This book deals with the critical empirical void created by the speed at which healthcare restructuring has taken place in Europe. Chapters explore the political uncertainty and budgetary pressures which have led governments increasingly to turn to New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms to attempt to balance the financial viability of public health structures, with democratic imperatives to maintain socially just outcomes. The authors of this volume consider how governments have therefore shifted identities from principal care providers to contractual monitors, setting targets increasingly directed toward third-party managers in quasi-markets and the private sector. Drawing upon extensive data from Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, and Israel, the contributions explore the often unexpected policy outputs and outcomes engendered by such reforms.

Public trust in the scientific community is under extraordinary pressure. Crucial areas of human activity and public policy, such as education, universities, climate and health care are influenced by populist political strategies rather than evidence-based solutions. Moreover, data-driven methods are becoming increasingly subject to de-legitimisation. This book examines potential remedies for improving public trust and the legitimacy of science. It reviews different policy approaches adopted by governments to incentivise the empowerment of stakeholders through co-production arrangements, participatory mechanisms, public engagement and interaction between citizens and researchers. Offering an original analysis of the political roots of the governmental impact and engagement agenda, this book sheds much-needed light on the wider connections to democracy.

Financial sustainability is one of the key challenges confronting Europe's universities today. Despite the fact that universities are at the centre of knowledge creation and development, which itself is seen as one of the main engines of economic growth, public funding of higher education in most countries is not increasing or at least not increasing enough in real terms. "Democratisation of higher education" has led to the fact that the higher education budgets per student are relatively low in most European countries compared to Europe's competitors. Despite declarations of intent to increase spending on higher education and research, it is not very likely that public expenditure will grow significantly on average in Europe and therefore be able to keep up with rapidly inflating costs in the years to come. One of the reasons for this is that higher education and research have to compete with other priorities in public budgets (e.g., security, health, etc.). Furthermore, the recent economic downturn has contributed to the decision in many European countries to decrease the levels of investment in higher education and research. Such trends are particularly worrisome for universities across Europe, whose continuing dependence on public funding puts their future sustainability under pressure. New funding schemes and incentives have been discussed and introduced in many European higher education systems, including competitive funding schemes for research under the name of "excellence" policies. Despite the different national institutional configurations in Europe, higher education systems face similar demands of promoting sustainable funding models, maintaining high academic standards, and equality. Thus, financial sustainability is not an end in itself; it aims to ensure that the public university's goals are reached by guaranteeing that the institution produces sufficient income to enable it to invest in high quality education and produce equitable outcomes. For these reasons, this book analyses funding reforms from a multidimensional approach.

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their field of study, this situation is problematic. The Oxford Handbook on Education and Globalization brings together in a unique way leading authors in social theory and in political science and reflects on how these two distinct disciplinary approaches deal with the relation between globalization and education. Part I develops a firmer and tighter dialogue between social theory, long concerned with theories of globalization, and education research. It presents, discusses, and compares three major attempts to theorize the process of globalization and its relation to education: the neo-institutionalist theorization of world culture, the materialist and domination perspectives, and Luhmann's theory of world society. Part II analyses the political and institutional factors that shape the adoption of global reforms at the national and local level of governance, emphasizing the role of different contexts in shaping policy outcomes. It engages with the existing debates of globalization mainly in the field of public policy and comparative politics and explores the social, political, and economic implications of globalization for national systems of education, their organizations, and institutions.