There have been significant developments in the state of psychological, neuroscientific and behavioural scientific knowledge relating to the human mind, brain, action and decision-making over the past two decades. These developments have influenced public policy making and popular culture in the UK and elsewhere – through policies and emerging social practices focussed on behavioural change, happiness, wellbeing, therapy, resilience and character. Yet little attention has been paid to examining the wider political and ethical significance of the widespread use of psychological governance techniques. There is a pressing and recognised need to address the behaviour change agenda in relation to how our cultural ideas about the brain, mind, behaviour and self are changing. This book provides a critical account of existing forms of psychological governance in relation to public policy. It asks whether we can speak of a co-ordinated and novel shift in governance or, rather, whether these trends are more simply pragmatic policy tools based on advances in scientific evidence. With contributions from leading scholars across the social sciences from the UK, the USA and Canada, chapters identify practical, political and research challenges posed by the current policy enthusiasm for particular branches of affective neuroscience, behavioural economics, positive psychology and happiness economics. The core focus of this book is to investigate the ways in which knowledge about the mind, brain and behaviour has informed the methods and techniques of governance and to explore the implications of this for shaping citizen identity and social practice. This groundbreaking book will be of interest to students, scholars and policy-makers interested and working within geography, economics, sociology, psychology, politics and cultural studies.

If 'prevention is better than cure', why isn't policy more preventive? Policymakers only have the ability to pay attention to, and influence, a tiny proportion of their responsibilities, and they engage in a policymaking environment of which they have limited understanding and even less control. This simple insight helps explain the gap between stated policymaker expectations and actual policy outcomes. Why Isn't Government Policy more Preventive? uses these insights to produce new empirical studies of 'wicked' problems with practical lessons. The authors find that the UK and Scottish governments both use a simple idiom - prevention is better than cure - to sell a package of profound changes to policy and policymaking. Taken at face value, this focus on 'prevention' policy seems like an idea 'whose time has come'. Yet, 'prevention' is too ambiguous until governments give it meaning. No government has found a way to turn this vague aim into a set of detailed, consistent, and defendable policies. This book examines what happens when governments make commitments without knowing how to deliver them. It compares their policymaking contexts, roles and responsibilities, policy styles, language, commitments, and outcomes in several cross-cutting policy areas (including health, families, justice, and employability) to make sense of their experiences. The book uses multiple insights from policy theory to help research and analyse the results. The results help policymakers reflect on how to avoid a cycle of optimism and despair when trying to solve problems that their predecessors did not.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. There is a broad consensus across European states and the EU that social and economic inequality is a problem that needs to be addressed. Yet inequality policy is notoriously complex and contested. This book approaches the issue from two linked perspectives. First, a focus on functional requirements highlights what policymakers think they need to deliver policy successfully, and the gap between their requirements and reality. We identify this gap in relation to the theory and practice of policy learning, and to multiple sectors, to show how it manifests in health, education, and gender equity policies. Second, a focus on territorial politics highlights how the problem is interpreted at different scales, subject to competing demands to take responsibility. This contestation and spread of responsibilities contributes to different policy approaches across spatial scales. We conclude that governments promote many separate equity initiatives, across territories and sectors, without knowing if they are complementary or contradictory. This outcome could reflect the fact that ambiguous policy problems and complex policymaking processes are beyond the full knowledge or control of governments. It could also be part of a strategy to make a rhetorically radical case while knowing that they will translate into safer policies. It allows them to replace debates on values, regarding whose definition of equity matters and which inequalities to tolerate, with more technical discussions of policy processes. Governments may be offering new perspectives on spatial justice or new ways to reduce political attention to inequalities.

This volume argues for the development of a macro perspective within psychology that more effectively incorporates social structures, systems, policies, and institutions. The book emphasizes how social structures and systems can ultimately promote, or erode, psychological wellbeing. Macropsychology is concerned with “understanding up,” or how we can influence the settings and conditions of the society in which we live. Psychology has traditionally been more interested in “understanding down,” that is, with the behaviour of individuals and groups; in inter-psychic and intra-psychic and in neurological and biological processes. This volume argues that psychology can more effectively contribute at the macro or societa level, by addressing grand challenges and global goals, using big data, and intervening at the population level.Bringing together social, organizational, cultural, and health psychology research, the book demonstrates a broad range of areas benefitting from a macropsychology perspective, particularly areas integral to the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Contributors address the value of macropsychological perspectives in addressing sub-topics such as: Mental health Personality traits and social structure Disability rights Food systems Humanitarian work psychology Macropsychology: A Population Science for Sustainable Development Goals aims to recognise and give impetus to a neglected perspective within psychology, and to inspire a paradigm-widening within the field of psychology, facilitating greater involvement with social justice and human rights.

