POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / General

Explores the role of scale and scaling in collaborative governance focusing on a wide range of policy areas with cases drawn from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America.

This study, by a qualitative sociologist, uses interpretive methods to examine the impact of auditing and inspection on professional work in schools, hospitals, local government and the police and provides a true sense of what is practically involved in the work of counting, measuring and managing quality.

Citizens' everyday conduct is shaped by governmental action, yet there is much evidence that both front-line public service staff and service users can sometimes act in ways that modify or disrupt intended policy outcomes. This book presents a highly original examination of how policy objectives can be 'subverted' through the actions of citizens.

A compelling new approach to public policy-making as problem processing, bringing together aspects of puzzling, powering and participation and relating them to cultural theory, issues about networks, models of democracy and modes of citizen participation.

This book focuses on how personalisation - the idea that public services should be tailored to the individual, with budgets devolved to the service user or frontline staff - evolved as a policy narrative and has mobilised wide-ranging political support.

Involving citizens in policy decision-making has been a central goal of the Labour government since it came to power. But what happens when the public are drawn into debate with unfamiliar others in the unknown world of policy making at national level? This book sets out to understand the contribution that citizens can realistically make.

An innovative and systematic overview of policy analysis in Colombia and an instructive view of how it might help studies elsewhere. Leading academics assess central and local policy in fields including health, education and the military, and explore their role in Colombia’s economic development, resolution of internal conflict and other successes.

By analysing the conceptual frameworks and methodologies used from a meta-theoretical perspective, this book provides a panoramic picture of the perspectives and challenges of policy analysis in Argentina.

Bringing together outstanding researchers, this book is the first to examine the theory and practice of policy analysis in South Korea. Drawing on case studies, it explores the development of policy analysis and procedures for decision making at different levels of government

With a public health crisis gripping the UK, this book examines the organisational and political barriers to an effective public health system and determines that a new social contract is needed, in which health policy is truly public.

Why do top-down reforms to public services so often over-promise and under-deliver? Using five concepts from psychology, economics and organisational sociology and diverse examples of successes and failures, Thomas Elston addresses this pressing question of good governance.

This book offers Ireland’s introduction of a welfare-to-work market as a case study that speaks to wider international debates in social and public policy about the role of market governance in intensifying the turn towards more regulatory and conditional welfare models on the ground.