Public Inquiries, Policy Learning, and the Threat of Future Crises

Public Inquiries, Policy Learning, and the Threat of Future Crises
Author: Alastair Stark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192567985

In the aftermath of major crises governments turn to public inquiries to learn lessons. Inquiries often challenge established authority, frame heroes and villains in the public spotlight and deliver courtroom-like drama to hungry journalists. As such, they can become high-profile political stories in their own right. Inquiries also have a policy learning mandate with big implications because they are ultimately responsible for identifying policy lessons which, if implemented, should keep us safe from the next big event. However, despite their high-profile nature and their position as the pre-eminent means of learning about crises, we still know very little about what inquiries produce in terms of learning and what factors influence their effectiveness in this regard. In light of this, the question that animates this book is as important as it is simple. Can post-crisis inquiries deliver effective lesson-learning which will reduce our vulnerability to future threats? Conventional wisdom suggests that the answer to this question should be an emphatic no. Outside of the academy, for example, inquiries are regularly vilified as costly wastes of time that illuminate very little while inside social scientists echo similar concerns, regularly describing inquiries as unhelpful. These commentaries, however, lack robust, generalizable evidence to support their claims. This volume provides evidence from the first international comparison of post-crisis inquiries in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, which shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the post-crisis inquiry is an effective means of policy learning after crises and that they consistently encourage policy reforms that enhance our resilience to future threats.

Public Inquiries, Policy Learning, and the Threat of Future Crises

Public Inquiries, Policy Learning, and the Threat of Future Crises
Author: Alastair Stark
Publisher:
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2018
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0198831994

In the aftermath of major crises governments turn to public inquiries to learn lessons. Inquiries often challenge established authority, frame heroes and villains in the public spotlight and deliver courtroom-like drama to hungry journalists. As such, they can become high-profile political stories in their own right. Inquiries also have a policy learning mandate with big implications because they are ultimately responsible for identifying policy lessons which, if implemented, should keep us safe from the next big event. However, despite their high-profile nature and their position as the pre-eminent means of learning about crises, we still know very little about what inquiries produce in terms of learning and what factors influence their effectiveness in this regard. In light of this, the question that animates this book is as important as it is simple. Can post-crisis inquiries deliver effective lesson-learning which will reduce our vulnerability to future threats? Conventional wisdom suggests that the answer to this question should be an emphatic no. Outside of the academy, for example, inquiries are regularly vilified as costly wastes of time that illuminate very little while inside social scientists echo similar concerns, regularly describing inquiries as unhelpful. These commentaries, however, lack robust, generalizable evidence to support their claims. This volume provides evidence from the first international comparison of post-crisis inquiries in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, which shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the post-crisis inquiry is an effective means of policy learning after crises and that they consistently encourage policy reforms that enhance our resilience to future threats.

Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector

Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector
Author: Lynn T. Drennan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2024-06-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1040036651

Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector 3rd edition is a guide for public managers and public management students which combines practical and scholarly knowledge about risk and crisis management together in a single accessible text. In the uncertainty of the twenty-first century, public managers need to know how to identify risks and plan for crises, how to respond to uncertain events and emergencies and how to develop resilience. This book provides this fundamental knowledge with reference to a range of contemporary cases including COVID-19, the war in Ukraine and global cyber-crime crises. It also explores the international, transboundary and multi-agency dimensions of risk and crisis management. This fully updated new edition explores the cutting edge of risk and crisis management scholarship, provides an extensive series of tools and practical guidance for public managers who deal with uncertainty and draws on a wealth of classic and contemporary case studies. This content equips readers and public managers with the knowledge and skills to understand key issues and debates, as well as the capacity to treat risks and better prepare for, respond to and recover from crisis episodes. This book is essential reading for students studying public management, risk management and crisis management as well as professionals in the public management sector.

Public Inquiries and Policy Design

Public Inquiries and Policy Design
Author: Alastair Stark
Publisher:
Total Pages: 70
Release: 2024-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009286862

Public inquiries regularly produce outcomes of importance to policy design. However, the policy design literature has largely ignored the many important ways that public inquiries can act as policy design tools, meaning the functions that inquiries can offer the policy designer are not properly understood. This Element addresses this gap in two ways. First, it presents a theoretical discussion, underpinned by international empirical illustrations, to explain how inquiries perform policy design roles and can be classified as procedural policy tools. It focuses on four inquiry functions - catalytic, learning, processual, and legitimation. Second, it addresses the challenge of designing inquiries that have the policy-facing capacities required to make them effective. It introduces plurality as a key variable influencing effectiveness, demonstrating its relevance to internal inquiry operations, the external inquiry environment, and policy tool selection. Thus, it combines conceptual and practical insights to speak to academic and practice orientated audiences.

Making Sense of Natural Disasters

Making Sense of Natural Disasters
Author: Graham Dwyer
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2022-03-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030947785

This book examines the ways in which emergency management organizations make sense and learn from natural disasters. Examining recent bushfires in Australia, it demonstrates that whilst public inquiries that follow such disasters can be important for learning and change, they have ultimately created a learning vacuum insofar as their recommendations repeat themselves. This has kept governments and society focused on learning lessons about the past, rather than for the future. Accordingly, this book recommends a new approach to sensemaking and learning focused on prospective planning rather than retrospective recommendations, and where planning for the future is seen as the shared responsibility of the government, society, and the emergency management community in Australia and beyond.

