Behaviourally Mediated Phenotypic Selection in a Disturbed Coral Reef Environment

Natural and anthropogenic disturbances are leading to changes in the nature of many habitats globally, and the magnitude and frequency of these perturbations are predicted to increase under climate change. Globally coral reefs are one of the most vulnerable ecosystems to climate change. Fishes often show relatively rapid declines in abundance when corals become stressed and die, but the processes responsible are largely unknown. This study explored the mechanism by which coral bleaching may influence the levels and selective nature of mortality on a juvenile damselfish, Pomacentrus amboinensis, which associates with hard coral. Recently settled fish had a low propensity to migrate small distances (40 cm) between habitat patches, even when densities were elevated to their natural maximum. Intraspecific interactions and space use differ among three habitats: live hard coral, bleached coral and dead algal-covered coral. Large fish pushed smaller fish further from the shelter of bleached and dead coral thereby exposing smaller fish to higher mortality than experienced on healthy coral. Small recruits suffered higher mortality than large recruits on bleached and dead coral. Mortality was not size selective on live coral. Survival was 3 times as high on live coral as on either bleached or dead coral. Subtle behavioural interactions between fish and their habitats influence the fundamental link between life history stages, the distribution of phenotypic traits in the local population and potentially the evolution of life history strategies

Studying Evidence Use for Health Policymaking from a Policy Perspective

Individuals working within the health sector widely embrace the idea of using evidence to achieve their goals of improving individual and population health. Yet while these actors embrace an ideal form of rational-instrumental evidence use under the banner of ‘evidence based policymaking’, they often struggle to understand when, why, or how evidence is used in policy processes. This chapter sets out the conceptual framework employed in this volume to study the use of evidence within policymaking from a public policy perspective. It explores the importance of both political contestation and institutional context to understand when and how evidence will be used within policy processes. The chapter then outlines the structure of this book and the focus of subsequent chapters, highlighting how each of these talks to these themes

Rethinking Policy ‘Impact’:Four Models of Research-Policy Relations

Abstract Political scientists are increasingly exhorted to ensure their research has policy ‘impact’, most notably via Research Excellence Framework (REF) impact case studies, and ‘pathways to impact’ statements in UK Research Council funding applications. Yet the assumptions underpinning these frameworks often fail to reflect available evidence and theories. Notions of ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘knowledge exchange’ are typically premised on simplistic, linear models of the policy process, according to which policy-makers are keen to ‘utilise’ expertise to produce more ‘effective’ policies. Such accounts overlook the rich body of literature in political science, policy studies, and sociology of knowledge, which offer more complex and nuanced accounts. Drawing on this wider literature, this paper sets out four different approaches to theorising the relationship: (1) knowledge shapes policy; (2) politics shapes knowledge; (3) co-production; and (4) autonomous spheres. We consider what each of these four approaches suggests about approaches to incentivising and measuring research impact

The pathway out of neoliberalism and the analysis of political ideology in the post-crisis world

©2015 Taylor & Francis Neoliberalism has not simply ‘survived’; it has failed to die, seemingly outlived the socio-economic conditions that gave rise to its existence. In this way, the non-death of neoliberalism raises some important questions about the nature of ideology, principally: its relationship to socio-economic determinants, how it exercises its grip over subjects and how this grip, or hold, can itself be exorcised. Seeking insights into these questions, this paper tells the story of the scholarly response to the non-death of neoliberalism over a ten-year period of crisis: a pre-crisis era beginning with the Asian financial crisis (1997– 2007) and a post-crisis era beginning with the global financial crisis to the present day (2008–2015). The paper considers key scholarly responses to the persistence of neoliberalism at three fundamental levels: (a) the trajectory of their analytical technique, or the key concepts that underpin their wider project; (b) their critique of neoliberalism, or how these concepts render the construction of core neoliberal ideals; and (c) their ideological response to neoliberalism, or their recommendations regarding the pathway out of neoliberalism. On this basis, the paper engages in a discussion of the most plausible explanation for the non-death of neoliberalism and the most likely avenue along which the post-crisis world might build an escape

