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Crafts have recently been experiencing a renaissance. This revitalization sees craft increasingly recognised as a growing industrial sector with benefits linked to educational, cultural and economic development policy agendas. This paper engages with policy debates around the place of craft in the United Kingdom from 2010. Drawing on craft sector perspectives and UK government policy initiatives it situates the disciplines and practices of craft within their institutional support networks, organizational contexts and draws attention to the role of individuals in driving agendas. The paper focuses on the national facing crafts development organizations, the UK Crafts Council and the UK Heritage Crafts Association, alongside recent policy discussion emerging from the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Recognizing that the legacies of past practice often inform contemporary agendas, the paper explores how the advocacy of craft in the recent past has shaped the place and positioning of craft in contemporary UK politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product-Service Systems (PSSs) constitute a family of service-based business models designed to satisfy our societal needs in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner. To date however PSS application has remained niche due to a variety of critical barriers. This paper explores how ‘demand pull’ national government policies could support PSS activity by addressing these barriers and cultivating market demand. Lessons are drawn from a case study of how regulatory , economic incentive , informative and procurement policies have supported Energy Service Company (ESCo) activity in the UK; a sub-set of the PSS family focused on energy service provision. Subsequently five policy recommendations are presented to support PSS activity: (1) balancing economic incentives and regulatory disincentives; (2) promoting indirect policy support; (3) redesigning existing market structures; (4) promoting locally-led PSS activity; and (5) creating stable policy frameworks. The paper warns however that national government policy cannot easily address all PSS barriers, such as customer preferences, international developments, technological progress and inherent business model weaknesses, pointing to the need for other complementary solutions. Furthermore, other governance actors beside national government could also implement PSS supporting policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the inter‐relationships between ‘education’ and ‘sustainable development’ as these are played out in the political arena. Each of these two important areas of policy is prioritized by the UK government: education for over a 150 years, but emphatically so since 1997; sustainable development since at least 1992 when the Rio Earth Summit brought the issue to political (if not) public attention, and when this (and other) governments entered into treaty obligations to advance sustainable development through the policy process—obligations which were reinforced during the Rio + 10 Summit in Johannesburg in 2002. We have written, with others, about the rise of interest in education's role in sustainable development in the period since Rio (Reid et al. , Geography , 87(3), pp. 247–255) and this paper does not go over this ground. Instead, we examine a range of contrasting perspectives that have been taken on these issues, ask what they reveal and what they do not, and further ask what we can and cannot say about politics, education and sustainable development. Finally, we argue that if sustainable development is to be promoted through education this requires that we learn to re‐think our thinking about politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades regeneration programmes in England targeted areas where spatial concentrations of poverty exist. These 'area-based initiatives' (ABIs) came under sustained attack, however, from the previous coalition government for being expensive and ineffective. This paper assesses this claim by re-evaluating past evidence on the impact of regeneration on poverty. It finds regeneration did relatively little to transform households' material circumstances but significantly ameliorated negative experiences of living in poverty in relation to housing, community safety and the physical environment. This partially undermines the rationale for the policy shift away from neighbourhood renewal interventions toward the current focus on 'local growth' as the sole remedy for spatial inequalities. It also suggests a need for more nuance in wider critical accounts of regeneration as a deepening form of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses relations between sub-national institutional actors responsible for the attraction and retention of foreign direct investment, other ‘governance’ actors in regional business systems – local and sub-regional government, cluster/sectoral bodies, RDA and LEP executives, and those involved in the coordination of skills provision – and subsidiaries of foreign-owned multinational corporations. It is based on qualitative research in two regions of England conducted between 2008 and 2011. Within a context of international competition for investment within global production networks, it explores recent politically driven changes in sub-national governance, including the abolition of Regional Development Agencies, alongside the more long-standing instability of economic development and skills coordination in England. The analysis is centred on an argument that a more adequate understanding of sub-national economic governance requires the active integration of perspectives on political systems of governance, and embedded patterns of economic coordination, as analysed in the varieties of capitalism literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Road transport policy may be seen as a framework to make decisions about road infrastructure so that economic growth may be supported. This paper summarises the findings of a survey which