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This thesis investigates the power relationships between the core executive and non-state actors at the heart of policy making in the UK. It assesses the extent to which an increasingly fragmented polity has led to autonomous non-governmental actors challenging the centralised power of the state and with it the dominant political traditions which have, overtime, informed the British system. To address this theme, the research examines the emergence of the concept of social enterprise (SE) through the period 1997-2015, and the changing patterns of network governance, through a case study approach. During this period, SE was lauded by governments from across the political spectrum as an innovative means by which to devolve autonomy to front-line actors in the delivery of public goods. The thesis asks whether SE lived up to this potential or was it constrained and shaped by a core executive committed to a command and control style of hierarchical governance and if so, why? The findings from the research contribute to existing debates in the SE, governance and political tradition literatures and connects the three analytically for the first time. It identifies and addresses under theorisation in the existing SE literature and seeks to resolve this through the application of the analytical framework of the British political tradition. It makes an analytical contribution to this literature by connecting it to the BPT and governance literatures for the first time. This approach is used to explain continuity in the relationship between government and SE as an alternative provider of public goods. It also constitutes the first study to consider the development of SE under three successive governments from the perspective of the BPT and governance approaches, making an empirical contribution to this end. More broadly then, the thesis responds to the most recent contributions to the critical wave of the BPT, which argue that it is not uncontested or immune to change and reveals that, contrary to these views, it continues to dominate the way actors conceive of the power relationships between SE and the core executive which, in turn, prompts the continuation of highly centralised, hierarchical forms of governance.

Detailed studies of three areas of environmental remediation techniques which utilise semiconductor photocatalytic technologies were undertaken. These areas were: oxidation of solid inorganic contaminant layers deposited on titania (TiO2); oxidation of inorganic gas species by ultraviolet-illuminated titania; and factors affecting wettability changes (photoinduced superhydrophilicity, PSH) on illuminated titania. Soot and elemental sulfur layers, deposited onto sol-gel derived and P25 TiO2 films were found to be completely removed upon illumination with UV light; carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide were detected in stoichiometric quantities as the only gas-phase oxidation products. Sulfur dioxide was trapped using an irradiated flow-cell set-up, with the resulting gas-species trapped and determined by the West-Gaeke method. Remote photocatalysis of soot layers was also investigated, with results suggesting that hydroxyl radicals are potentially not the primary migratory species responsible for remote photocatalysis. Further work concentrating on the photocatalytic oxidation of SO2 in a static cell system containing a TiO2 film was also carried out, with production of SO3 and poisoning of the photocatalyst observed. The photocatalytic oxidation of carbon monoxide was also assessed, initially using sol-gel TiO2 films before platinised films and polymerphotocatalyst matrices were assessed. The flexible polymer films were found to be degraded by the photocatalyst - including those developed using fluoropolymers - at the expense of oxidative photocatalytic activity. The final part focused on repeatable experiments involving PSH - including the use of a novel environmental chamber to vary atmospheric conditions during illumination, and experiments into droplet composition and recovery of contact angle - in order to further investigate the possible mechanism(s) behind the phenomenon.