Adrian Kay
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3583364 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Adrian Kay |
| NOMBRES | Adrian |
| APELLIDO | Kay |
| FIRMA | KAY A |
| AFILIACIONES | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5854-4516 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 614 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
The politics of social responsibility after neoliberalism
Purpose This paper aims to evaluate how the field of public policy studies can contribute to investigating the politics of social responsibility. The concept of post-neoliberalism is interpreted as a policy paradigm collapse with consequences for the politics of social responsibility of both businesses and governments. Specifically, the paper links the notion of output legitimacy to new forms of social responsibility after neoliberalism. Design/m…
Theoretical-methodological aspects of researching the area of religion and public administration
This article, commissioned by the editors of Public Policy and Administration, contributes to the theoretical and methodological groundworks for the development of research in religion and public administration. It does so in three ways. The first part contrasts different approaches to defining the concept of religion, those from the vantage of academic observers against those from within religious traditions themselves. Several theoretical and m…
Managing staged policy implementation
This study focuses on the agency of governments engaged in implementation processes that take place over a number of years and through multiple stages. The long timeframes associated with staged implementation leave reforms vulnerable to the institutional effects that may ultimately derail policy aspirations. Governments engaged in staged implementation need to be able to plan longitudinally (foresight capacity) and analyse whether implementation…
Political, process and programme failures in the Brexit fiasco
We propose a conceptual framework of policy deception to help identify, analyse and explain Brexit as a policy fiasco. The framework casts light on the political use of the device of an in/out European Union (EU) referendum by David Cameron. The paper develops the argument that the referendum did not offer a binary choice between two policy options for the United Kingdom's (UK) relationship with the EU representing different, but commensurable pr…
The implementation of complex social policy
In this article, we identify the unfolding unintended consequences which flow from one instance of policy layering in Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). We show how use of a causal diagram, which highlights feedback loops and emergent properties, to map complex chains of causal factors can assist policy scholars and policy practitioners to understand the likely direction of change and possible responses. In the case of Austr…
Institutional Legacies and “Sticky Layers”
Policy layering has received significant scholarly attention in recent years as a means to explain and understand the outcomes of policy implementation efforts, particularly within the context of incremental change. However, little is known about how processes of policy layering and institutional legacies play out in (relatively rare) system-wide and transformative policy reforms. This article presents a critical case study of one such reform—the…
Policy feedback and pathways
Participatory Adaptation in Contemporary Parliamentary Committees in Australia
Contemporary parliamentary institutions operate in a dynamic participatory and digital context. Recent studies demonstrate that many parliaments are rethinking how they reach out to the public in this changing environment. This article discusses the findings of empirical research that examined how and why parliamentary committees are adapting their public engagement practices. Parliamentary staff in six Australian parliaments were interviewed abo…
From ‘Opening Up’ to Democratic Renewal
Many legislatures around the world are undergoing a ‘participatory makeover’. Parliaments are hosting open days and communicating the latest parliamentary updates via websites and social media. Public activities such as these may make parliaments more informative and accessible, but much more could be done to foster meaningful democratic renewal. In particular, participatory efforts ought to be engaging citizens in a central task of legislatures …
Increased private health fund involvement in Australia's primary health care
This study identifies current practices of private health funds ( PHF s) in Australian primary health care ( PHC ), including areas where their involvement is increasing, and examines the risks and benefits of these practices for quality of, and equity of access to PHC . The paper draws on research to investigate equity implications of current PHF involvement in PHC in Australia. We reviewed literature, analysed documents relating to a Senate Com…
Value choices in a mixed economy of care
While social and public policy studies recognize the diversity of actors and processes occurring in the implementation of policy and the organization of public service delivery, analysis of the role of value pluralism in implementation remains underdeveloped. This article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between value pluralism and organizational responses to value conflict by exploring the effect of politics on the…
