The Scottish Government’s Decisive Shift to Prevention
The Scottish Government faces the same ‘prevention puzzle’ as the UK government, but often argues that it deals with it in different ways. Some of this potential distinctiveness relates to a Scottish ‘policy style’ or ‘approach’, in which it encourages relatively consensual policy consultation and delivery. However, as Chapter 4 suggests, a lot of the ‘Scottish approach’ is aspirational. Further, many policymaking differences relate to the size of the Scottish Government, its responsibilities, and the scale of its task. If we account for such differences, the Scottish and UK governments often seem to respond in similar ways to the dilemmas posed by multi-centric policymaking and Westminster-style accountability. In the absence of clear and systematic differences between them, we need to produce empirical analysis of how each government: (a) makes sense of prevention policy, and (b) produces models of preventive policymaking. In that context, the Scottish Government experience provides a rich source of case study evidence on how governments address policy problems, and how territorial governments act while operating within wider multi-level systems.