Policy makers and commentators refer readily to ‘the European project’, as though Europe itself were a project. But what would it mean to take this term seriously, to develop the account of European governance it seems to suggest? This chapter begins on the ground, in the everyday understanding of the project as an organizational form…
As a knowledge-based international agency, WHO offers a useful opportunity to explore the nature of knowledge in policy making.
We sum up this volume by restating our initial ambition, which was to develop a framework for investigation rather than to formulate any specific theory.
The literature on the role of knowledge in policy making encompasses a striking diversity of views on just what knowledge is, what different types of knowledge there may be and how they are to be observed empirically.
Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the making of knowledge about governance itself.
What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? What unacknowledged assumptions do we hold? This Introduction argues that, for a long time, EU studies has been dominated by discussions in which ‘the EU’ is consistently treated as an object: supranational, intergovernmental, multi-level, monotopia.
Regulation depends fundamentally upon the production and dissemination of knowledge. At a minimum, one might imagine a mechanical model of regulation which involves regulator A exerting control over the actions of actor B. But even here, knowledge is crucial, for B must know what kinds of actions A requires or considers appropriate if regulation is to occur.
We are concerned here with community psychiatry, a particular way of knowing and thinking about mental illness and of responding to it. Community psychiatry, for our purposes, refers to all the policies, services, agencies and staff deployed in treating people with mental health problems who are poor and for whom publicly-funded services are the default, if not the only, option.
What is policy? How do we do or make policy? Where and who with? What is it for, anyway, and what difference does it make? Good questions, though you wouldn’t be asking them if you didn’t already know that answering them isn’t easy.
This paper reviews comparative research on health policy in OECD countries, outlining the origins and development of health policy in the modern state and pointing to the different ways that development has been understood by welfare state scholars.
Health policy is as modern as social democracy. This is not to suggest that social democracy is some sort of ’cause’ of health policy, but that their environments – political, economic, demographic, social and ideological – are shared. Underpinning all of these is a common, modern epistemology, which frames the causes and effects of social problems and the capacities of government in specific ways.