First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this updated volume explores policy failures and the valuable opportunities for learning that they offer.Policy successes and failures offer important lessons for public officials, but often they do not learn from these experiences. The studies in this volume investigate this broken link. The book defines policy learning and failure and organises the main studies in these fields along the key dimensions of processes, products...

Global policy making is taking shape in a wide range of public sector activities managed by transnational policy communities. Public policy scholars have long recognised the impact of globalisation on the industrialised knowledge economies of OECD states, as well as on social and economic policy challenges faced by developing and transition states. But the focus has been on domestic politics and policy. Today, policy studies literature is building new concepts of 'transnational public-priv...

Global policy making is unfurling in distinctive ways above traditional nation-state policy processes. New practices of transnational administration are emerging inside international organizations but also alongside the trans-governmental networks of regulators and inside global public private partnerships. Mainstream policy and public administration studies have tended to analyse the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies. By contrast, this Handbook...

Banking on Knowledge is one of the first studies of how the World Bank is reinventing itself as the 'Knowledge Bank'. The book addresses how international organizations and governments are developing partnerships with think tanks, research institutes and other knowledge institutions in the hope of informing and improving policies for reform and development around the world.The book focuses on the recently established Global Development Network (GDN). The GDN is a new and a...

Think tanks are proliferating. Although they are outside of government, many of these policy research institutes are perceived to influence political thinking and public policy. This book develops ideas about policy networks, epistemic communities and policy learning in relation to think tanks.

In recent decades international development has grown into a world-shaping industry. But how do aid agencies work and what do they achieve? How does aid appear to the adults and children who receive it? And why has there been so little improvement in the position of the poor? Viewing aid and development from anthropological perspectives gives illuminating answers to questions such as these. This essential textbook reveals anthropologists' often surprising findings and details ethnographic ...

Several problems plague contemporary thinking about governance. From the multiple definitions that are often vague and confusing, to the assumption that governance strategies, networks and markets represent attempts by weakening states to maintain control. Rethinking Governance questions this view and seeks to clarify how we understand governance. Arguing that it is best understood as 'the strategies used by governments to help govern', the authors counter the view that governments have be...

The dawn of the twenty-first century has been accompanied by an upsurge of anti-capitalist campaigning, challenging the very basis of the New World Economic order. Dramatic events such as the protests from Seattle to Genoa, have captured media headlines. But media headlines leave key questions unanswered, questions about the ultimate significance of the challenges posed by global social movements and the development of civil society, both South and North.This book sets out to explo...

Globalisation and Women in the Japanese Workforce contributes to the debate about the impact of globalisation upon women. It examines the effect of restructuring upon women's employment in Japan and describes the actions women are taking individually and collectively to campaign for change in their working environment and the laws and practices regulating it.

The relationship between global governance and regionalization is fraught with ambiguity. Understanding regionalization in this context requires an understanding of its relationship, and reactive condition, with both the constellations of global governance and globalization.This book presents an overview and explores the distinctive but intersecting trajectories of regionalization and global governance. It surveys:the theoretical debatesthe economi...

This volume examines higher education in globalized conditions through a focus on the spatial, historic and economic relations of power in which it is embedded. Distinct geometries of power are emerging as the knowledge production capability of universities is increasingly globalized. Changes in the organization and practices of higher education tend to travel from the ‘West to the rest’. Thus, distinctive geographies of knowledge are being produced, intersected by geometries of power and ...

Remaking Media is a unique and timely reading of the contemporary struggle to democratize communication.With a focus on activism directed towards challenging and changing media content, practices and structures, the book explores the burning question: What is the political significance and potential of democratic media activism in the western world today?Taking an innovative approach, Robert Hackett and William Carroll pay attention to an emerging social movement t...