Strands Of Policy Research Articles

The role of oral language in the dialogic primary classroom

ABSTRACT This article takes stock of the current trends in research, policy and practice regarding the role of language in the dialogic classroom. The article uses the policies of two different educational jurisdictions as counterpoints to highlight the different ways that oral language can be positioned within primary curricula. It reflects on current and recent research literature, exploring how language can promote the collaborative learning that is central to dialogic pedagogy, highlighting the value of less formal registers or less ‘certainty’ in the proposal of ideas. The article then offers a linguistic-ethnographic analysis of what this looks like in practice, drawing on classroom observational data gathered in English primary schools. Finally, these three strands of theory, policy and practice are brought together, scoping ways forward for the inclusion of language and dialogue in primary education.

Repurposing public education: governmental rationality of education export in Finland through public education problematisations

ABSTRACT The Finnish government’s education export (FGEE) programme, which was initiated in 2010, seeks to promote and coordinate education as an export product. Until recently, research on the Finnish education export has focused on individual education sectors, with only passing consideration of the governmental rationality of education export. Drawing on Bacchi’s (2009) post-structural policy analysis, I use the FGEE documents as a material starting point, as ‘practical texts’ (Bacchi 2009, 34; Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 34) to study how education export discourse problematises public education and produces a contextualised governmental rationality. Contributing to the growing body of knowledge on emerging global, national, and local public – private structures, the paper illustrates how minor policy strands such as the FGEE programme can be seen as production sites in which education practices and their governmental rationalities are constructed.

Scope-shifting: Bureaucracy, Energy Justice and the Dakota Access Pipeline

Through a study of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) environmental assessment (EA) of the Dakota Access Pipeline's crossing of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, this paper explores regulatory agencies’ “interpretive implementation.” We find that, in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice, USACE “scope-shifted”—facultatively expanding and contracting the scopes of its spatial, scientific and cost–benefit impact analyses—to expedite industrial expansion, contravening the policies’ original intents. In doing so, USACE's EA created various energy injustices by excluding local tribes (especially the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes) and their concerns, e.g. treaty rights, local histories, climate change and especially potential oil spills with impacts on human health and subsistence resources. We analyze this scope-shifting through the lens of Karl Polayni's double movement between socioenvironmental protections and capitalist development. We elaborate this framework further via a triple-helix model that analyses ideologies, power relations and policies (here further complicated by both “law” and “interpretation” threads), as three intertwined strands that pull with or against each other, jointly progressing toward greater rights for vulnerable communities, “retrograding” toward earlier, oppressive conditions or simply stagnating. Ultimately, we argue that understanding scope-shifting and other forms of interpretive implementation as threads within the triple-helix policy strand, in dynamic tension or synchrony with other threads and strands, can help explicate agency decision-making processes. We hope that this conceptualization can elucidate the capacity of seemingly mundane bureaucratic practices for exacerbating, or potentially alleviating, energy injustice.

Society shapes industrial policy, industrial policy shapes society

Industrial Policy has been defined and performed in very different ways over time and across countries and continents, along with its aims and scope. Instead of repeating these controversies, the article starts with the emerging consensus that systemic industrial policy should support societal priorities and that instruments should be used which maximize synergies with other policy strands. A future-oriented industrial policy should also no longer maximize national priorities, but goals should at least be shared with neighboring countries. Realistically, we have to acknowledge that it will remain a weapon in the competition between superpowers and those who want to defend or gain this status. Industrial Policy will also be different in emerging countries with low income and education, a high agricultural share, and persistent gender differences, compared to that in highly industrialized countries. Industrial policy leads to and requires structural change, with causality running in both directions. Its shape will influence the "future of capitalism", and the socio-ecological system will define the content of a systemic and integrated industrial policy.

Sustainable developmentality: Interrogating the sustainability gaze and the cultivation of mountain subjectivities in the central Indian Himalayas

Sustainability challenges persist in the central Indian Himalayas (CIH) despite an array of solutions proffered by external experts. This paper interrogates the ‘sustainability gaze’ of external experts – which reflects attempts to reconcile neoliberal economic growth with environmental conservation within the logics of technical and biophysical rationalities - by exploring local experiences of rapid and uncertain social and environmental change. Three strands of policy and practice shape the gaze: (i) natural hazard mitigation for climate change adaptation; (ii) reducing social vulnerability through pro-poor development; and (iii) increasing resilience through environmental management and conservation. Results challenge narratives that overpopulation causes environmental degradation and changing patterns of migration are a natural process of modernisation in the CIH. Alternative local narratives highlight haphazard and inequitable economic growth, lack of mountain planning and disaster management, inadequate social welfare programmes, and monkey relocation policies as the major sustainability challenges. The paper discusses how the gaze produces ‘sustainable developmentality’ - a depoliticising process that cultivates multiple and conflicting mountain subjectivities, namely: (i) active community members responsible for mitigating natural hazards, (ii) productive farmers and flexible waged labourers, and (iii) custodians of the environment. This creates a triple-bind for smallholders which has forced huge numbers to migrate from their mountain dwellings with unsustainable outcomes. Exploring local perspectives re-politicises the debate, exposing the contradictions and tensions of the gaze and the broader systemic issues of power and inequity the gaze overlooks. Such insights are crucial for rendering development policies more relevant to mountain residents of the CIH and beyond.