aimed to examine the degree to which senior road transport executives of middle- and low-income countries are familiar with their national road transport policy, together with their perceptions about whether the road policy addressed the development needs of such countries. The main findings of the survey were that the exposure of road transport sector professionals to their countries' national road transport policy was sometimes insufficient; their level of awareness about the developmental needs addressed by road policy was not comprehensive, and this applied also to their knowledge of systems for monitoring and evaluation of policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the installation of a UK Coalition Government in 2010, ways of governing the spatial organization of development have undergone far-reaching change in England. Within a context of austerity following the abolition of regional policy machinery, and an onerous national target framework, localities are entering a new phase of incentivized development. Consequently, local planning authorities are having to transferpartof their focus from government's ‘top-down’ requirements, as they come to embrace more adequately ‘bottom-up’ neighbourhood scale plans. Analysing the path of change, especially at the interface between planning and economic development, the paper draws attention to the dilemmas arising from these crucial scale shifts, and explores the potential of sub-national governance entities—Local Enterprise Partnerships—to help resolve the strategic co-ordination of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past 15 years the international community has assumed that by strengthening legislative capacity, legislatures are better equipped to oversee government activity and spending, to keep governments accountable, to secure good governance, prevent corruption, and create the conditions for sustainable economic development. The purpose of the present paper is to test this set of assumptions by focusing on one of the oversight tools that the international community regards as particularly important, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). Structural and organisational features that affect the performance of PACs is analysed, the relationship between oversight activity and effectiveness is investigated, and it is assessed whether good governance is a function of oversight activity, of effectiveness or of both. The analyses reveal that while oversight activity does not always have a significant or directly positive impact on good governance, good governance is indeed a function of oversight effectiveness as the international community had long assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we argue that the emerging new systems for subnational plans and spatial strategies represent a highly contested policy terrain over which battles are being played out about what constitute the appropriate scale, scope, and process of strategic planmaking activities. Significantly, these debates are being played out in different ways in different parts of the postdevolutionary UK state. The approach adopted here engages with and develops existing work on state restructuring and sociopolitical rescaling. In doing so we bring struggles over spatial planning to the centre of the analysis, addressing calls for increasing integration across different sectoral policy domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to advance the research agenda on British tourism policy by unravelling the critical issues for the tourism sector in Liverpool associated with its connectivities with the rise and diffusion of urban entrepreneurialism as the new dominant policy strategy for local economic development. It focuses on the role of the key players involved in tourism-related governance and the extent to which policy processes can be exploited to encourage increased competitiveness. The research strategy it proposes emphasizes the need to demarcate strong (innovative) and weak (reproduction) competition in tourism policy initiatives, because these dimensions have major impacts on the success and failure of local tourism regimes. It is hoped that this study will contribute to an emerging agenda on the determinants of urban tourism competitiveness policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, much attention has been paid to the migration-development nexus, both in academia and in the global development community. This has created what we argue in this paper can be characterized as an 'international buzz' around the issue. In this paper, we explore how two donor countries, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have approached the nexus in their policies and practices in recent years. We examine in what ways it has been feasible to work with migration-development links, taking into account various interests and the national political climates regarding development aid and immigration policies. Important themes of the nexus, which are discussed in detail going through the policies, are remittances, engagement with migrant associations, and temporary migration schemes and programmes addressing the so-called 'brain drain' problem. We argue that the two countries represent two different trends among donors: the one does not directly link migration management with migration and development policies, as these are conceived within the national donor agencies; while the other appears to be more focused on providing better migration management through development cooperation. In the conclusion, we argue that the consensus-orientated simplicity of the buzz surrounding migration and development can be said to have had a somewhat restricting effect on the policies, in the sense that it seems to have discouraged conflicting parts of the migration-development nexus from being taken up in the national contexts. Based on our analysis of the two countries' policies, we discuss possible implications for the future, reflecting on the tendency of buzzwords to dip in and out of fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]