Pragmatic, progressive and global in its approach, this Handbook centres around the key question: how can we teach public policy? Presenting a wide variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, it expertly examines current approaches to teaching public policy and critically reflects on potential future developments in the field. Bringing together contributions from over sixty leading public policy scholars, chapters examine the many different orientations to teaching and learning public policy, spanning traditional, current and emerging approaches. Employing a multi-jurisdictional approach, contributors discuss key theories surrounding the policy process, analyse diverse teaching strategies, and investigate the different publics engaged in learning about public policy. Through detailed case studies, the Handbook also explores the differences in international public policy programmes, and suggests possible explanations for the plurality in content. This forward-thinking Handbook will be an essential resource for educators in the field of public policy looking to enhance their teaching practices as well as those interested in the latest developments within the discipline. Offering a comprehensive overview of modern public policy pedagogy, it will also be of interest to academics and students.

If 'prevention is better than cure', why isn't policy more preventive? Policymakers only have the ability to pay attention to, and influence, a tiny proportion of their responsibilities, and they engage in a policymaking environment of which they have limited understanding and even less control. This simple insight helps explain the gap between stated policymaker expectations and actual policy outcomes. Why Isn't Government Policy more Preventive? uses these insights to produce new empirical studies of 'wicked' problems with practical lessons. The authors find that the UK and Scottish governments both use a simple idiom - prevention is better than cure - to sell a package of profound changes to policy and policymaking. Taken at face value, this focus on 'prevention' policy seems like an idea 'whose time has come'. Yet, 'prevention' is too ambiguous until governments give it meaning. No government has found a way to turn this vague aim into a set of detailed, consistent, and defendable policies. This book examines what happens when governments make commitments without knowing how to deliver them. It compares their policymaking contexts, roles and responsibilities, policy styles, language, commitments, and outcomes in several cross-cutting policy areas (including health, families, justice, and employability) to make sense of their experiences. The book uses multiple insights from policy theory to help research and analyse the results. The results help policymakers reflect on how to avoid a cycle of optimism and despair when trying to solve problems that their predecessors did not.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. There is a broad consensus across European states and the EU that social and economic inequality is a problem that needs to be addressed. Yet inequality policy is notoriously complex and contested. This book approaches the issue from two linked perspectives. First, a focus on functional requirements highlights what policymakers think they need to deliver policy successfully, and the gap between their requirements and reality. We identify this gap in relation to the theory and practice of policy learning, and to multiple sectors, to show how it manifests in health, education, and gender equity policies. Second, a focus on territorial politics highlights how the problem is interpreted at different scales, subject to competing demands to take responsibility. This contestation and spread of responsibilities contributes to different policy approaches across spatial scales. We conclude that governments promote many separate equity initiatives, across territories and sectors, without knowing if they are complementary or contradictory. This outcome could reflect the fact that ambiguous policy problems and complex policymaking processes are beyond the full knowledge or control of governments. It could also be part of a strategy to make a rhetorically radical case while knowing that they will translate into safer policies. It allows them to replace debates on values, regarding whose definition of equity matters and which inequalities to tolerate, with more technical discussions of policy processes. Governments may be offering new perspectives on spatial justice or new ways to reduce political attention to inequalities.