Emerging Direction Of U.S. National Higher Education Internationalization Policy Efforts Between 2000 And 2019

Novel trends in U.S. national higher education internationalization policy efforts emerged in the 2000s. Within the context of globalization, the purpose of this historical policy analysis study was to capture the emerging direction of national higher education internationalization policy in three policy-making sectors (voluntary, private, and public) between 2000 and 2019. Novel policy efforts in the three sectors were evident in four major areas: (a) international education at home (language and personnel training), (b) international student recruitment, (c) education abroad, and (d) international institutional partnerships. Within all three sectors, interest in policy strands wavered and policy efforts veered towards international institutional partnerships. Policy efforts tended to disregard the impact of globalization on the domestic front, focusing instead on international ties.

Integration policies and threat perceptions following the European migration crisis: New insights into the policy-threat nexus

The link between integration policies and intergroup attitudes or threat perceptions has received considerable attention. However, no studies so far have been able to explore how this relationship changed following the European migration crisis due to a lack of recent comparative policy data. Using new MIPEX data, this is the first study to examine mechanisms underlying the policy-threat nexus following the European migration crisis, distinguishing between several strands of integration policies, and realistic and symbolic threat. To do so, we combine 2017 Eurobarometer data with 2017 Migrant Integration Policy data, resulting in a sample of 28,080 respondents nested in 28 countries. The analyses also control for economic conditions, outgroup size, and media freedom. Multilevel analyses indicate that respondents living in countries with more inclusive integration policies in general report lower realistic and symbolic threat. When investigating different policy strands, we find that inclusive policies regarding political participation and access to nationality for immigrants are associated with lower realistic and symbolic threat. We compare our findings to those from prior to the European migration crisis and discuss the potential role of this crisis in the policy-threat nexus.

Knocking on the door: policy, agency and path creation in the post-industrial city

ABSTRACT At the time of the Millennium, Nottingham, a former manufacturing city in the English Midlands, faced serious challenges as a consequence of de-industrialisation. This was the context from which a new development path based on life sciences emerged. This paper explores the role of policy interventions and the agency of local actors in this path creation process. Kingdon’s [1995. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy. 2nd ed. New York: Longman] multiple streams framework (MSF) is used as an analytical framework through which to assess the interaction and local implementation of three related strands of national policy: regional policy, industrial policy (with an emphasis on clusters) and innovation policy and their role in the emergence of a life science cluster in the city. The case is explored with reference to the experience of other European cities that have faced similar structural challenges and sought to respond with development strategies based on life sciences.

Comparing and learning from English and American higher education access and completion policies

ABSTRACT England and the United States provide a very interesting pairing as countries with many similarities, but also instructive dissimilarities, with respect to their policies for higher education access and success. We focus on five key policy strands: student information provision; outreach from higher education institutions; student financial aid; affirmative action or contextualisation in higher education admissions; and programmes to improve higher education retention and completion. At the end, we draw conclusions on what England and the US can learn from each other. The US would benefit from following England in using Access and Participation Plans to govern university outreach efforts, making more use of income-contingent loans, and expanding the range of information provided to prospective higher education students. Meanwhile, England would benefit from following the US in making greater use of grant aid to students, devoting more policy attention to educational decisions students are making in early secondary school, and expanding its use of contextualised admissions. While we focus on England and the US, we think that the policy recommendations we make carry wider applicability. Many other countries with somewhat similar educational structures, experiences, and challenges could learn useful lessons from the policy experiences of these two countries.

