Social and Public Policy > Social Policy
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Social services are an increasingly important part of the welfare state. According to existing scholarship, services should be preventative, tailored and complementary. Yet, in practice, these service delivery preconditions or goals are often found lacking. Managers in street-level organisations can influence this discrepancy, by either alleviating or further enhancing it. That is the issue we explore, by asking how the discrepancy between formal policy goals and actual service delivery is perceived and articulated by middle managers whose work includes the discretionary translation of policy on paper to their employees at the street level. To address this question, we conducted a vignette interview study among middle managers from a variety of welfare state organisations in the Netherlands. Instead of focusing on one type of service, we focus on several types of services delivered to recipients with a combination of socio-economic and health problems. The results show that the three preconditions of service delivery are perceived to be not or only partly present in service delivery practice in the Netherlands. We distinguish three ways in which middle managers articulate the ambiguous work within this discrepancy. First, they equate prevention with early identification and accessibility of services. Second, they internalise a discourse on customisation. Third, they substitute complementarity for collaboration. Given that the span of influence of the middle managers includes the individual level more than the organisational and system levels, we argue that these articulations could reinforce the existing emphasis on the service precondition tailoring at the expense of complementarity and prevention.
Background:
Interventions to support engagement between academics and policy professionals have proliferated, yet little evidence is available to guide what works, how, or for whom.
Aims and objectives:
To evaluate the activities, outcomes and impacts of the Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement (CAPE) programme and identify enabling conditions, using a modified framework for academic-policy engagement.
Methods:
Mixed methods evaluation across four intervention types (seed funding, policy fellowships, training, knowledge exchange events), between 2021 and 2024. We interviewed academics, research support staff and policy professionals (n=129), observed 32 activities, and distributed a survey (n=42, 27 per cent response rate). We analysed data using inductive and framework analyses.
Findings:
CAPE interventions focused at the linear (training) or relational (fellowships, seed funding and knowledge exchange) levels. Interventions led to outcomes in capacity-building, connectivity, conceptual and attitude change, and tacit knowledge development. Interventions were resource-intensive and required responsive intermediary skills, particularly fellowships. We found influencing factors at individual, organisation and system levels. The most experienced participants preferentially benefited from opportunities, potentially perpetuating or even exacerbating inequalities. We did not find evidence of impact on policy processes or outcomes.
Discussion and conclusions:
CAPE led to an increase in academic-policy engagement activities, mostly as linear and relational interventions. These generated costs as well as benefits and often advantaged individuals with significant prior experience of academic-policy engagement. Future academic-policy engagement interventions should consider motivations, capabilities, goals and resources at the individual and organisation levels, while using strategic planning and coordination to maximise their value, and address diversity and inclusion.
This article explores the multifaceted challenges to organisational legitimacy encountered by international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) operating in India. It seeks to uncover the factors that make certain organisations more susceptible to regulatory restrictions than others despite operating within a shared geopolitical landscape. The research delves into the complexities surrounding INGO operations in India, particularly those engaging with justice, democracy and rights issues. By qualitatively exploring how different INGOs respond to legitimacy challenges, this article aims to discern the reasons behind this variability, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the intricate interplay between legitimacy and the shrinking spaces for INGOs in India. The findings elucidate how legitimacy is used as a key proxy to impose restrictions on organisations perceived as a threat to the government’s own political legitimacy. It highlights the critical role that political congruence or divergence with state policies plays in determining the operational landscape for these organisations.
Background:
While the last decade has seen the increasing refinement of methods for evidence collection and synthesis for clinical guidelines or health policy decision-making, no similar methodological advances can be observed for ethics guidelines. Accordingly, the evidence base of ethics recommendations often remains opaque. The ‘REIGN’ framework fills this gap by addressing how evidence can (and possibly should) be used to develop ethics guidance.
Methods:
A review of the academic and grey literature was conducted. To this end, PubMed and the websites of selected institutions engaged in ethics guideline development and/or health technology assessment were searched. The literature found was read and summarised. Through further conceptual analysis of the arguments, terminology and ideas provided in the literature the REIGN framework was developed.
