Download or read book Interpreting Governance High Politics and Public Policy written by Nick Turnbull and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpreting Governance, High Politics, and Public Policy offers the latest perspectives on the interpretive approach to governance and public policy research. This book commemorates more than a decade of governance research by Mark Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes, the leading exponents of interpretive political science in the United Kingdom. It explains how insights from the interpretive perspective may be used to advance the study of governance, high politics, and public policy. Featuring contributions from major scholars in the field, both inside and outside the interpretivist fold, the authors critically reflect upon interpretivism and consider how aspects of the interpretive approach apply to their own research. The authors debate the significance of Bevir and Rhodes’s work and develop future directions for interpretive governance research. The chapters link one of the most innovative contemporary perspectives in political science with the latest empirical studies. Contributing towards setting the governance research agenda, Interpreting Governance, High Politics and Public Policy is an excellent resource for the study of interpretive policy analysis.

Download or read book Interpretive Political Science written by R. A. W. Rhodes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpretive Political Science is the second of two volumes featuring a selection of key writings by R.A.W. Rhodes. Volume II looks forward and explores the 'interpretive turn' and its implications for the craft of political science, especially public administration, and draws together articles from 2005 onwards on the theme of 'the interpretive turn' in political science. Part I provides a summary statement of the interpretive approach, and Part II develops the theme of blurring genres and discusses a variety of research methods common in the humanities, including: ethnographic fieldwork, life history, and focus groups. Part III demonstrates how the genres of thought and presentation found in the humanities can be used in political science. It presents four examples of such blurring 'at work' with studies of: applied anthropology and civil service reform; women's studies and government departments; and storytelling and local knowledge. The book concludes with a summary of what is edifying about an interpretive approach, and why this approach matters, and revisits some of the more common criticisms before indulging in plausible conjectures about the future of interpretivism. The author seeks new and interesting ways to explore governance, high politics, public policies, and the study of public administration in general. Volume I collects in one place for the first time the main articles written by Rhodes on policy networks and governance between 1990 and 2005, and explores a new way of describing British government, focusing on policy making and the ways in which policy is put into practice.

Download or read book Comparing Cabinets written by Patrick Weller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is cabinet government so resilient? Despite many obituaries, why does it continue to be the vehicle for governing across most parliamentary systems? Comparing Cabinets answers these questions by examining the structure and performance of cabinet government in five democracies: the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Australia. The book is organised around the dilemmas that cabinet governments must solve: how to develop the formal rules and practices that can bring predictability and consistency to decision making; how to balance good policy with good politics; how to ensure cohesion between the factions and parties that constitute the cabinet while allowing levels of self-interest to be advanced; how leaders can balance persuasion and command; and how to maintain support through accountability at the same time as being able to make unpopular decisions. All these dilemmas are continuing challenges to cabinet government, never solvable, and constantly reappearing in different forms. Comparing distinct parliamentary systems reveals how traditions, beliefs, and practices shape the answers. There is no single definition of cabinet government, but rather arenas and shared practices that provide some cohesion. Such a comparative approach allows greater insight into the process of cabinet government that cannot be achieved in the study of any single political system, and an understanding of the pressures on each system by appreciating the options that are elsewhere accepted as common beliefs.

Download or read book Behavioural Public Policy in Australia written by Sarah Ball and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-14 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using rich ethnographic data and first-hand experience, Ball presents a detailed account of Australia’s attempts to incorporate behavioural insights into its public policy. Ball identifies three competing interpretations of behavioural public policy, and how these interpretations have influenced the use of this approach in practice. The first sees the process as an opportunity to introduce more rigorous evidence. The second interpretation focuses on increasing compliance, cost savings and cutting red tape. The last focuses on the opportunity to better involve citizens in policy design. These interpretations demonstrate different ‘solutions’ to a series of dilemmas that the Australian Public Service, and others, have confronted in the last 50 years, including growing politicisation, technocracy and a disconnect from the needs of citizens. Ball offers a detailed account of how these priorities have shaped how behavioural insights have been implemented in policy-making, as well as reflecting on the challenges facing policy work more broadly. An essential read for practitioners and scholars of policy-making, especially in Australia.