The Transnational Counter-Terrorism Order: A Problématique

Abstract We live our lives in an often-unseen transnational counter-terrorism order. For almost two decades now, counter-terrorist hegemons have been acting on multiple transnational levels, using a mixture of legal, institutional, technical and political manoeuvres to develop laws, policies and practices of counter-terrorism that undervalue rights, exclude civil society, limit dissent and disagreement, and expand greatly the reach of national and transnational security. The assemblage of laws, institutions, forums, processes, bureaucracies, and cooperative networks that have emerged from these machinations should be understood as a transnational counter-terrorism order that is intended to instantiate on a global level ‘an arrangement of social life…[that]…promotes certain goals or values’ (Bull), whether or not they conflict with rights, whether or not they emerge from legitimate and participatory processes. This paper brings together various seemingly-technical or esoteric strands of law, institutions, policy and politics to show their connections, interdependencies and interactions and, thereby, to illustrate the emergence of this transnational counter-terrorism order. It argues that unless we recognise the connections between and multi-scalar implications of the seemingly disparate, sometimes opaque, and often bureaucratic elements that make up the transnational counter-terrorism order, its scale and implications will remain hidden in plain sight and we may find ourselves unable effectively to insist on fidelity to the constitutionalist values of rights, accountability, and democratic legitimacy.

Potential shift of Integrated Design (ID) through BIM in Sustainable Building Renovation

Future building renovation concerns more holistic perspectives related to both integrations through the involvement of key stakeholders and fulfillment of sustainability in connection to a broader range of objectives and criteria facilitated by the renovation scenarios. This entails re-thinking, reviewing, and application of novel integrating methods and approaches through an integrated design (ID) schema, towards establishing a richer early design stage to deal with the multifaceted challenges in building renovation context. Through its technological capabilities (modeling techniques), shifting into Building Information Modelling (BIM) as a methodology for integration can be useful bringing more efficiency in (particularly the early design stage of) renovation projects by creating and adding values through the five strands of product, people, process, policy, and technology. On the basis of this underlying hypothesis, the aim of this paper is firstly to review the characteristics of ID, BIM, and their interactions on each other, and secondly to explore and address the potential shift of integrated design through BIM (ID+BIM) for sustainable building renovation. This contribution is relevant to building design researches and practitioners, who can use the resultant to better understanding and navigating the integrated design through BIM, and its potential shift in sustainable building renovation with multiple stakeholders.

Protecting the lost city hydrothermal vent system: All is not lost, or is it?

Lost City is a unique marine hydrothermal vent field in Area Beyond National Jurisdiction on the front line of deep-sea features that policy-makers should seek to protect. The feature, located on the Mid Atlantic Ridge, is part of a priority area for a future International Seabed Authority Regional Environmental Management Plan. It is also recognized by the Convention on Biological Diversity as being within an Ecologically or Biologically Significant Marine Area and has been mooted as a possible World Heritage site. Together these policy strands present a strong rationale for protection but governance and policy uncertainties remain. The paper advocates a proactive and bold interpretation of UNCLOS in favour of strong protection.

An inductive classification of types of social innovation

Though widely regarded as ill-defined and lacking conceptual clarity, social innovation has been heralded as a desirable response to social economic and environmental challenges arising from market and policy failures. Based on a definition of social innovation as involving the reconfiguration of social practices through civil society engagement, this paper offers an inductive classification of the diverse types of social innovation found in Scotland, based primarily on rural examples. It is argued that not only does social innovation occur in a diverse range of fields and in many different forms, but also that the Scottish Government policy has explicitly connected to social innovation as a means of delivering a communitarian policy agenda. However, without affirmative action, the community empowerment agenda is likely to widen the gap between communities with strong social capital and those with weaker social capital, thus undermining another strong strand of Scottish policy which supports greater equality and social inclusion.

The Sensitivity of Country Ranks to Index Construction and Aggregation Choice: The Case of Immigration Policy

How sensitive are country ranks to the aggregation function used in index construction? This paper tests whether different aggregation functions come to different results in regard to the ranking of countries. Indices within the field of immigration and integration policy are analyzed, yet, the results pertain to index building across the social sciences. The paper discusses three aggregation methods: the arithmetic mean, the geometric mean, and a noncompensatory/non‐linear aggregation function based on the Condorcet method. In the empirical part, these three aggregation functions are applied to the family indicators for the year 2010 of the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) dataset, a new dataset which measures immigration policies’ restrictiveness, as well as to the eight policy strands of the Migrant Integration Policy Index for the year 2014. Results show that the methods react differently to extreme values and thus result in different rank orders in the middle range. In the politicized field of immigration and integration policies, country ranks play a crucial role and this is shown to have profound real‐world implications. The paper thus urges researchers to be reflective of the assumptions of different aggregation functions, as these lead to different results.