Evolutionary approaches to the concept of drift in policy studies
This article is a contribution to the emerging line of scholarly inquiry into the concept of drift in the study of public policy. It investigates a persistent problem in the literature on policy drift: how to explain variation in responses to drift, separately from the process of drift itself and in order to do so how to incorporate a model of agency into the concept of drift. We argue that the broader project of evolutionary thinking in policy s…
Institutionalist perspectives on international policy coordination in Asia
This paper argues that there is greater international policy coordination capacity in Asia than commonly acknowledged in claims about strong mutual assertions and recognition of national sovereignty. The paper dissects the notion of ‘weak institutions’ at the international level by developing conceptually an argument about relationships between formal and informal institutions. The argument is then illustrated by cases drawn from public health po…
Policy failures, policy learning and institutional change
This article presents an institutionalist perspective on the relationship between policy failure and policy learning. It contributes both to our understanding of different patterns institutional change as well as the conditions for policy learning at the system-wide level. The first section elaborates the concept of policy failure in terms of type, value and timing. Next, how policy failure may trigger a process of deinstitutionalisation and in t…
Generating political priority for regulatory interventions targeting obesity prevention
Shaping the discourse
The Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), emblematic of the new generation of free trade agreements, is a regional agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries. This paper reports on a study into how the food industry has framed issues in an effort to influence the TPP. We undertook a thematic analysis of the issues raised in publicly available submissions by the food industry to the trade negotiating bodies of four TPP countries: Australia, New…
What Can Causal Process Tracing Offer to Policy Studies? A Review of the Literature
Causal process tracing (CPT) has emerged as an important method of causal inference in qualitative \nsocial science research, most notably in case study research designs. There is now a considerable \nliterature on the aims, philosophical groundings, and methods of process tracing. This paper reviews the \nCPT literature to assess what new directions it may suggest for policy studies. The first part of the paper \nsets out the methodological adva…
Strengthening Trade and Health Governance Capacities to Address Non‐Communicable Diseases in A sia
Trade liberalisation is a driver of the rising burden of non‐communicable diseases in A sia through its role in facilitating the growth of the region's tobacco, alcohol and ultra‐processed foods industries while simultaneously restricting the capacities of governments to enact public health regulations. This highlights the need for greater coherence between health and trade policy in the region. Yet there has been little analysis of these topics …
Separating Sovereignty and Sharing Problems
From its origins in the study of the European Union, the concept of multi‐level governance (MLG) can contribute to understanding the capacity for, and barriers to, dynamism and innovation in the Australian federation. By placing the quality of the interactions between different jurisdictions at different spatial scales at the centre of analysis, the concept helps to underpin the argument that constitutional change in formal roles and responsibili…
Success and Failure in Public Policy
In explaining policy reform, there is a tendency to assume that causes and outcomes are temporally contiguous and that the consequences of reform efforts unfold quickly. There is no obvious reason, theoretical or empirical, why this should be the case when considering the relationships between policy failure and policy success. This paper considers why and how policy failures may be causally linked to future policy events in sequences over extend…
Looking to the Past and the Future of the Australian Journal of Public Administration
The first issue of the Australian Journal of Public Administration (AJPA) was published in December 1937 and contained just two articles. The first was by Sir Herbert Gepp K.B.E.,1 a metallurgist and manager, who joined the public service in 1926. One of his roles in the Australian Public Service was as the chairman of the Development and Migration Commission that was created to ‘apply scientific methods to economic and politics problems in the i…
Trade and investment liberalization and Asia¿s noncommunicable disease epidemic
Trade and investment liberalization (trade liberalization) can promote or harm health. Undoubtedly it has contributed, although unevenly, to Asia’s social and economic development over recent decades with resultant gains in life expectancy and living standards. In the absence of public health protections, however, it is also a significant upstream driver of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) including cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes thr…