Download or read book Politics Policy and Public Administration in Theory and Practice written by Andrew Podger and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This festschrift celebrates the extensive contribution John Wanna has made to the research and practice of politics, policy and public administration. It includes both personal acknowledgements of his work and substantial essays on the issues that he focused most closely upon during his academic career: budgeting and financial management, politics, and public policy and administration. The essays address contemporary developments in public sector financial management in Australia and overseas, changing political processes in Queensland and the Commonwealth, and public governance and administration reform trajectories in Australia and internationally, including in China. A common theme is the importance of linking research to practice, reflecting John Wanna’s own style and contribution. Essays include exploration of the interface between academia and practice, including from the perspective of practitioners. The authors of the essays in this volume include eminent Australian and international scholars of public administration, experienced public service practitioners and younger scholars influenced by John Wanna.

Download or read book Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration Public Policy and Governance written by Ali Farazmand and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 13623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This global encyclopedic work serves as a comprehensive collection of global scholarship regarding the vast fields of public administration, public policy, governance, and management. Written and edited by leading international scholars and practitioners, this exhaustive resource covers all areas of the above fields and their numerous subfields of study. In keeping with the multidisciplinary spirit of these fields and subfields, the entries make use of various theoretical, empirical, analytical, practical, and methodological bases of knowledge. Expanded and updated, the second edition includes over a thousand of new entries representing the most current research in public administration, public policy, governance, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, and management covering such important sub-areas as: 1. organization theory, behavior, change and development; 2. administrative theory and practice; 3. Bureaucracy; 4. public budgeting and financial management; 5. public economy and public management 6. public personnel administration and labor-management relations; 7. crisis and emergency management; 8. institutional theory and public administration; 9. law and regulations; 10. ethics and accountability; 11. public governance and private governance; 12. Nonprofit management and nongovernmental organizations; 13. Social, health, and environmental policy areas; 14. pandemic and crisis management; 15. administrative and governance reforms; 16. comparative public administration and governance; 17. globalization and international issues; 18. performance management; 19. geographical areas of the world with country-focused entries like Japan, China, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, North America; and 20. a lot more. Relevant to professionals, experts, scholars, general readers, researchers, policy makers and manger, and students worldwide, this work will serve as the most viable global reference source for those looking for an introduction and advance knowledge to the field.

Download or read book Interpreting Governance High Politics and Public Policy written by Nick Turnbull and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpreting Governance, High Politics, and Public Policy offers the latest perspectives on the interpretive approach to governance and public policy research. This book commemorates more than a decade of governance research by Mark Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes, the leading exponents of interpretive political science in the United Kingdom. It explains how insights from the interpretive perspective may be used to advance the study of governance, high politics, and public policy. Featuring contributions from major scholars in the field, both inside and outside the interpretivist fold, the authors critically reflect upon interpretivism and consider how aspects of the interpretive approach apply to their own research. The authors debate the significance of Bevir and Rhodes’s work and develop future directions for interpretive governance research. The chapters link one of the most innovative contemporary perspectives in political science with the latest empirical studies. Contributing towards setting the governance research agenda, Interpreting Governance, High Politics and Public Policy is an excellent resource for the study of interpretive policy analysis.

Download or read book When politics meets bureaucracy written by Christian Lo and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is based on a study of the strategies and tactics applied by municipal bureaucrats and local politicians in the pursuit of political goals in two small Norwegian municipalities. The enactment of a bureaucracy within these small and close-knit communities offer an insight into how formal and informal relations intersect during the production of public policy. By analysing the relation between normative and pragmatic rules regulating political action, Christian Lo demonstrates how the efforts to resolve these tensions and dilemmas involve a balancing of alternative sources of political legitimacy. Through ethnographic accounts of policy-making in action, When politics meets bureaucracy offers novel perspectives to the interdisciplinary debate about local governance. Most significantly, these accounts demonstrate how processes of hierarchical government are inextricably intertwined with broader processes of governance during policy processes, thereby dissolving the theoretical and normative separation between the two concepts characterising large parts of the literature. By centring its focus on the interconnections between government and governance, Lo explores the cultural and historical conditions informing this intertwinement, which, the author argues, enable horizontal alignments that can modify the hierarchical logic of bureaucratic organisations. Combining approaches and perspectives from political science, sociology and anthropology, this book is essential reading for those interested in the inner workings of bureaucratic organisations and how such organisations interact with their societal surroundings.

