policy Archives

Voices for Change

Voices For Change is a groundbreaking history of environmental activism across the four nations of the UK since the early 1970s, revealed in first-hand testimony by some of those who were most closely involved. It highlights the lived experiences of generations of environmental campaigners engaged in a wide variety of protest, projects and policy during this period, from grassroots actions in local communities to the leadership of major national organisations. The book draws on a unique archive of one hundred in-depth life-history interviews with environmental campaigners involved in action on a wide range of concerns, from conservation and transport to energy and climate change. It situates the experience of activism biographically and historically, exploring the role of family, region, class, ethnicity, gender and generation in the lives of participants in the key campaigns of the period. The voices of campaigners whose contributions have never been widely recognised appear here, alongside some of the most high-profile, including Jonathan Porritt, Caroline Lucas, George Monbiot, Jane Goodall and Swampy. There are also links to hundreds of freely-available audio clips and associated transcripts from the interview archives. Together, these voices highlight the achievements and the challenges of activism across more than 50 years, revealing diverse and unsung stories from the movement. Through this focus on life stories, the book provides a vital resource for today’s environmental activists, throwing new light on the diverse origins, forms and impacts of their campaigns.

Village Housing

Village Housing explores the housing challenge faced by England’s amenity villages, rooted in post-war counter-urbanisation and a rising tide of investment demand for rural homes. It tracks solutions to date and considers what further actions might be taken to increase the equity of housing outcomes and thereby support rural economies and alternate rural futures.

Examining past, current and future intervention, the book’s authors look firstly at the interwar reliance on landowners to provide tied housing and post-war diversification of responses to rising housing access difficulties, including from the public and third sectors; secondly, at recent responses that are community-led or rely on flexibilities in the planning system; and thirdly, at actions that disrupt established production processes: self-build, low impact development and a re-emergence of council provision.

These responses to the village housing challenge are set against a broader backcloth of structural constraint – rooted in a planning-land-tax-finance nexus – and opportunities, through reform, to reduce that constraint. Village Housing makes the case for planning, land and tax reforms that can broader the social inclusivity and diversity of villages, supporting their economic function and allowing them to play their part in post-carbon rural futures. It aims to contribute greater understanding of the village housing problem – framed by the wider cost crisis afflicting advanced economies – and offer glimpses of alternative relationships with planning and land.

Reading Randomised Controlled Trials

In early 2021-22, the Flexible Phonics reading intervention, a large-scale randomised controlled trial, took place in 118 schools in England and involved nearly 3,000 children. This study aimed to provide valuable insights into the success of largely school-based education trials. The Flexible Phonics trial proved to be not only an important experiment in improving children’s literacy, but a case study in which the methodology of single randomised controlled trials in education can be considered.

Reading Randomised Controlled Trials investigates the complexities of conducting randomised controlled trials in the field of education and how they can be seen as a cultural activity. The book emphasises the human operations, decision-making, and actions that drive such trials, which are often overlooked in published reports. Through the case study of Flexible Phonics, the book highlights the key differences between scaled educational trials and other types of trials, such as pharmaceutical trials. The additional focus on early childhood literacy is of significant educational importance, particularly in the context of UK school partial closures in 2020 and 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Reading Randomised Controlled Trials is ultimately a unique resource on the implementation of randomised controlled trials in authentic school contexts and for the sustained improvement of practice in education.

Obstacles to Environmental Progress

Why, when so many people understand the severity of environmental problems, is progress so slow and sustainability such a distant goal? What gets in the way? Perhaps you have immediately thought of several barriers. In Obstacles to Environmental Progress, Peter Schulze identifies 18 practical obstacles that routinely and predictably hinder U.S. progress on existing environmental problems. The obstacles apply to problems small and large and, in most cases, regardless of whether an issue is controversial. Though the book focuses on the U.S., most of the obstacles pertain elsewhere as well.