Using rich ethnographic data and first-hand experience, Ball presents a detailed account of Australia’s attempts to incorporate behavioural insights into its public policy. Ball identifies three competing interpretations of behavioural public policy, and how these interpretations have influenced the use of this approach in practice. The first sees the process as an opportunity to introduce more rigorous evidence. The second interpretation focuses on increasing compliance, cost savings and cutting red tape. The last focuses on the opportunity to better involve citizens in policy design. These interpretations demonstrate different ‘solutions’ to a series of dilemmas that the Australian Public Service, and others, have confronted in the last 50 years, including growing politicisation, technocracy and a disconnect from the needs of citizens. Ball offers a detailed account of how these priorities have shaped how behavioural insights have been implemented in policy-making, as well as reflecting on the challenges facing policy work more broadly. An essential read for practitioners and scholars of policy-making, especially in Australia.

Policy-making in public health is highly complex, which is one reason why the behavioural turn is now playing a significant role in this field. Against this backdrop, this book aims to develop a theoretical understanding of how policymakers take up public health challenges and how policies change over the course of time. Accordingly, the book reveals policy-makers' underlying assumptions, which influence the way in which public policy seeks to promote the health status of citizens. In a second step, the book presents a typology of policy instruments and applies this to the field of health promotion. This typology introduces an option that adds behaviourally informed insights to the toolbox of political analysis. Empirical evidence of behavioural health policies can be found in various countries around the world, and the book presents both relevant country studies and examples from the supra- and international level. Finally, the book discusses the implications of the rise of behavioural health policies, proposes a specific concept of health citizenship and reviews state-citizen relations. The book is useful for academics from health-related disciplines, such as political science, sociology, and public health, as well as for policy-makers, practitioners and students.

British Politics provides a cutting-edge, analytical introduction to the subject, encouraging students to think about methods and theory, whilst building a fundamental understanding of the current debates shaping British politics and public policy.

This book addresses the wave of innovation and reforms that has been called the nudge or behavioural public policy agenda, which has emerged in many countries since the mid-2000s. Nudge involves developing behavioural insights to solve complex policy problems, such as unemployment, obesity and the environment, as well as improving the delivery of policies by reforming standard operating procedures. It reviews the changes that have taken place, in particular the greater use of randomised evaluations, and discusses how far nudge can be used more generally in the policy process. The book argues that nudge has a radical future if it develops a more bottom up approach involving greater feedback and more engagement with citizens.

The Routledge Handbook of Social Change provides an interdisciplinary primer to the intellectual approaches that hold the key to understanding the complexity of social change in the twenty-first century. We live in a world of intense social transformation, economic uncertainty, cultural innovations, and political turmoil. Established understandings of issues of well-being, development, democratisation, progress, and sustainability are being rethought both in academic scholarship and through everyday practice, organisation and mobilisation. The contributors to this handbook provide state-of-the-art introductions to current thinking on central conceptual and methodological approaches to the analysis of the transformations shaping economies, polities, and societies. Topics covered include social movements, NGOs, the changing nature of the state, environmental politics, human rights, anti-globalism, pandemic emergencies, post-Brexit politics, the politics of resilience, new technologies, and the proliferation of progressive and reactionary forms of identity politics. Drawing on disciplines including anthropology, human geography, political sociology, and development studies, this is a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to researching key issues raised by the challenge of making sense of the twenty-first century futures.

This book provides a focused discussion of how families are governed through technologies. It shows how states attempt to influence, shape and govern families as both the source of and solution to a range of social problems including crime. The book critically reviews family governance in contemporary neo-liberal society, notably through technologies of self-responsibilisation, biologisation, and artificial intelligence. The book draws attention to the poor working class and racialised families that often are marked out and evaluated as culpable, dysfunctional, and a threat to economic and social order, obscuring the structural inequalities that underpin family lives and discriminations that are built into the tools that identify and govern families. Filling a gap where disciplinary perspectives cross-cut, this book brings together sociological and criminological perspectives to provide a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the topic. It will be of interest to researchers, scholars and lecturers studying sociology and criminology, as well as policy-makers and professionals working in the fields of early years and family intervention programmes, including in social work, health, education, and the criminologically-relevant professions such as police and probation.