Governance & Policy Design
This research seeks, first, to understand policy-making by reference to the institutional, social, economic and political processes involved and the wider transformations of power and advantage that they entail. This enables us to re-examine ‘technical’ policy problems and the assumptions that underpin them.
We seek, second, to understand how policy actors (broadly defined) manage and organise their responses to these transformations; we evaluate the rationalities, tools and practices that they employ; and we contribute thereby to academic and public debates on the use of research, evidence and policy toolkits.
Research topics include the relationship of corporate social responsibility to corporate governance; the subversion of public policies by corporate interests; individual behaviour and compliance in face of different public policy instruments, including taxation and pension provisions and the dynamics of scandal and policy change.
Policy briefs
Research summaries
Videos
Publications
- Capitalist Globalization, Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Policy (Miller, 2010)
- Global Health Governance and the Commercial Sector: a documentary analysis of tobacco company strategies to influence the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (Gilmore, 2012)
- The Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility: techniques of neutralization, stakeholder management and political CSR (Gilmore, 2013)
- Changes in Smoking Prevalence in 8 Countries of the Former Soviet Union Between 2001 and 2010 (Gilmore, 2012)
- "Working the System” —British American Tobacco's Influence on the European Union Treaty and its Implications for Policy: an analysis of internal tobacco industry documents (Gilmore, 2010)
- Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare (Butler, 2005)
- Institutions and Public Policy: agile decision-making in a turbulent world (Room, 2011)
- The European Union and South East Europe: the dynamics of europeanization and multi-level governance (Lees, 2012)
- The Governance of Unsustainability: ecology and democracy after the postdemocratic turn (Bluhdorn, 2013)
- The Politics of Unsustainability: COP 15, post-ecologism, and the ecological paradox (Bluhdorn, 2011)
- Extending Working Life: behaviour change interventions (Weyman, Wainwright, Jones, 2012)
- The Meta-Regulation of European Industrial Relations: Power shifts, institutional dynamics and the emergence of regulatory competition among member states (Papadopoulos, 2013)
Forthcoming
- Political Economy Analysis, Aid Effectiveness and the Art of Development Management (Copestake, 2012)
- Evidence for Agile Policy Makers: the contribution of transformative realism (Room, 2013)