Download or read book Transformational Public Policy written by Mark Matthews and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transformational Public Policy examines how governments can more effectively handle uncertainty and risk in an uncertain and changing world. Unpredictable and changing circumstances often bring nasty surprises that can increase waste in governance and public debt. This book illustrates how new methods derived from signal processing techniques can improve the practice of public policy by transforming it through rapid learning and adaptation. Interventions are processes of discovery, not compliance. Transformational Public Policy shows readers how the power of hypothesis testing in governance can be deployed. The book argues that public policy can be framed as tests of competing hypotheses subject to diagnostic errors. The aim is to learn how to reduce these diagnostic errors through cumulative experience. This approach can reduce the impact of negative unintended consequences -- a topic of great interest to policy makers and academics alike.

Download or read book Network Governance and the Differentiated Polity written by R. A. W. Rhodes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Network Governance and the Differentiated Polity is the first of two volumes featuring a selection of key writings by R. A. W. Rhodes. Volume I collects in one place for the first time the main articles written by Rhodes on policy networks and governance between 1990 and 2005. The introductory section provides a short biography of the author's journey, Part I focuses on policy networks, and Part II focuses on governance. The conclusion provides critical commentary, both replying to critics and reflecting on theoretical developments since publication. The volume complements the author's other publications on networks and governance, and many chapters in the volume feature an afterword setting out the context in which it was written and identifying what has changed empirically. Volume II looks forward and explores the 'interpretive turn' and its implications for the craft of political science, especially public administration.

Download or read book Handbook on Ministerial and Political Advisers written by Richard Shaw and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making a significant, novel contribution to the burgeoning international literature on the topic, this Handbook charts the various methodological, theoretical, comparative and empirical dimensions of a future research agenda on ministerial and political advisers.

Download or read book The Art and Craft of Comparison written by John Boswell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A call to arms for researchers to embrace their comparative intuition and combine in-depth stories with general lessons from their research.

Download or read book Marriage and Values in Public Policy written by Elizabeth van Acker and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marriage is a site of political conflict. It is a controversial issue in the UK, Australia and the US where there is a clash of values between neoliberal governments and diverse groups either strongly opposing or supporting marriage. In the meantime, fewer couples are marrying, while other family forms are more widely accepted. This book explores this disconnect by examining policy issues such as class divides, ethnicity, religion, same-sex marriage, gender relations and romantic expectations. A top down approach explores different government policy responses to marriage. In all three countries, there are differences and similarities in how governments react to the changes in family formations, but values or ‘conceptions of the desirable’ play a significant role. Enhancing stability and commitment as well as personal responsibility are important for policymakers who aim to keep ‘the family’ intact and thereby lower the burden on the public purse. It is difficult for political actors to respond to conflicting and changing values surrounding the diversity in relationships or to translate them into policies. There is a strong case to be made for increased policy attention to adult relationships - and a much weaker case for marriage. Rich evidence is drawn from interviews with key stakeholders as well as politicians’ speeches, government departmental reports, stakeholders’ documents and responses to government policies, and media articles.

