Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete 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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 123 items for :
- Type: Book x
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Life expectancy is about more than just health – it’s about the kind of society we live in. And in the early 2010s, after decades of continual improvement, life expectancy in the UK, USA and many other rich countries stopped increasing. For millions of people it actually declined. Despite hundreds of thousands of extra deaths, governments and officials remained silent.
Combining robust evidence with real-life stories, this book tells the story of how austerity policies caused this scandal. It argues that this shocking and tragic suffering was predictable, caused by a dereliction of duty from those in power.
The book concludes with an optimistic vision of what can be done to restore life expectancy improvements and reduce health inequalities.
The movement of policy is a core feature of contemporary education reform. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion and mobility, have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across jurisdictions, scales of governance, policy sectors or organisations. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of different approaches to policy movement remain insufficiently discussed.
To address this gap, this book places front and center questions of theory, ontology, epistemology and method related to policy movement. It explores a wide diversity of approaches to help understand the policy movement phenomena, providing a useful guide on global studies in education, as well as insights into the future of this dynamic area of work.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This book examines the idea and practice of co-creation in public services. Informed by practical action, lived experience and research from 10 countries across Europe, including the UK, it shines new light on the theory and reality of co-creation by conceptualising it in terms of human rights, social justice and social innovation.
Focusing on human dimensions, the book presents real life examples in public services as diverse as social care, health, work activation, housing and criminal justice. It also highlights the ways digital technologies can accelerate or hinder co-creation.
The book confronts a paradox at the heart of co-creation: standardisation and inflexibility in planning and resourcing, or ‘concrete-ness’, counters the ‘elasticity’ required to sustain co-creation in complex contexts.
In this book, street-level bureaucracy scholars from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America analyse the conditions that shape frontline work and citizens’ everyday experience of the state.
Institutional factors such as political clientelism, resource scarcity, social inequality, job insecurity, and systemic corruption affect the way street-level bureaucrats enforce rules and implement policies. Inadvertently, they end up implementing inequities in citizens’ access to rights and services – despite efforts to repair organisational deficiencies and broker relations between vulnerable citizens and a distant state. This book illuminates these realities and challenges and provides unique insights into critical themes such as resource scarcities, bureaucratic corruption, control practices, and the complexities of dealing with vulnerable population groups.
As the practices of public governance are rapidly changing, so must the theoretical frameworks for understanding the creation of efficient, effective and democratic governance solutions.
First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics journal, this book explores the role of strategic management, digitalisation and generative platforms in encouraging the co-creation of innovative public value outcomes. It considers why we must transform the public sector to drive co-creation and the importance of integrating different theoretical strands when studying processes, barriers and outcomes.
This book lays out important stepping-stones for the development of new research into the ongoing transition to co-creation as a mode of governance.
In recent years, a wave of reforms known as ‘nudges’ or ‘behavioural interventions’ have emerged in public policy and administration. ‘Nudge’ policies are created to lightly influence groups in society to change their behaviour, using behavioural insights to solve complex policy problems. Generally, behavioural approaches focus on the psychology underlying the implementation and effects of policies in practice.
First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics journal, this book situates these reforms within a broader tradition of methodological individualism.
With contributions from international scholars, it demonstrates that when behavioural policies expand their focus beyond the individual, they have the potential to better understand, investigate and shape social outcomes.
The latest edition in the International Library of Policy Analysis series explores a comprehensive overview of policy analysis in Argentina. It explores theoretical frameworks, views of the State, the development of the field and current paradigms before examining knowledge produced at different levels (federal, provincial, and local); the application of the discipline by ‘Internal Policy Advisory Councils, Consultants, and Committees’; the role of think tanks, NGOs, and political parties; and the developments provided by university teaching and research.
Analysing the conceptual frameworks and methodologies used from a meta-theoretical perspective, it provides a panoramic picture of the perspectives and challenges of policy analysis in Argentina.
This book introduces the concept of ‘knowledge alchemy’ to capture the generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards. Using examples from North America, Europe and Asia, it explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional policies and practices on economic performance, higher education, research and innovation.
The book examines how governments around the world have embraced global models of world-class university, human capital and talent competition as essential in ensuring national competitiveness. Through its analysis, the book shows how this strongly future-oriented and anticipatory knowledge governance is steered by a surge of global classifications, rankings and indicators, resulting in numerous comparisons of various domains that today form more constraining global policy scripts.
Design approaches to policymaking have gained increasing popularity among policymakers in recent years.
First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this book presents original critical reflections on the value of design approaches and how they relate to the classical idea of public administration as a design science. Contributors consider the potential, challenges and applications of design approaches and distinguish between three methods currently characterising the discipline: design as optimisation, design as exploration and design as co-creation.
Developing the dialogue around public administration as a design science, this collection explores how a more ‘designerly’ way of thinking can improve public administration and public policy.
The articles on which Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are based are available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
The subject of policy analysis in Thailand is less examined than in Western societies. This is the first English language book to engage in a detailed, comprehensive and current study of policy analysis in Thailand.
Providing a broad view of the history, styles and methods of policy analysis in Thailand, it examines policy analysis both within and beyond executive government, revealing the role of parties, military, and interest groups.
It will be a valuable resource for policy analysis researchers and practitioners and as a comparison with other volumes in the International Library of Policy Analysis series.