Trade and investment liberalization and Asia’s noncommunicable disease epidemic
BACKGROUND: Trade and investment liberalization (trade liberalization) can promote or harm health. Undoubtedly it has contributed, although unevenly, to Asia's social and economic development over recent decades with resultant gains in life expectancy and living standards. In the absence of public health protections, however, it is also a significant upstream driver of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) including cardiovascular disease, cancer and …
A new generation of trade policy
Trade poses risks and opportunities to public health nutrition. This paper discusses the potential food-related public health risks of a radical new kind of trade agreement: the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). Under negotiation since 2010, the TPP involves Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the USA, and Vietnam. Here, we review the international evidence on the relationships between…
A trade balance
The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been widely accepted as representing the legalisation of world trading rules. However, it is important to reflect on the limits of this legalisation thesis in terms of the interface between inter
A Critique of the Use of Path Dependency in Policy Studies
Path dependency is an important notion in diachronic approaches to understanding social and political processes. The first section of this paper examines the application of path dependency to policy studies; the advantages of the concept in understanding policy development are highlighted by examples from pension policy and social housing policy in the UK, and the EU budget. The next section considers several criticisms of path dependency: (1) it…
Ambiguity, multiple streams, and EU policy
The multiple streams framework draws insight from interactions between agency and institutions to explore the impact of context, time, and meaning on policy change and to assess the institutional and issue complexities permeating the European Union (EU) policy process. The authors specify the assumptions and structure of the framework and review studies that have adapted it to reflect more fully EU decision-making processes. The nature of policy …
Multiple streams in EU policy-making
The multiple streams model, developed by Kingdon in the United States (US), is being adapted increasingly to study European Union (EU) policy-making. This, however, is revealing a theoretical underdevelopment in some of its central components. The present paper considers several concerns. It seeks to develop the idea of policy entrepreneurship as a context-specific activity that gives substance to the claim that ‘ideas have their time’; it interp…
Path dependency and the CAP
Current frameworks for understanding the development of the CAP all suffer from having a static rather than a dynamic perspective. This paper considers whether the concept of path dependency can provide a corrective. However, the large majority or the empirical applications of the concept have been to institutional development at a macro, constitutional level rather than to specific public policies. This paper by defining the CAP as an institutio…
Tense Layering and Synthetic Policy Paradigms
This paper analyses the substantial financial subsidy, alongside other regulatory changes, introduced to support private health insurance in Australia at the end of the 1990s. The concept of policy layering is developed and refined theoretically in terms
From ‘Opening Up’ to Democratic Renewal
Many legislatures around the world are undergoing a ‘participatory makeover’. Parliaments are hosting open days and communicating the latest parliamentary updates via websites and social media. Public activities such as these may make parliaments more informative and accessible, but much more could be done to foster meaningful democratic renewal. In particular, participatory efforts ought to be engaging citizens in a central task of legislatures …
Historical-institutionalist perspectives on the development of the EU budget system
The EU budget has only recently started to feature in theories of European integration. Studies typically adopt a historical-institutionalist framework, exploring notions such as path dependency. They have, however, generally been rather aggregated, or coarse-grained, in their approach. The EU budget has thus been treated as a single entity rather than a series of inter-linked institutions. This paper seeks to address these lacunae by adopting a …
Policy feedback and pathways
The implementation of complex social policy
In this article, we identify the unfolding unintended consequences which flow from one instance of policy layering in Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). We show how use of a causal diagram, which highlights feedback loops and emergent properties, to map complex chains of causal factors can assist policy scholars and policy practitioners to understand the likely direction of change and possible responses. In the case of Austr…
Evaluating Devolution in Wales
