Social Alarms to Telecare

Social policy agendas have generally failed to take account of the actual or potential role played by social alarms and telecare. This book draws on research and practice throughout the developed world. It documents the emergence of these important technologies and considers their potential in healthcare, social welfare and housing.

Barriers and Enablers for Integrating Public Health Cobenefits in Urban Climate Policy

Urban climate policy offers a significant opportunity to promote improved public health. The evidence around climate and health cobenefits is growing but has yet to translate into widespread integrated policies. This article presents two systematic reviews: first, looking at quantified cobenefits of urban climate policies, where transportation, land use, and buildings emerge as the most studied sectors; and second, looking at review papers exploring the barriers and enablers to integrating these health cobenefits into urban policies. The latter reveals wide agreement concerning the need to improve the evidence base for cobenefits and consensus about the need for greater political will and leadership on this issue. Systems thinking may offer a way forward to help embrace complexity and integrate health cobenefits into decision making. Knowledge coproduction to bring stakeholders together and advance policy-relevant research for urban health will also be required. Action is needed to bring these two important policy agendas together. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 43 is April 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Towards an Intersectional Perspective in Cycling

In recent years, concerns about climate change have elevated cycling on urban policy agendas worldwide. The rapid implementation of temporary cycling infrastructure in cities across the globe during the Covid-19 pandemic has further elevated the importance of cycling in facilitating a green and just recovery. However, if cycling is to be a key part of a green and just recovery for cities, then an intersectional perspective is needed to ensure that cycling can be an equitable and inclusive mode of transport. An intersectional perspective acknowledges that there are multiple systems of oppression, which interact in complex ways to compound inequalities and reinforce certain power dynamics. Structural and spatial inequalities contour urban mobility, as evidenced by well-documented gender, racial and socioeconomic disparities in cycling. This paper provides an overview of gender and other inequalities in urban cycling and makes the case for adopting an intersectional perspective to cycling policies and infrastructures, so that cycling in cities can be more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

Engineering the Climate

Notions of the impending climate crisis have pushed a set of highly contested techno-scientific measures onto policy agendas around the world. Suggestions to deliberately alter, to engineer, the Earth’s climate have gained political currency in recent years not as a positive vision of techno-scientific innovation, but as a daunting measure of last resort. The controversial status of various so-called climate engineering proposals raises a simple, yet pressing question: How has it has come to this? And, more specifically, how did such contested measures earn their place on policy agendas, despite enormous scientific complexities and fierce political contestation? Global societal problems, such as climate change, financial crises, or pandemics have brought the political relevance of scientific expertise to the foreground. This book speaks to scholarship in sociology and science studies, seeking to illuminate the essential entanglements between efforts to understand and efforts to govern such problems. By giving climate engineering a life of its own and following its dynamic trajectory as a contested object of expert work, this book sheds light on the reflexive and historically contingent interplay of science and politics as two distinct, yet increasingly interdependent, realms of society.

Proposals of European Citizens for Reviving the Future of Shrinking Areas

Shrinkage, depopulation and the related structural decline threaten development trajectories of more than a quarter of European territories from the present until 2050. In April 2021, the European Commission has launched the Conference on the Future of Europe to involve citizens and players beyond the traditional actors in shaping future policy agendas. The initiative consists of a wide-scale citizen engagement policy offering them a digital framework to actively contribute to the most relevant debates from April to December 2021. Given that shrinkage is a neglected theme in traditional policy arenas, this article examines the proposals of European citizens for reviving the future of shrinking areas. Through content analysis, the article highlights a limited relative presence of shrinkage in the Conference debate. Nevertheless, the results offer insights into the thematic concentration and the affinity of shrinkage with the most popular policy debates. The article also discusses the content of citizens’ ideas for the future of shrinking areas, thus offering concrete proposals that may fuel the definition of future policy agendas.

Do Elections (Still) Matter?

This book sheds new light on this central democratic concern based on an ambitious study of democratic mandates through the lens of agenda-setting in five West European countries since the 1980s. The authors develop and test a new model bridging studies of party competition, pledge fulfilment, and policymaking. The core argument is that electoral priorities are a major factor shaping policy agendas, but mandates should not be mistaken as partisan. Parties are like ‘snakes in tunnels’: they have distinctive priorities but they need to respond to emerging problems and their competitors’ priorities, resulting in considerable cross-partisan overlap. The ‘tunnel of attention’ remains constraining in the policymaking arena, especially when opposition parties have resources to press governing parties to act on the campaign priorities. This key aspect of mandate responsiveness has been neglected so far because in traditional models of mandate representation, party platforms are conceived as a set of distinctive priorities, whose agenda-setting impact ultimately depends on the institutional capacity of the parties in office. Rather differently, this book suggests that counter-majoritarian institutions and windows for opposition parties generate key incentives to stick to the mandate. It shows that these findings hold across five very different democracies: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. The results contribute to a renewal of mandate theories of representation and lead to question the idea underlying much of the comparative politics literature that majoritarian systems are more responsive than consensual ones.

If not party mandates, then what? The determinants of legislative agendas

What determines changes in the focus of laws over time? Before turning to the impact of democratic mandates, this chapter examines alternative explanations focusing on globalization, the rise of regulatory politics and its effects on redistribution; social change and the emergence of post-materialism; friction and cognitive constraints resulting in punctuated equilibrium patterns of attention; and the hypothesis of a broadening of policy agendas leading governments to deal with a growing number of issues. Panel negative binomial regressions of data collected by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) on legislative priorities in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, confirm that further explanations are needed. Among the different explanations that we explore, only globalization seems to have some impact on legislative agendas in terms of the relative weight of regulatory and redistributive policies. These first tests set the landscape and provide guidance as to potential covariates to take into account when analysing the role of parties and party competition in the subsequent chapters.

The International Politics of Carbon Dioxide Removal: Pathways to Cooperative Global Governance

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C require that, in addition to unprecedented reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, between 100 and 1,000 metric gigatons of CO2 be removed from the atmosphere before 2100. Despite this, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is not yet firmly on national or global policy agendas. Owing to uncertainty about both technical potential and social license, it is unclear whether CDR on the required scale will even be feasible. This article asks what scholarship about the provision of global public goods can tell us about governing CDR. We identify four areas where new international cooperative efforts—likely performed by small clubs of motivated actors—could amplify existing CDR policy responses: development of CDR accounting and reporting methodologies, technological and prototype deployment for technically challenging CDR, development of incentives for CDR deployment, and work on governance and accountability mechanisms that respond to social justice impacts and social license concerns.

Delivery of Ecosystem Services by Community Woodland Groups and Their Networks

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment stresses that it is possible to manage ecosystems so as to strengthen their capacity to provide a range of goods and services. In reality, the delivery of ecosystem services reflects policy and delivery mechanisms, the environment, and the objectives of landowners and managers. Amid gradual changes to forest policy and more recent periods of austerity, the management of treescapes by locally led groups, such as Community Woodland Groups (CWGs), has become increasingly common. Through document analysis and interviews we explore the objectives and activities of British-based CWGs, and the implications these have for the delivery of ecosystem services. Additionally, we explore CWGs involvement with three types of networks and the ways in which each facilitate CWGs’ establishment, operations and ecosystem service provision. We conclude that, while CWGs are capable of delivering a range of ecosystem services, their focus is typically on: (i) cultural services for the benefit of the local community, and (ii) biodiversity. Since these foci parallel the goods and services emphasised in contemporary forest policy agendas, it is apparent that CWGs represent a promising model for woodland management. However, to realise their potential and confront management challenges, CWGs often rely on access to advice, labour, equipment and funding from across multiple networks.