Pathways to Positive Public Administration

Pathways to Positive Public Administration
Author: Patrick Lucas
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1803929170

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Situated in an era of low trust in government and a pervasive negativity bias that has shaped the field, this insightful volume examines the foundations, practices and tools of a distinctly positive strand of public administration (PPA). It advocates for a more optimistic approach to the study of what government does, how they do it, and to what effect.

Reconsidering Policy

Reconsidering Policy
Author: Kate Crowley
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-02-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1447333136

For nation-states, the contexts for developing and implementing policy have become more complex and demanding. Yet policy studies have not fully responded to the challenges and opportunities represented by these developments. Governance literature has drawn attention to a globalising and network-based policy world, but politics and the role of the state have been de-emphasised. This book addresses this imbalance by reconsidering traditional policy-analytic concepts, and re-developing and extending new ones, in a melded approach defined as systemic institutionalism. This links policy with governance and the state and suggests how real-world issues might be substantively addressed.

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics
Author: Jenny M. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2022-01-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0198805462

"BOOK Abstract: The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is a comprehensive collection that considers Australia's distinctive politics-both ancient and modern-at all levels and across many themes. It examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the nation's Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement. The book presents an account of Australian politics that recognizes and celebrates its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach in six parts. The first theme addresses Australia's unique inheritances, examining the development of its political culture in relation to the arrival of British colonists and their conflicts with First Nations peoples, as well as the resulting geopolitics. The second theme, improvization, focuses on Australia's political institutions and how they have evolved. Place-making is then considered to assess how geography, distance, Indigenous presence, and migration shape Australian politics. Recurrent dilemmas centre on a range of complex, political problems and their influence on contemporary political practice. Politics, policy, and public administration cover how Australia has been a world leader in some respects, and a laggard in others when dealing with important policy challenges. The final theme, studying Australian politics, introduces some key areas in the study of Australian politics and identifies the strengths and shortcomings of the discipline. This Handbook is an opportunity for others to consider the nation's unique politics from the perspective of leading and emerging scholars, and to gain a strong sense of its imperfections, its enduring challenges, and its strengths. Key Words: Australia, politics, policy, Indigenous heritage, colonial settlement, political institutions, place-making, political dilemmas, policy, and public administration, studying politics"--

The Oxford Handbook of Administrative Justice

The Oxford Handbook of Administrative Justice
Author: Marc Hertogh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 745
Release: 2022
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0190903082

"The core animating feature of administrative justice scholarship is the desire to understand how justice is achieved through the delivery of public services and the actions, inactions, and decision-making of administrative bodies. The study of administrative justice also encompasses the redress systems by which people can challenge administrative bodies to seek the correction of injustices. For a long time now, scholars have been interested in administrative justice, but without necessarily framing their work as such. Rather than existing under the rubric of administrative justice, much of the research undertaken has existed within sub-categories of disciplines, such as law, sociology, public policy, politics, and public administration. Consequently, although aspects of the topic have attracted rich contributions across such disciplines, administrative justice has rarely been studied or taught in a manner that integrates these areas of research more systematically. This Handbook signals a major change of approach. Drawing together a group of world-leading scholars of administrative justice from a range of disciplines, The Oxford Handbook of Administrative Justice shows how administrative justice is a vibrant, complex, and contested field that is best understood as an area of inquiry in its own right, rather than through traditional disciplinary silos"--

The Politics of Policymaking

The Politics of Policymaking
Author: Arjen Boin
Publisher: SAGE Publications Limited
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2024-04-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1529679230

Never has good policy been so important. From unemployment and a lack of affordable housing to regulating cryptocurrencies and protecting against cybersecurity threats, the challenges we face are complex and global. The text explains how policymaking works: from the emergence of policy ideas to deciding between cutting-edge solutions, from evaluating policies to improving policymaking practices, using examples from around the world. Open up the black box of government to see where policies are made. This introductory text takes you beyond theory and into the messy world of policymaking, offering a toolkit for making better policy. Drawing from insights earned through years of interactions with policymakers and extensive teaching experience, Boin and Lodge offer a comprehensive introduction to the inner workings of government and how to produce policies that address societal problems of today and tomorrow. The Politics of Policymaking teaches you the connections between policies, their effects, and the society they impact. It explores the interplay between citizens, policymakers and politicians, and the intricate web of policy decisions. Reflective questions help to engage readers with the key themes and to reflect on the challenges of policymaking in practice. A global perspective enables you to learn from diverse viewpoints and see examples from around the world. Timely and cutting-edge, this book tackles contemporary policy issues—platform economies, climate change, and more - while delving into crucial theoretical tools like political legitimacy and reform. An assignment feature provides you with the opportunity to consolidate your learning and put it into practice. This text is an essential companion for any undergraduate or postgraduate student of Politics, International Relations, and Public Administration and for anyone aspiring to work in public policy. Arjen Boin is Professor of Public Institutions and Governance at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Martin Lodge is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at London school of Economics and Political Science.