Findings:
The framework consists of two parts. First, it provides a definition of evidence that is productive for the field of ethics while incorporating key ideas behind the evidence-based medicine movement. It also introduces ‘normative evidence’ in contrast to empirical evidence. Second, it identifies five ‘evidential support components’ (ESCs) as aspects of developing normative recommendations in the health context that can/should be substantiated by evidence. It also provides guidance regarding possible sources of evidence as well as quality appraisal of normative evidence.
Conclusions:
By structuring the dispersed discourses on the topic, the REIGN framework allows ethics guideline developers to think more coherently through the questions of whether, for what area and in what manner evidence should be sought.
This article discusses the concept of success in relation to policy experimentation, a type of policy innovation. Despite a growing literature on policy experiments, few studies define or explore what constitutes a successful experiment. This is important given the potential of experiments for policy learning and change, and also so that experiments can be evaluated and lessons learned across jurisdictions by academics and practitioners. The article develops a concept of success that is rooted in policy learning. Based on an empirical study of policy experimentation in Canadian federal cultural, heritage and sport policy, the article outlines four key ‘success criteria’: basic elements of an experiment; leadership and resources; procedural elements; and evaluation. It argues that experiments need to be evaluated not merely on outcomes, and that they should ultimately aim to encourage reflexive learning, characterised by dialogue and deliberation.
The non-profit sector has experienced significant changes and growth over the past few decades. Market failure theories aim to explain why traditional non-profit organisations (NPOs) exist but fall short in accounting for the diversity and complexity we observe in the third sector today. This article takes a first step in applying a two-sided market model to describe the evolution of the sector. It finds that purely donative NPOs may have once had the characteristics of a platform in a two-sided market featuring donors and beneficiaries linked by non-profit intermediaries. However, the transition of the sector from donative to one reliant on earned income requires an extension of the model of two-sided markets so that it has a less static approach. The demand and supply sides in the two-sided market model have become more complex. The article therefore suggests a dynamic model, in which consumers and financiers of NPO products and services can move from one side of the platform to the other and take on different and at times overlapping roles.
Charity reserve levels are widely used as a measure of financial vulnerability, of both individual charitable organisations and the wider sector. This paper assesses the mandated reporting of reserves by a large sample of British charities. We find that many charities are reporting figures that do not match the definition of reserves given by regulatory bodies. We therefore recommend caution when using extant reserves data, and that increased attention should be paid to the preparation of such data.
Research on environmental volunteering suggests that nature bonding is crucial to promoting citizen engagement. However, predominant research on volunteers’ initial motivations overlooks the creation of bonds between people and nature over time. To understand the nature bonding from a temporal perspective, this article examines significant life experiences of volunteers of a self-organised citizen-based river group in Barcelona Metropolitan Region. Through a qualitative study involving 25 interviews with members of this group, different types of significant life experiences (formative and reinforcing) and associated psychological drivers (others-oriented, place-oriented and self-oriented) are identified. Maturation and interaction of experiences and drivers throughout volunteers’ life stages determines the evolution of self-nature bonding, that starts unconsciously and becomes conscious and complex, leading to place attachment and moral commitment. The shift from mere identification of volunteers’ initial motivations to a holistic understanding of their bonds with nature over time provides insights for promoting the self-organisation of citizen-based groups that can play a significant role in collaborative environmental governance.
This article aims to provide a theoretical framework for working with excluded youth as active partners in non-profit organisations. Using the Youth-Adult Partnership model, we propose three strategies for creating partnerships with youth in the realm of volunteerism: (1) group volunteering; (2) mentoring as a managerial strategy; and (3) management councils. Each strategy is a means of relying on youths’ knowledge and expertise, and assigning volunteers and practitioners joint authority to lead the services. Based on Bourdieu’s (1986) theory of capital, we argue that such partnerships serve not only as a means of reducing the inequality of young people experiencing social exclusion as volunteers, but also as an opportunity to demonstrate the social capital of youth as service providers stemming from their marginalisation. Such recognition by adults and staff, who are the service providers of the youths as clients, can change the rules for both the youth and the organisations.
Fundraising is essential to the voluntary sector. Giving clubs, where donors are publicly recognised for a gift at a specific level, are prolific in the context of university and arts fundraising to support giving. However, there is little known about their role in other cause areas. This paper examines giving clubs in UK health and disability charities and explores the benefits and challenges they offer to fundraisers working in UK nonprofit organisations.
