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
This chapter examines the role of civil society in advancing sustainable welfare in the Swedish metropolitan cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. It views civil society as a space for collective action and potential transformation, where organisations, movements and activist networks strive for change. The chapter explores the collaboration and integration between civil society groups focused on environmental and welfare issues. Based on interviews with leaders and a survey of participants in environmental protests, the findings reveal an absence of a unifying master frame that bridges the environmental and welfare divides. This is primarily attributed to the particularistic nature of civil society organisations and their alignment with the siloed structure of local government, which separates policy areas. While inertia appears to dominate, the chapter highlights the emergence of a justice frame able to mobilise supporters from both environmental and welfare sectors, offering a potential path towards sustainable welfare.
This concluding chapter evaluates whether Swedish cities have successfully bridged the gap between environmental and welfare concerns in urban governance. Despite the disruptive pressures of climate change, the findings indicate that substantive transformative change has not yet occurred in the investigated cities. Environmental and welfare policy domains remain largely separate, with civil society organisations and public attitudes continuing to operate within a framework of differentiation rather than integration. While many results adhere to established pathways, the chapter highlights that patterns of inertia and emergence coexist. Actors actively push for new discourses and practices to integrate environmental and welfare concerns. However, the emergence of a sustainable welfare path remains contested, with expressions of denial, rejection and opposition to transformative efforts. Drawing on Polanyi’s concepts of movements and counter-movements, these tensions do not represent a failure of transformation but rather the clarification of two competing pathways for addressing the challenges and risks posed by climate change.
The introductory chapter outlines the core challenge of providing welfare within planetary boundaries, a pressing issue for cities and societies globally. It emphasises the growing recognition of climate change’s impact on welfare and social risks, forming the foundation for the book’s objectives. It explores patterns of inertia, emergence and transformation in Swedish urban governance and analyses if and to what extent Swedish cities have overcome the separation between welfare and environmental concerns and practices. Sweden, with its strong social democratic welfare legacy and widespread support for environmental policies, serves as a compelling case to examine factors that either promote or impede the integration of these domains. The chapter introduces the three cities central to the study – Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö – and outlines the three sites of urban governance explored in the book: local government, civil society and public attitudes. This sets the stage for the empirical investigation of sustainable welfare integration in Swedish urban governance.
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.
The aim of this chapter is to provide more detail on the analytical and research processes involved in the inhabitation practices approach and to highlight some of the issues to be confronted in the choice of methods and evaluation criteria to employ. The key question to be addressed is how should inhabitation practices be studied and evaluated by academics, governments or housing agencies? The aim of the chapter is to outline some of the general issues involved and the choices available.
In this concluding chapter, the aim is to briefly summarise the main argument of the book, which is in four parts. First is the case for the importance of seeing the impact of housing on the rest of Nature; second is the redefinition of the field through adoption of the concept of inhabitation; third is the argument for the adoption of the practices approach as a research framework; and fourth is the adoption of a holistic research approach to the study of practices that is wide-ranging and by examining issues from different perspectives (including those of materials and animals). Each of these four arguments is considered in turn. Taken together these constitute a radical overhaul of housing research and policy and so the chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications for both.
This chapter focuses on the consumption of houses with the aim of providing examples of the use of the concept of inhabitation practices in order to provide some guidance on the practical use of the concept and to illustrate the contribution that its application can make to the study of inhabitation and to housing policy. The chapter provides examples of the research topics that would be important to pursue, and to provide insight into the methods that could usefully be employed, in the hope that this will inspire the research that will contribute to goals such as climate change and to the health of Nature in general.