Alternatives to cost-benefit analysis for economic evaluation

Science and scientific devices, such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA), involve an implicit effort to rationalize policy-making. In political science, these efforts are not new. Social scientists cannot assume that the notion of policymakers improving their decision-making via means of scientific knowledge necessarily speaks for itself. Beyond the outputs that devices such as CBA offer, health economists and policy makers need to build their relationship by additional means. As environmental policy interventions make their way through policy processes-stages such as agenda setting, policy formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation-environmental health economists need to engage and participate in nuanced and entrepreneurial ways, demonstrating an ability to work with both CBA and the many alternatives to it

Policy change and the failure of pro-European agency in the British Conservative Party: A post-structuralist analysis

Under a post-structuralist lens, the policy change through which Britain left the European Union in January 2020 is not only about the success of the Euroskeptic policy position at the 2016 referendum, but also about the failure of pro-European agency in major British political parties like the Conservative and Unionist Party (CP). This article applies critical logics analysis—social, political, and fantasmatic—to deployments of pro-European agency within the CP across three historical periods: (i) a pre-Maastricht period, (ii) a Maastricht period, and (iii) a pre-referendum period. I outline reasons for which key conservative agents failed to restore meaning to a policy routine for upholding British membership of European institutions. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate the capacity of post-structuralist policy analysis to make insightful, rigorous, and useful contributions to political science and its important issue of policy change by way of comparison with more established models. Related Articles: English, Patrick, Maria T. Grasso, Barbara Buraczynska, Sotirios Karampampas, and Luke Temple. 2016. “Convergence on Crisis? Comparing Labour and Conservative Party Framing of the Economic Crisis in Britain, 2008–14.” Politics & Policy 44(3): 577–603. http://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12160. Hazakis, Konstantinos J. 2015. “The Political Economy of Economic Adjustment Programs in the Eurozone: A Detailed Policy Analysis.” Politics & Policy 43(6): 822–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12141. Temple, Luke, Maria T. Grasso, Barbara Buraczynska, Sotirios Karampampas, and Patrick English. 2016. “Neoliberal Narrative in Times of Economic Crisis: A Political Claims Analysis of the U.K. Press, 2007–14.” Politics & Policy 44(3): 553–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12161

The corporatization of healthcare organizations internationally: A scoping review of processes, impacts, and mediators

Corporatization, the conversion of state-owned enterprises into semi-autonomous, legally independent entities, has gained in popularity internationally since the 1980s. This review suggests that usage of the term has become entangled with other definitions of corporatization, and other organizational reforms associated with new public management, and appears consequently to have lost its distinctiveness in many contemporary studies of corporatization. Through a scoping review of literature on corporatization of healthcare organizations internationally, we develop a typology of four perspectives on corporatization (as managerialism of medical work, as institutional level reform to encourage market-like behavior, as corporate governance implications of legal independence, and as private sector colonization) and analyze the specific processes, impacts, and mediators associated with each approach. This typology can aid conceptual clarity in future research on corporatization and orient practitioners to particular management and policy questions within the complex field of reform signified by this term

Challenges to sovereign ambitions: forces of convergence and divergence within the global pharmaceutical sector and the UK's withdrawal from the European Union.

This paper maps key regulatory, governance and legal challenges associated with the UK's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) in terms of convergent and divergent pressures within the global pharmaceutical sector. These include (i) convergent regulatory pressures associated with the European framework for pre-market licensing; (ii) convergent and divergent industry pressures with regard to drug discovery and manufacturing; and (iii) divergent and convergent market pressures associated with the supply, pricing and assessment of medicines. The UK's sovereign ambitions risk a loss of influence over the licensing and surveillance of pharmaceuticals under convergent regulatory and industry pressures to engage in unilateral participation in the European regime. Further, they also risk a loss of influence over processes for pricing and assessing the effectiveness of new treatment regimens under divergent market pressures from larger pharmaceutical markets outside the EU, notably the United States