Transformational change through Public Policy

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue ‘Transformational change through Public Policy’. After introducing the idea of transformational societal change, it asks how public policy scholarship can contribute to fostering it; the research questions we need to do so; what actors we need to study; who our audiences are; and how we need to expand our theories and methods. In our conclusion, we draw five lessons from the special issue articles. Transformational change (1) often results from many instances of policy changes over extended periods of time; (2) involves social movements that reconceptualise problems and possibilities; and (3) requires policy changes across sectors and levels of society, from local communities to national or global communities. As a field, Public Policy will (4) never offer detailed instructions to create transformational change in all circumstances, but (5) must involve scholars taking on different roles, from engaged scholarship to theory development that each provide unique contributions.

(Re)moving exclusions: School exclusion reduction in Glasgow and London

“…Similarly, although it could only be a minor feature, our works suggest that the study of social movements (see e.g. Berglund et al., 2022; Laybourn‐Langton et al., 2021) can be fruitfully applied to educational change. Secondly, our analysis of city‐level conditions for policy emulation is of clear relevance to the educational policy transfer literature (see e.g.…”

“…This multi‐directional connection and collaboration—which gained particular momentum within education and adjacent sectors such as Early Years and justice—appears to have been key to policy movements on violence reduction and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), among others, which cumulatively created conducive conditions for school exclusion reduction in Glasgow. These policy networks effectively produced ‘a movement with enough force’ (Berglund et al., 2022, p. 311) to bring about substantial change in how young people were perceived and responded to, including in schools (see Zeedyk, 2021).…”

Entrepreneurs beyond neoliberalism: Municipally owned corporations and climate change mitigation in German cities

“…By contrast, publicly owned corporations of German and Danish municipalities play a crucial role in energy transitions; for instance, Lockwood et al (2017: 319) note that ‘Local ownership of heat companies in Denmark seems to have driven energy efficiency improvements through innovation’. Moreover, municipal ownership opens paths for mediating bottom-up demands for climate action with democratic procedures and public policy resources (Berglund et al, 2022).…”

Allocation and Evolution of Government Attention in China’s Electric Power Industry: An Analysis Based on Policy Text

“…Subsequently, we use the LDA topic model to find the implied intrinsic association between policy topics at various stages. The LDA model, proposed by Biel et al [41], represents the topic probability distribution of a document by a k-dimensional-implied random variable obeying the Dirichlet distribution. The LDA is a topic model based on the Bayesian model, and its model is implemented by first drawing a topic for each document.…”

“…Therefore, by identifying the focal points of government department's attention on the electric power industry in different stages, one can observe the differences in the key issues faced at different times, and simultaneously, by analyzing government departments' responses when faced with the key issues, it is helpful to deduce how government departments will make decisions in the new environmental context. Furthermore, policies significantly influence transformational changes [41]; thus, we examine the feasible routes for altering the electric power energy structure in response to the need for green development by analyzing policy evolution processes.…”