Reviews of devolution in Wales have been focussed so far on empirical description and positive analysis; there has been almost no discussion of how it should be judged or evaluated. I redress this imbalance by considering the arguments for devolution and the various normative values that may be used to evaluate the process. The arguments for devolution are of two basic kinds. Some are consequentialist: that devolution is desired on the grounds th…
Evidence-Based Policy-Making
Evidence-based policy making has been criticised as a revival of the ‘rationality project’ in which democratic politics is regarded as rent-seeking and a deadweight loss to society. In response, the evidence-based policy movement has failed to articulate a defence in which the rationality animating the policy process is situational and contextual rather than unique and authoritative. This article traces the movement's motto –‘what works?’– to the…
Generating political priority for regulatory interventions targeting obesity prevention
UK Monetary Policy Change During the Financial Crisis
Policy responses to the tumult of the global financial crisis of 2007–9 prompt a consideration of the critical dimensions in specifying policy change. UK monetary policy between 2007 and 2009 is characterised by a remarkable degree of innovation yet counts as a ‘normal’ period of policy making under the Hall (1993) framework of policy change, the enduring workhorse of the comparative public policy field. This exposes its lack of conceptual refine…
Political, process and programme failures in the Brexit fiasco
We propose a conceptual framework of policy deception to help identify, analyse and explain Brexit as a policy fiasco. The framework casts light on the political use of the device of an in/out European Union (EU) referendum by David Cameron. The paper develops the argument that the referendum did not offer a binary choice between two policy options for the United Kingdom's (UK) relationship with the EU representing different, but commensurable pr…
Institutional Legacies and “Sticky Layers”
Policy layering has received significant scholarly attention in recent years as a means to explain and understand the outcomes of policy implementation efforts, particularly within the context of incremental change. However, little is known about how processes of policy layering and institutional legacies play out in (relatively rare) system-wide and transformative policy reforms. This article presents a critical case study of one such reform—the…
Understanding Policy Change as a Hermeneutic Problem
Part one sets out the distinctive features of a post-positivist approach in policy studies, what it brings to policy scholarship and its relationship to extant positivist analyses. Post-positivism allows policy change to be stated as a hermeneutic problem that requires an interpretive approach: policy change occurs through the politics of establishing definitions and agreeing the meanings of societal problems over time. Two crucial questions of a…
Success and Failure in Public Policy
In explaining policy reform, there is a tendency to assume that causes and outcomes are temporally contiguous and that the consequences of reform efforts unfold quickly. There is no obvious reason, theoretical or empirical, why this should be the case when considering the relationships between policy failure and policy success. This paper considers why and how policy failures may be causally linked to future policy events in sequences over extend…
Policy failures, policy learning and institutional change
This article presents an institutionalist perspective on the relationship between policy failure and policy learning. It contributes both to our understanding of different patterns institutional change as well as the conditions for policy learning at the system-wide level. The first section elaborates the concept of policy failure in terms of type, value and timing. Next, how policy failure may trigger a process of deinstitutionalisation and in t…
Territorial Justice and Devolution
The concept of territorial justice has a long history in studies of the spatial distribution of welfare state services in the UK. Since the inception of the devolution process, territorial justice has maintained support as a principle to guide policy and has been promoted recently as an objective for the reform of the financial arrangements for the devolved administrations. The first part of the article argues that the standard version of territo…
Value choices in a mixed economy of care
While social and public policy studies recognize the diversity of actors and processes occurring in the implementation of policy and the organization of public service delivery, analysis of the role of value pluralism in implementation remains underdeveloped. This article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between value pluralism and organizational responses to value conflict by exploring the effect of politics on the…
Governing the transition to a biofuels economy in the US and EU
The scale of the ambition to decouple emissions growth from energy consumption runs counter to decades of debates and literatures on the limits of government. Transport biofuels are an early and influential case of the policy capacity challenge in the transition to low-carbon economies. The case stands analytically for the policy-maker’s dilemma of maintaining long-term policy goals as credible commitments, despite the flexibility and adaptabilit…
