Think-tanks play a key role in policy today. Yet, for scholars who are concerned with the dynamics within and between law and science, the place and impact of such organisations are often over-looked. To begin to remedy this, we held an event titled ‘Regulating Bioscience: Between the Ivory Tower and the Policy Room’ on the   …Continue Reading

International education assessments have become the lifeblood of education governance in Europe and globally. However what do we really know about how education systems are measured against one another and the effects this measuring produces? Operating as a new form of global education governance, international assessments create a powerful comparative spectacle focused on the performance   …Continue Reading

As evidenced in documents and reviews such as High Quality Care for All, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, and the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement’s Patient Experience Book, references to ‘the patient experience’ have become increasingly pervasive in healthcare policy in the UK. While a concern with how people experience health and illness   …Continue Reading

In a wonderfully perceptive article from 1999, German sociologist Peter Weingart identifies two paradoxes surrounding the use of science in political debate (and we can apply this to expertise more generally). First, late modern societies show an unprecedented dependence on expert knowledge to assess the risks and consequences of political action. Politics becomes ‘scientised’. But   …Continue Reading

Professor Albert Weale FBA (UCL) writes about the challenges of knowledge democratisation Issues like the funding of highly expensive pharmaceutical interventions, new forms of animal breeding, dispersed chemicals in the environment, the genetic modification of plants or the choice among different forms of energy production make for hard public policy decisions. They are highly technical,   …Continue Reading

The travelling inspector is a new phenomenon –although education in Europe has always ‘travelled’, inspectors were firmly rooted and derived influence from their local and authoritative standing as education ‘connoisseurs’. However the creation of SICI, the Standing International Conference of Inspectorates 20 years ago and its increasing influence in bringing school inspectors together across Europe   …Continue Reading

Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government writes about the UK Government’s approach to ‘open policy making’. One of the questions at the SKAPE launch on Thursday was whether the UK government was pursuing open policy making for procedural (increasing involvement, democratic engagement in the policy making process) or for instrumental reasons (getting better results).   …Continue Reading

Many of us recently went through the painful experience of trying to evidence the impact of research on policy, as part of the REF 2014 process. One of the problems with this endeavour is that policy-makers are likely to be reticent about the influence of research precisely in cases where it has affected policy. Yes,   …Continue Reading

For the last two centuries or so the countries that now make up the core of the Western democratic and industrialized world have – on their good days – sought to honour two political and constitutional principles: to allow freedom of thought and belief, and to accept the role of reason in political, legal and   …Continue Reading

For the last two centuries or so the countries that now make up the core of the Western democratic and industrialized world have – on their good days – sought to honour two political and constitutional principles: to allow freedom of thought and belief, and to accept the role of reason in political, legal and   …Continue Reading