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.
This chapter examines how city governments and administrations integrate environmental and social concerns into urban governance. Utilising theories of policy integration, it explores the potential for eco-social integration in three major Swedish cities – Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. The findings, based on interviews and document analysis, reveal limited integration between environmental and welfare domains. The siloed structure of public administration poses a significant barrier to cross-sectoral integration, compounded by resource constraints and the high degree of specialisation among experts. Despite this inertia, signs of emergence are observed in the form of urban experiments – short-term projects that challenge existing silo structures but generally do not establish lasting pathways for integration. The chapter recognises the potential impact of the sustainable development goals in reshaping urban governance, offering a path towards enhanced integration of eco-social policies.
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.
This chapter explores public attitudes towards sustainable welfare and the social dispositions that influence them based on a survey of urban and rural residents. The findings show that urban residents are generally more supportive of an eco-social agenda than their rural counterparts. Among the specific policies, working time reduction garners the most public support, followed by a wealth tax and a meat tax, while maximum income and basic income receive the least support. The analysis highlights that urban residents are more supportive of eco-social policies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the chapter examines the social dispositions that explain these varying attitudes. While many of these dispositions reflect inertia or emergence, one – ‘active sustainable welfare’ – is linked to a transformative outlook among parts of the public.
This chapter investigates varying conceptions of stability and change within sociology, political science and sustainability sciences. It synthesises key theoretical constructs such as dependency, niches, path entrepreneurs and tipping points to study pathways towards sustainable welfare. Building on these theories and concepts, the chapter proposes an analytical framework based on the conceptual distinctions between inertia, emergence and transformation. Inertia is framed as stability, while emergence reflects the creation of something new without a predefined trajectory. Transformation, on the other hand, involves the establishment of new pathways and the restructuring of institutions and practices to support them. The framework highlights the roles of discourses, actors and practices in shaping these dynamics, enabling a deeper empirical and analytical exploration of the integration between environmental and welfare domains and the mechanisms that facilitate or obstruct such integration.
This chapter reviews some of the central ideas related to care and explores how care and care work is connected to water and water security. The first part engages with the conventional framing of care as a gendered and often hidden and undervalued set of practices. It then explores other ways in which care has been theorized, including the spatialities of care and the role of non-humans in caring assemblages. The chapter finishes an introduction to the idea of ‘ecologies of care’, put forward as a mechanism to visualize the pervasiveness of care and to bolster a care-centric way of living with climate change. The central argument of this chapter is that care is central to the management of water and the establishment of water security.
This chapter explores efforts to access and provide safe, clean and secure drinking water. The cases and discussions detail specific experiences of care and how these are made visible and invisible through policy, media and practice. In much of this work around water security, the infrastructures of care are variably visible/invisible as well as present/absent and in various states of deterioration. The chapter starts with an overview of water distribution, highlighting the extensive work undertaken to live with and through water systems. The intent is to situate drinking water and concomitant infrastructures in our social and cultural histories. Subsequently, the chapter narrates two examples of the challenges associated with water distribution based in Flint, Michigan (United States) and Rajasthan (India). The intent of these examples is to highlight the social and cultural aspects of water distribution focusing on the role of care in these experiences and contexts.
This chapter introduces the book’s approach and conceptual framework. It sets out some of the limitations of conventional climate change discourse and some of the ways in which stories and narratives that connect to human experience can motivate transformative action. Subsequently, the chapter reviews the context of climate change and the central data related to anthropocentric global warming. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between climate change and water across themes of floods and droughts, coastal change, drinking water, and conflict. The chapter also introduces the concepts of vulnerability and fragility and how these have been deployed to characterize climate risk. Lastly, it sets out the plan and structure of the book and subsequent chapters.
This chapter summarizes and compares the cases and further develops the concept of ecological care. The chapter includes a brief introduction followed by a summary of the case examples and key themes. It then develops the central theoretical contribution joining together perspectives from urban studies, geography, water security studies and feminist theory. The intent is to build a foundation for future climate change adaptation. This starts with recognizing the potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming and the ways in which these impacts will be locally and unevenly experienced. The chapter argues for a shift in understanding of the practices which make up adaptation and wellbeing more generally. This is a shift that sees water security and human lives as always invested in ecologies of care.
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.
This chapter reviews the impacts of climate change on communities located in the cryosphere. It starts with a narrative of how global warming is impacting cultural practices and understandings of snow and ice. It then details the particular challenges facing the cryosphere, including impacts to ice sheets, alpine glaciers and the permafrost. Subsequently, cases in Shishmaref (Alaska, United States) and Ladakh (India) are presented to examine how communities are adapting to climate change in the cryosphere. The chapter concludes with a discussion of postcolonial perspectives on the environment and how these might connect to alternative views on sustainability and climate change adaptive practices.