Institutional Change in the International Governance of Agriculture
This article traces the evolution of the international governance of agriculture as a sequential process, in which the negotiation of new trading and enforcement rules interacts with legal disputes over the interpretation of existing rules. The interaction between negotiation and litigation has produced a governance trajectory from vague to precise commitments and a strengthened dispute settlement process. We contest standard histories, which ide…
Participatory Adaptation in Contemporary Parliamentary Committees in Australia
Contemporary parliamentary institutions operate in a dynamic participatory and digital context. Recent studies demonstrate that many parliaments are rethinking how they reach out to the public in this changing environment. This article discusses the findings of empirical research that examined how and why parliamentary committees are adapting their public engagement practices. Parliamentary staff in six Australian parliaments were interviewed abo…
Evolution in Political Science
Peter Kerr ( Kerr 2002 ) recently argued in this journal that evolutionary theories could be of great benefit to political scientists' investigations of change. He is not successful in establishing a case for evolutionary theory in political science due to the misconception that evolutionary theory can have explanatory power without being functionalist. Two options for the use of evolution in political science are set out: firstly, leave the conc…
Increased private health fund involvement in Australia's primary health care
This study identifies current practices of private health funds ( PHF s) in Australian primary health care ( PHC ), including areas where their involvement is increasing, and examines the risks and benefits of these practices for quality of, and equity of access to PHC . The paper draws on research to investigate equity implications of current PHF involvement in PHC in Australia. We reviewed literature, analysed documents relating to a Senate Com…
Objective 1 in Wales
Beyond Policy Community — the Case of the GP Fundholding Scheme
The paper examines the conception, implementation and abolition of the GP fundholding scheme, all within 10 years, for evidence of a changed style of health care policy‐making. A health care policy community, in which the interests of the medical profession were prominent, existed between 1948 and the mid‐1980s. The paper highlights the important factors in the breakdown of the policy community and traces the effect through to the negotiation, im…
New Labour on Drugs
Devolution and drugs
English The regulation of drug prices is an excellent example of the type of tensions that are emerging in the UK’s new system of multi-level governance. Both the benefits and regulatory burden of the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS) are regionally concentrated. However, those regional concentrations are not coterminous. The PPRS as an industrial policy supports jobs primarily in the south east and east of England. However, Wales (al…
Evolution in Political Science
Peter Kerr ( Kerr 2002 ) recently argued in this journal that evolutionary theories could be of great benefit to political scientists' investigations of change. He is not successful in establishing a case for evolutionary theory in political science due to the misconception that evolutionary theory can have explanatory power without being functionalist. Two options for the use of evolution in political science are set out: firstly, leave the conc…
Evaluating Devolution in Wales
Reviews of devolution in Wales have been focussed so far on empirical description and positive analysis; there has been almost no discussion of how it should be judged or evaluated. I redress this imbalance by considering the arguments for devolution and the various normative values that may be used to evaluate the process. The arguments for devolution are of two basic kinds. Some are consequentialist: that devolution is desired on the grounds th…
Path dependency and the CAP
Current frameworks for understanding the development of the CAP all suffer from having a static rather than a dynamic perspective. This paper considers whether the concept of path dependency can provide a corrective. However, the large majority or the empirical applications of the concept have been to institutional development at a macro, constitutional level rather than to specific public policies. This paper by defining the CAP as an institutio…
Territorial Justice and Devolution
The concept of territorial justice has a long history in studies of the spatial distribution of welfare state services in the UK. Since the inception of the devolution process, territorial justice has maintained support as a principle to guide policy and has been promoted recently as an objective for the reform of the financial arrangements for the devolved administrations. The first part of the article argues that the standard version of territo…
A Critique of the Use of Path Dependency in Policy Studies
Path dependency is an important notion in diachronic approaches to understanding social and political processes. The first section of this paper examines the application of path dependency to policy studies; the advantages of the concept in understanding policy development are highlighted by examples from pension policy and social housing policy in the UK, and the EU budget. The next section considers several criticisms of path dependency: (1) it…