The obstacles fall into three categories: challenges to anticipating, detecting, and understanding problems; political and economic factors that interfere with responding; and obstacles to effective responses. While all the obstacles are predictable and common, they have not been systematically studied as related phenomena, perhaps because they span a wide range of academic disciplines.

In practice, they often arise as surprises that are then addressed in an ad hoc manner. Might they be better understood and thus more readily anticipated and overcome or avoided?

The book seeks to hasten environmental progress by forewarning and thus forearming those who are striving or will soon be striving for environmental progress, and by drawing scholarly attention to the obstacles as a set of related phenomena to systematically understand and more quickly overcome.

Matters of Significance

Application of scientific findings to effective practice and informed policymaking is an aspiration for much research in the biomedical, behavioural, and developmental sciences. But too often translations of science to practice are conceptually narrow, ethically underspecified, and developed quickly as salves to an urgent problem. For developmental science, widely implemented parenting interventions are prime examples of technical translations from knowledge about the causes of children’s mental distress. Aiming to support family relationships and facilitate adaptive child development, these programmes are rushed through when the scientific findings on which they are based remain contested and without ethical grounding of their aims.

In Matters of Significance, Marinus van IJzendoorn and Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg draw on 40 years of experience with theoretical, empirical, meta-analytic, and translational work in child development research to highlight the complex relations between replication, translation, and academic freedom. They argue that challenging fake facts promulgated by under-replicated and under-powered studies is a critical type of translation beyond technical applications. Such challenges can, in the highlighted field of attachment and emotion regulation research, bust popular myths about the decisive role of genes, hormones, or the brain on parenting and child development, with a balancing impact for practice and policymaking. The authors argue that academic freedom from interference by pressure groups, stakeholders, funders, or university administrators in the core stages of research is a necessary but besieged condition for adversarial research and myth busting.

Major Infrastructure Planning and Delivery

Major Infrastructure Planning and Delivery introduces the system for planning and consenting Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) in England (which has also applied for some schemes in Wales). These are the major projects involving power stations and large renewable energy schemes, motorways, railways and a range of other high profile, high impact and sometimes controversial development schemes, including some closely linked to the UK’s transition to net zero.

The book explains where this separate system for governing major infrastructure came from and how it operates in practice, with a particular focus on the relationship between planning, consent and delivery of these infrastructure projects. Detailed case studies of the A14 highway, Thames Tideway super sewer, Galloper offshore windfarm and Progress Power station, drawing on research by the authors, illustrate issues of the often overlooked continuing role of local government, the engagement of local communities and stakeholders, and the modification of schemes between consent and construction.

At a time of ongoing government planning reform, increased concern about climate change, and still unresolved consequences of Brexit, as well as timeless debates such as over national need versus local impact, this timely book offers rich detail on the particular approach to major infrastructure planning in England, but also speaks to wider issues around the governance of development and implementation of government policy under late capitalism.

Developing a Sense of Place

How do cultural planners and policymakers work through the arts to create communities? What do artists need to build a sense of place in their community? To discuss these issues, Developing a Sense of Place brings together new models and case studies, each drawn from a specific geographical or socio-cultural context.

Selected for their lasting effect in their local community, the case studies explore new models for opening up the relationship between the university and its regional partners, explicitly connecting creative, critical and theoretical approaches to civic development. The volume has three sections: Case Studies of Place-Making; Models and Methods for Developing Place-Making Through the Arts; and Multidisciplinary Approaches to Place and Contested Identities. The sections cover regions in the UK such as Bedford, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Manchester, London, Plymouth and Wakefield, and internationally in countries such as Brazil, Turkey and Zimbabwe.

Developing a Sense of Place offers a range of viewpoints from, for example, the arts strategist, the academic, the practice-researcher and the artist. Through its innovative models, from performing arts to architectural design, the volume will serve the needs and interests of arts and cultural policy managers, master planners and arts workers, as well as students of Human Geography, Cultural Planning, Business and the Creative Industries, and Arts Administration, at undergraduate and postgraduate level.