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The British higher education system has been a site of privatisation for nearly two decades. While this has not been officially acknowledged, an incremental and uneven process of privatisation has occurred in the context of managerial and administrative reform. Although the impetus for privatisation was initiated by Conservative governments concerned to reduce higher education funding dependence on the state, increasingly privatisation measures are being considered more widely within the higher education sector as a pragmatic response to the current funding crisis. Yet, the ground work for privatisation – the ideas, plans and proposals as well as the advocacy and agenda-shaping activities to soften public opinion in favour of fees, loans and private capital – occurred many years in advance. Accordingly, this paper provides a study of agenda setting and the gradual acceptance of privatisation ideas in higher education prior to the 1997 general election.
This article re-assesses the literature on policy transfer and diffusion in light of what constitutes failure or limited success. First, it looks at imperfect, incomplete or uninformed transfer processes. Second, it addresses the concept of ‘negative lesson-drawing’ as well as the role of interlocutors who complicate policy transfer processes. Third, the idea of ‘transfer’ as a neat linear transmission of an intact policy approach is criticised by drawing attention to hybridity, synthesis, adaptation and ‘localisation’. Finally, policy ‘translation’ is a better conceptual framework for comprehending the learning and policy innovations that come with the trial and error inherent in policymaking.
The Open Society Institute (OSI) is a private operating and grant-making foundation that serves as the hub of the Soros Foundations Network, a group of autonomous national foundations around the world. OSI is a mechanism for the international diffusion of expertise and ‘best practices’ to post-communist countries and other democratising nations. Focusing on the ‘soft’ ideational and normative policy transfer, the article highlights the engagement in governance that comes with OSI transnational policy partnerships.
This chapter re-assesses some of the literature on policy transfer and policy diffusion, in light of ideas as to what constitutes failure, partial failure, or limited success. Rather than frame a policy transfer as a failure or success, scholars must recognise transfer (and so failure) as a messy process involving an array of meso-level actors. Two aspects are of particular note. First, the treatment of imperfect transfer as underscored by flawed lesson-drawing is useful as it takes one back to questions about the depth of learning. Second, the chapter highlights two aspects of learning that are often overlooked in mainstream accounts: ‘negative lesson-drawing’ and selective learning. Negative lesson-drawing is a quest to avoid policy failure where policy learning is not synonymous with policy adoption. Instead, policy lessons can help crystallise what ideas and policy paths decision-makers do not wish to follow.
In the United States, many rural communities are confronted with the dual burden of intimate partner violence (IPV) and the opioid crisis. In the past decade, rural US communities have experienced extremely high rates of opioid use disorder and opioid-related fatalities. At the same time, rural communities continue to experience high rates of IPV and a lack of accessible services. This chapter presents the findings of an interdisciplinary, community-based participatory study of 33 rural Vermont residents who have experienced co-occurring opioid use and IPV and 18 service providers representing a county Coordinated Community Response team. Their experiences richly illustrate the reality of social and geographic isolation, inaccessible social services, and the amplified impact of stigma in small town settings. We demonstrate important challenges for delivering victim services for rural residents with complex, interrelated needs, especially when supporting communities via teleservices, as so many organisations have had to do during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude with recommendations for multidisciplinary, inter-agency approaches to reducing barriers to care.
