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
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented global disruption. In this book we explore what the pandemic has shown us about ideology, social policy, and human rights in Global Minority countries. We focus particularly on the UK and US, and on the policy areas of health, food, housing, and technology. The problems we discuss are inherently political ‒ they have political causes and political solutions. For this reason, we focus on the political ideology that has shaped our policy landscape – neoliberalism – and countries that have pursued a neoliberal agenda to a great extent. We propose that ideological changes are an essential prerequisite for a well-planned, equitable, and just system going forward. Without such an explicit consideration of motivations and ideological underpinnings, future policies may fail in their goals, or, perhaps worse, set harmful and unethical goals.
COVID-19 is a timely and salient example of how some states have failed both to plan for a pending disaster and to equitably meet people’s needs up to and throughout the disaster. As Illner (2020) cogently argues, framing disasters COVID-19 included ‒ as sudden, unpredictable, and often ‘natural’ events which have disrupted an otherwise well-functioning system ignores the systematic marginalisation of people whose needs have been long-neglected by the state, and further obfuscates how that neglect led directly to disaster.
The right to food is a key right enshrined in Article 25 of the UDHR. Unarguably, food is a basic need for human health and survival. However, the significance of food extends well beyond this; it is essential for ensuring that people can live with dignity, and is intimately linked to the fulfilment of other important human rights. This reality is well-captured in CESCR General Comment 12, which clarifies: the right to adequate food is indivisibly linked to the inherent dignity of the human person and is indispensable for the fulfilment of other human rights enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights. It is also inseparable from social justice, requiring the adoption of appropriate economic, environmental and social policies, at both the national and international levels, oriented to the eradication of poverty and the fulfilment of all human rights for all. (UN Economic and Social Council, 1999 p. 2)
The Comment emphasises the right to food is not simply a matter of meeting minimum caloric needs; food must be healthy, safe, diverse, and culturally acceptable. Meeting these requirements must be sustained over time; sporadic access to food does not adequately fulfil this right. Accessibility includes not only physical but also economic access to food. ICESCR signatory states ‒ the UK included ‒ have signalled their commitment to these principles. As with other human rights, states have a legal obligation to respect, protect, and fulfil the right to food, including through implementation of social programmes which directly and/or indirectly facilitate access.
As with medical care and food, housing is one of the key rights included in Article 25 of the UDHR. It is central to ensuring a decent standard of living and a prerequisite for many other rights. Despite its centrality in human rights, the role of housing in the welfare state is often portrayed as ‘wobbly’. It was one of the Five Giant Evils in the Beveridge Report, but is arguably the area of the welfare state to have been most significantly undermined by neoliberal decision making.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic the housing crisis in the UK, and many other nations, was starkly evident. Characterised particularly by concerns about high housing costs, the inaccessibility of owner-occupation, and the conditions faced by those excluded from ownership, the housing crisis meant that housing was on ‘the political agenda’ (Colenutt, 2020) to a far greater extent than in much of recent history.
However, as Madden and Marcuse (2016) point out, crises are typically framed as temporary, whereas the challenges of the housing market for low income and marginalised groups are longstanding (Illner, 2020). The recurrence of the language of crisis instead reflects the creeping expansion of housing difficulties into middle-class lives. The COVID pandemic has accelerated and intensified concerns about a ‘housing crisis’, as well as emphasising the importance of housing to people’s lives.
CESCR General Comment 4 (UN Economic and Social Council, 1991) expands on the right to housing established in the UDHR.
The COVID-19 pandemic is, first and foremost, a public health emergency. However, while the pandemic’s scale and the associated pace of illness and death merit labelling it an emergency, our use of this term does not imply that a large-scale infectious outbreak of this nature was unforeseeable nor impossible to plan for. Although political and popular rhetoric often frames emergencies (or disasters, crises, etc.) as unpredictable disruptions to otherwise well-functioning social systems and institutions, SRT challenges this framing (Illner, 2020). Instead, emergencies can best be understood as moments ‘in which natural crises, do not create, but rather expose ongoing social crises’ (Illner, 2020, p. 3). These social crises are the consequence of longstanding neglect and active erosion of structural support for social reproduction, involving processes of marginalisation and social divestment that leave systematically devalued members of the population disproportionately susceptible to natural crises. COVID-19 is no exception: Emerging evidence suggests that several governments (including the US and the UK) simulated flu-like pandemics and identified catastrophic gaps in the public health response well before the first cases of COVID-19 were identified, but no action was taken to prepare, and in fact in some cases health systems were subjected to further cuts, leaving systematically devalued people at greatest risk of illness and death (Friedman, 2020; PHE, 2017; Scally et al, 2020).