Download or read book The Politics of Evidence written by Justin Parkhurst and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ‘improved’ use of evidence would look like from a policymaking perspective. Part I describes the great potential for evidence to help achieve social goals, as well as the challenges raised by the political nature of policymaking. It explores the concern of evidence advocates that political interests drive the misuse or manipulation of evidence, as well as counter-concerns of critical policy scholars about how appeals to ‘evidence-based policy’ can depoliticise political debates. Both concerns reflect forms of bias – the first representing technical bias, whereby evidence use violates principles of scientific best practice, and the second representing issue bias in how appeals to evidence can shift political debates to particular questions or marginalise policy-relevant social concerns. Part II then draws on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology to understand the origins and mechanisms of both forms of bias in relation to political interests and values. It illustrates how such biases are not only common, but can be much more predictable once we recognise their origins and manifestations in policy arenas. Finally, Part III discusses ways to move forward for those seeking to improve the use of evidence in public policymaking. It explores what constitutes ‘good evidence for policy’, as well as the ‘good use of evidence’ within policy processes, and considers how to build evidence-advisory institutions that embed key principles of both scientific good practice and democratic representation. Taken as a whole, the approach promoted is termed the ‘good governance of evidence’ – a concept that represents the use of rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence within decision-making processes that are representative of, and accountable to, populations served.

Download or read book Rethinking Governance written by Mark Bevir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores new directions of governance and public policy arising both from interpretive political science and those who engage with interpretive ideas. It conceives governance as the various policies and outcomes emerging from the increasing salience of neoclassical and institutional economics or, neoliberalism and new institutionalisms. In doing so, it suggests that that the British state consists of a vast array of meaningful actions that may coalesce into contingent, shifting, and contestable practices. Based on original fieldwork, it examines the myriad ways in which local actors - civil servants, mid-level public managers, and street level bureaucrats - have interpreted elite policy narratives and thus forged practices of governance on the ground. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of governance and public policy.

Download or read book The Quest for Revolution in Australian Schooling Policy written by Glenn C. Savage and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to critically examine the impacts of ‘grand designs’ in public policy through a detailed historical analysis of Australian schooling reforms since the ‘education revolution’ agenda was introduced by the federal government in the late 2000s. Combining policy analyses and interviews with senior policy makers and ministerial advisors centrally involved in the reforms, it offers a detailed interpretive analysis of the complexities of policy evolution and assemblage. The book argues that the education revolution sought to impose a new order on Australian schooling by aligning state and territory systems to common policies and processes in areas including curriculum, assessment, funding, reporting and teaching. Using a theory and critique of ‘alignment thinking’ in public policy, Savage shows how the education revolution and subsequent reforms have been underpinned by uncritical faith in the power of nationally aligned data, evidence and standards to improve policies and unite systems around practices ‘proven to work’. The result is a new national policy assemblage that has deeply reshaped the making and doing of schooling policy in the nation, generating complex questions about who is steering the ship of education into the future. The Quest for Revolution in Australian Schooling Policy is a must read for education policy researchers, policy makers, education ministers and school leaders, and will appeal to anyone with an interest in the complex power dynamics that underpin schooling reforms.

Download or read book Narrative Policy Analysis written by R.A.W Rhodes and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives or storytelling are a feature of the everyday life of all who work in government. They tell each other stories about the origins, aims and effects of policies to make sense of their world. These stories form the collective memory of a government department; a retelling of yesterday to make sense of today. This book examines policies through the eyes of the practitioners, both top-down and bottom-up; it decentres policies and policymaking. To decentre is to unpack practices as the contingent beliefs and actions of individuals. Decentred analysis produces detailed studies of people’s beliefs and practices. It challenges the idea that inexorable or impersonal forces drive politics, focusing instead on the relevant meanings, the beliefs and preferences of the people involved. This book presents ten case studies, covering penal policy, zero-carbon homes, parliamentary scrutiny, children’s rights, obesity, pension reform, public service reform, evidence-based policing, and local economic knowledge. It introduces a different angle of vision on the policy process; it looks at it through the eyes of individual actors, not institutions. In other words, it looks at policies from the other end of the telescope. It concludes there is much to learn from a decentred approach. It delivers edification because it offers a novel alliance of interpretive theory with an ethnographic toolkit to explore policy and policymaking from the bottom-up. Written by members of the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Southampton, with their collaborators at other universities, the book’s decentred approach provides an alternative to the dominant evidence–based policy nostrums of the day.