Social and Public Policy - Research

This book explores how diverse citizens experience welfare provision. It seeks to promote broader debate and address the silences in research and debate, particularly in relation under-researched groups, with the aim of developing a renewed call for analysis.

This book shows how the speech and syntax of low-income female teachers in India’s education system establishes a special form of relational agency and empowerment.

This book examines the policy approaches of Conservative governments since 2015 in key social policy areas including education, health, housing, employment, children and young people and more.

Providing perspectives from the global North and South, faith leaders, scholars and activists demonstrate the complex connections between faith and abortion, how women and pregnant people are positioned in society and how morality is claimed and challenged.

This book argues there is urgent need for a radical reassessment of the way the law mediates between citizens and the state. Drawing on public inquiries into high-profile cases, this book examines how the regulation of street-level bureaucracy can play an integral part in reimagining postliberal politics and the role of the law.

First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics journal, this book situates reforms known as ‘nudges’ or ‘behavioural interventions’ which have emerged in public policy and administration within a broader tradition of methodological individualism.

Based on decades of research, this book explores global social change processes through the concepts of social change organisations (SCOs) and social change makers (SCMs) – the individuals working within and alongside SCOs.

This book offers a holistic view of Julio Boltvinik’s vast and important work on poverty conceptualisation and measurement. It provides the foundations, application and empirical examples of Boltvinik’s Integrated Poverty Measurement Method, which could potentially transform poverty narratives globally as it has done in Mexico.

This topical book offers an analysis of the current state of the planning system in England and an evidence-based review of over a decade of change. With a critique of ongoing UK planning reforms, the book argues that the planning system is often blamed for a range of issues that are in fact the fault of ineffective policymaking.

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.

Addressing previously neglected groups of care leavers such as unaccompanied migrants, street youth, young parents and those with a disability, this book considers the precarity often experienced by many care leavers. It makes research relevant to practitioners and policy-makers aiming to enable, rather than label, vulnerable groups.

Drawing on a wealth of qualitative longitudinal evidence, this book casts light on women’s lived experiences of welfare and work. It uncovers the hidden gendered bias of conditional welfare reforms to challenge dominant political discourses, policy design and practice norms.