayo identifies ways of developing more inclusive policies and practices, working towards social justice for the future. She also tackles the pervasive influence of the ‘culture wars’ undermining work in communities, including the denial of problematic colonial legacies.
Inspired by movements such as Black Lives Matter and labour solidarity, the book includes case studies from the US, UK and the Global South, outlining the lessons that can be applied to community education and development training and practice.