The Financial Crisis and Policy Responses in Europe (2007–2018)

In Europe, the financial crisis has gone through several phases of varying complexity before abating in mid-2014. It started with the Financial Turmoil in August 2007, followed by the Global Financial Crisis in September 2008, and the Great Recession in 2009–2010. These events exacerbated imbalances that had been building-up in the euro area. Then, in early 2010 the Sovereign Debt Crisis of the euro area was triggered by unsustainable finances in some countries and overstretched banks. The euro area was then confronted with financial fragmentation, impaired monetary policy transmission, and threats to financial stability. The acute phase of the euro area crisis was followed by weak growth, a second recession, and thereafter a protracted period of disinflation. As the crisis mutated, monetary policy had to respond to ever new challenges. The policy toolkit of the ECB has thus expanded. This paper explains the events as they unfolded against the backdrop of a changing institutional framework, and governance reforms. There is no encompassing study of such an exceptional period. Our paper is the first to bring together the various policy strands. Policy responses are working and have supported a steady recovery of the economy since mid-2014 and changes in its governance.

Welcoming talent? A comparative study of immigrant entrepreneurs\u2019 entry policies in France, Germany and the Netherlands

This article explores the admission policies for self-employed non-EU immigrants wanting to start or move their business to the European Union (EU). Selecting immigrant entrepreneurs is a specific and understudied policy strand in the battle for talent. No common EU policy is available (yet) and although national policies do show some similarity, they differ in respect of how and who decides if an entrepreneur serves a national economic interest. By presenting a first-time model for defining the level of welcoming, this study adds an instrument to the toolbox of both scholars and policy makers for evaluating immigration policies. Whether a policy is welcoming depends on material criteria, such as entry conditions giving the entrepreneur a fair chance and on the formal criteria of the applicable procedures and the actors involved in the decision-making process. The body of the article constitutes of a legal comparison between French, German and Dutch entry policies for non-EU entrepreneurs. The article concludes that a future EU policy on welcoming immigrant entrepreneurs must set standards for a large variety of entrepreneurs, allow for the economic interest to be broadly defined and have, at the least, transparent and practical procedures.

Transatlantic Lessons on Higher Education Access and Completion Policy

This article explores what England and the United States can learn from each other withregard to reducing social class and racial/ethnic differences in higher education accessand completion. It focuses on seven policy strands: student information provision;outreach from higher education institutions; student financial aid; affirmative action orcontextualization in higher education admissions; higher education efforts to improveretention and completion; performance funding; and degree of reliance onsubbaccalaureate institutions.

Transatlantic Lessons on Higher Education Access and Completion Policy

This article explores what England and the United States can learn from each other withregard to reducing social class and racial/ethnic differences in higher education accessand completion. It focuses on seven policy strands: student information provision;outreach from higher education institutions; student financial aid; affirmative action orcontextualization in higher education admissions; higher education efforts to improveretention and completion; performance funding; and degree of reliance onsubbaccalaureate institutions.

Is the longbow better than the crossbow? Emerging issues from mobilising a longitudinal study on a megaproject

Longitudinal studies of occupational safety and health (OSH) outcomes in construction projects are rarely conducted, due to the financial, practical and ethical difficulties of studying people, projects, and organisations over extended periods of time. Traditionally, OSH research in the construction industry is cross-sectional – where a ‘snapshot’ is taken, often with a retrospective view. The focus of this paper is the mobilisation of a longitudinal research study investigating OSH policy in an eight-year infrastructure megaproject in the UK. The research examines implementation of the project’s “transformational” OSH strategy, in order to develop new understandings of the effectiveness of OSH interventions. The research design uses a “strategy as practice” lens and traces the various strands of OSH policy, from development to their adoption as practice. The research context is complex, due to the complicated contractual arrangements. The research design incorporates a rarely used “tracer” methodology. During the mobilisation phase of the research project, several challenges were identified, including interpretation and implementation of this tracer methodology, coping with a large team of researchers, obtaining ethics approval and establishing the governance structure, deployment of the team to the site, ensuring consistency in the data collection, managing data sets, and the reliability of the coding. The methodology adopted is time-consuming, and the very large data sets that are generated need to be managed. Complex research project management structures and processes are required, which would not be needed for traditional cross-sectional studies. Sufficient time needs to be allowed at the start of such research projects, in order to put the necessary systems in place. The paper will be of interest to OSH researchers and those contemplating longitudinal studies, particularly those employing a tracer approach.

Heart of the deal: the use of negotiation and advocacy skills to revise national guidance for the NHS in line with professional best practice in the recordkeeping sector

Being able to negotiate a mutually satisfactory agreement is of great importance to the archives and records sector. The article will take the negotiations between the Archives and Records Association (ARA) and the Information Governance Alliance regarding the update of the Records Management Code of Practice for Health and Social Care 2016 as a case study. The article will uncover the steps and lessons learned throughout a process which changed a poorly researched document that was out of line with professional practice within the archives and records sector. Due to the significance of the Code, the role of the ARA in influencing this strand of national policy is significant and demonstrates the role of the ARA as a body advocating for best professional practice and supporting its members.