Neoliberal ideology favours private provision of health care and views spare capacity in the system as waste, leaving health systems exposed at times of increased demand.
In the face of a deadly airborne virus, the world acted to limit the spread by rapidly shifting as much as possible toward digital practices. In the UK, people were instructed to stay home to save lives, barring limited exceptions delineated by the government, and homes were transformed into multifunction bunkers facilitating work, school, doctor appointments, and recreation. Customers competed for limited online shopping delivery slots. Retailers fought amongst each other for cardboard boxes to meet the massive surge in online retail shopping, with Amazon buying up most of the stock (Stokel-Walker, 2021). An array of digital offerings were produced to help parents navigate the challenges of homeschooling ‒ Joe Wicks created daily PE lessons on YouTube; the BBC created BBC Bites and other educational tools; zoos became virtual, hosting educational sessions via Facebook. Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime became personal home cinemas. Birthday celebrations were hosted via Zoom. While life was far from ideal, for many, digital technologies were newly appreciated as enabling some semblance of normality while remaining safe.
At the same time, the benefits and harms of increased digitisation were far from equally distributed. The companies that survived the pandemic were those that were already digitised or offered products or services that were amenable to digitalisation ‒ clothes and shoes retailers offered virtual fitting appointments; entertainers turned to video hosting and social media platforms to monetise virtual performances; farms began charging for video conferences with animals (BBC News, 2021).
With the ideological shift to neoliberalism and the introduction of austerity measures following the Global Recession, the UK has experienced divestment in the National Health Service, growing food bank use, increasing housing problems and growing inequities in access to digital services. These inequities have been both highlighted and compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Questioning the ideology that economic growth should be prioritised above all else, this book demonstrates that an alternative approach to social policy, based on human rights and social justice, is necessary to tackle the existing systemic inequalities brought to the foreground by COVID-19.
Through our examination of the failure of neoliberal states to fulfil the rights outlined in Article 25 of the UDHR, we have explored five key themes. First, COVID-19 represents a watershed moment for social policy and human rights. The pandemic should provide all the justification we need to finally tackle the structural bases of inequality. COVID-19 has unarguably had the most devastating and disproportionate impact on marginalised people. From health to food insecurity, housing to the digital divide, the reality that marginalisation is structurally violent is not unique to the pandemic. As with other disasters, a return to ‘normal’ is a return to a dysfunctional and harmful social system for marginalised people. Yet what is unique to this moment is that, because of its globally and nationally disruptive and devastating effects, COVID-19 has created precariousness in the lives of the ‘deserving’, perhaps cracking the rhetorical foundation upon which the flawed notion of meritocracy rests. That the pandemic may be a watershed moment is by no means guaranteed, however, as historical precedent favours this crisis being exploited by disaster capitalists to tighten the grip of neoliberalism on society. Our structurally violent, inequitable system will not right itself, and, as history has shown, it certainly will not be righted by market forces. If this is to be a watershed moment, we must reimagine our societal goals and then take proactive steps to meet new aims.
This chapter asks the question, what does this unthinking mean for current anthropogenic climate change policies? This is answered in two ways. First, the concept of urban demand is discussed in its current manifestation as the product of a global Advertising-Big Data-Social Media complex. Second, the mechanisms behind the immensity of Chinese urban growth in recent decades are described. In their different, but intertwined, ways these two expressions of today’s modernity are pointing irrevocably towards terminal consumption. The only means to stop this happening appears to a reinvention of the city, creating an urban demand for stewarding nature for future generations, a posterity city
This chapter provides a description of Jane Jacobs’ legacy beyond her famous intervention into city planning. Five aspects of her work are highlighted. First and foremost she was a knowledge builder, harnessing a voracious curiosity to understand the complexity of the human condition. The most auspicious outcome has been her revision of economics identifying city economies as the loci of economic growth. She made further unusual forays into history – contesting power to eliminate complexity – and politics where her bottom-up approach had drawn admiration from both the right and left. She brought this altogether towards the end of her life as a new understanding of economics as ecology. The chapter concludes with a critical appraisal of her treatment of urban demand – crucial to the argument of this book – and links Jacob’s oeuvre to the work of multiple other radical scholars to aid the process of unthinking.
This urgent book brings our cities to the fore in understanding the human input into climate change. The demands we are making on nature by living in cities has reached a crisis point and unless we make significant changes to address it, the prognosis is terminal consumption.
Providing a radical new argument that integrates global understandings of making nature and making cities, the authors move beyond current policies of mitigation and adaption and pose the challenge of urban stewardship to tackle the crisis.
Their new way of thinking re-orients possibilities for environmental policy and calls for us to reinvent our cities as spaces for activism.