The Dynamics of Public Policy
In The Dynamics of Public Policy, Adrian Kay sets out the crucial methodological, theoretical and empirical implications of two important trends in the social sciences: a frequently expressed ambition for analysis of 'movies not stills' and the regular observation that policy, politics and governance is becoming more complex
Historical-institutionalist perspectives on the development of the EU budget system
The EU budget has only recently started to feature in theories of European integration. Studies typically adopt a historical-institutionalist framework, exploring notions such as path dependency. They have, however, generally been rather aggregated, or coarse-grained, in their approach. The EU budget has thus been treated as a single entity rather than a series of inter-linked institutions. This paper seeks to address these lacunae by adopting a …
The Methodology of The Public Choice Research Programme
Financing social and cohesion policy in an enlarged EU
The development of the Open Method of Coordination, agreement on the Lisbon Agenda and EU enlargement offered the prospect of a new and substantial EU social policy agenda. This article considers EU social and cohesion policies in the context of the recent negotiation of the EU budget for 2007—13. We find the Commission's wish to redistribute EU spending in favour of these policy areas and new member states was thwarted by key political features …
Negotiating an Exception
What happens to a regulatory regime when the company that it has been designed to regulate radically changes form? We examine the case of Glas Cymru (GC), which was set up in 2001 and is unique within the England and Wales water industry in being entirely debt financed and operated on a not-for-profit basis. The article argues that the Office for Water Services (Ofwat) has been able to accommodate GC successfully as a unique case within an extant…
Tense Layering and Synthetic Policy Paradigms
This paper analyses the substantial financial subsidy, alongside other regulatory changes, introduced to support private health insurance in Australia at the end of the 1990s. The concept of policy layering is developed and refined theoretically in terms
On the Tenacity of Tiebout
Time, Policy, Management
Understanding Policy Change as a Hermeneutic Problem
Part one sets out the distinctive features of a post-positivist approach in policy studies, what it brings to policy scholarship and its relationship to extant positivist analyses. Post-positivism allows policy change to be stated as a hermeneutic problem that requires an interpretive approach: policy change occurs through the politics of establishing definitions and agreeing the meanings of societal problems over time. Two crucial questions of a…
Institutional Change in the International Governance of Agriculture
This article traces the evolution of the international governance of agriculture as a sequential process, in which the negotiation of new trading and enforcement rules interacts with legal disputes over the interpretation of existing rules. The interaction between negotiation and litigation has produced a governance trajectory from vague to precise commitments and a strengthened dispute settlement process. We contest standard histories, which ide…
Ideas, Institutions, & Trade
Explaining Institutional Change
Evidence-Based Policy-Making
Evidence-based policy making has been criticised as a revival of the ‘rationality project’ in which democratic politics is regarded as rent-seeking and a deadweight loss to society. In response, the evidence-based policy movement has failed to articulate a defence in which the rationality animating the policy process is situational and contextual rather than unique and authoritative. This article traces the movement's motto –‘what works?’– to the…
Anxious to Do Good
UK Monetary Policy Change During the Financial Crisis
Policy responses to the tumult of the global financial crisis of 2007–9 prompt a consideration of the critical dimensions in specifying policy change. UK monetary policy between 2007 and 2009 is characterised by a remarkable degree of innovation yet counts as a ‘normal’ period of policy making under the Hall (1993) framework of policy change, the enduring workhorse of the comparative public policy field. This exposes its lack of conceptual refine…
Multiple streams in EU policy-making
The multiple streams model, developed by Kingdon in the United States (US), is being adapted increasingly to study European Union (EU) policy-making. This, however, is revealing a theoretical underdevelopment in some of its central components. The present paper considers several concerns. It seeks to develop the idea of policy entrepreneurship as a context-specific activity that gives substance to the claim that ‘ideas have their time’; it interp…
Political science (47 obras) · Economics (39 obras) · Law (36 obras) · Law (32 obras) · Sociology (26 obras) · Politics (21 obras) · Public Administration (18 obras) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (18 obras) · Computer Science (16 obras) · Public Administration (15 obras)