Matthew Flinders
Professor of Politics and Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre at the University of Sheffield. Vice-President of the Political Studies Association and former member of the Economic and Social Research Council. Research interests focus on governance and public policy, democratic (dis)engagement and parliamentary studies.
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‘The Changing Politics of Blame Games and Claiming Credit’
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR) has published a call for special issues with a deadline of 1 September 2020 for publication in 2021. Matthew Flinders (University of Sheffield), R. A. W. Rhodes (University of Southampton) and Gergana Dimova (University of Winchester) are planning to apply for a special edition slot that will be themed around the topic of ‘blames games and claiming credit’. As part of this process, the prospective editors are now keen to accept ‘expressions of interest’ in the form of abstracts from potential contributors to this special issue. An outline abstract for this collection and further details are provided below.
From coping with the Coronavirus crisis thorough to debates concerning historical injustices and embedded social inequalities, not to mention Brexit and the UK’s future role and position in the world, a number of contemporary socio-political issues have all in their own ways focused attention on both blame games and claiming credit. The manner in which these issues have involved temporal dimensions, multi-levelled relationships and strong emotional allegiances creates both challenges and opportunities for the social and political sciences in terms of mapping, interrogating and understanding the attribution of blame or statements of success in complex and fast-moving environments. It is exactly this context that this special edition focuses on developing the analytical traction and theoretical leverage of existing approaches to understanding ‘the politics of blame games and claiming credit’. A flexible and pluralistic approach is taken in terms of defining this intellectual terrain and contributions are particularly welcome that draw upon insights from a variety of disciplines, that utilise a range of methods and which draw upon empirical material from beyond the UK.
The BJPIR is a top-ranked peer-reviewed international journal and prospective papers will therefore be assessed through a rigorous selection process that involves several stages. The first stage involves the submission of an abstract that outlines the main argument and focus of your proposed article in no more than 250 words. This should be sent to [email protected] with a full list of authors and their institutional affiliations by Friday 31 July 2020. The editors will then undertake a review process and select no more than twenty submissions to be taken forward to the second stage which involves inclusion in the final submission to the BJPIR’s editorial advisory board by 1 September. If our application for a special issue is successful we will know by the end of September and prospective contributions will proceed to the third stage. This revolves around the submission of a full manuscript (max 8,000 words) that abides to the journal’s style guide by an agreed date in mid/late 2021. It must be underlined that an invitation to submit a full manuscript is not a guarantee of acceptance and all contributions will be expected to progress through a standard double-blind peer review process. The editors’ decisions about individual manuscripts will be final but it is expected that the final volume will include up to 14 articles. It is expected that an on-line workshop will be held in April 2021 to review and discuss potential papers.
Proposals that emphasise innovation in terms of theory, methods or approach are particularly encouraged. The aim of this special issue is that it become a defining reference point within the social and political sciences for anyone interested in (inter alia) notions of blame, scrutiny, accountability, scapegoating, policy-making, and innovations in democracy. Our approach to blame games and claiming credit includes (but is not limited to): domestic and international drivers; economic, cultural and cognitive dimensions; as well as their manifestations viewed through the prism of environmental, gendered, psychological, philosophical, historical and ethnographic approaches.
Potential article abstracts should be sent to [email protected] by 17.00 on Friday 31 July 2020.
Questions to Prof. Matt Flinders via [email protected]
strand of “positive” scholarship, akin to social science subfields like
positive psychology, positive organizational studies, and positive
evaluation. We call for a program of research devoted to uncovering
the factors and mechanisms that enable high performing public policies and public service delivery mechanisms; procedurally and distributively fair processes of tackling societal conflicts; and robust
and resilient ways of coping with threats and risks. The core question driving positive public administration scholarship should be:
Why is it that particular public policies, programs, organizations, networks, or partnerships manage do much better than others to produce widely valued societal outcomes, and how might knowledge
of this be used to advance institutional learning from positives?
Methods: We undertook a scoping project using some research methods and some descriptive summaries to explore the potential for, and what would be needed to develop a local authority research system for the City of Bradford, UK. This included identifying the current research landscape and any barriers and enablers to research activity within the local authority using qualitative individual and focus group interviews, a rapid review of existing local research system models, scoping and description of the use of evidence in decision making and training opportunities and existing support for local government research.
Results: We identified four key themes important to developing and sustaining a research system: leadership, resource and capacity, culture, partnerships. Some use of research in decision making was evident but research training opportunities within the local authority were limited. Health research funders are slowly adapting to the local government environment, but this remains limited and more work is needed to shift the centre of gravity towards public health, local government and the community more generally.
Conclusions: We propose a model for a local authority research system that can guide the development of an exemplar whole system research framework that includes research infrastructure, data sharing, research training and skills, and co-production with local partners, to choose, use, generate, and deliver research in local government.
Methods: We undertook a scoping project using some research methods and some descriptive summaries to explore the potential for, and what would be needed to develop a local authority research system for the City of Bradford, UK. This included identifying the current research landscape and any barriers and enablers to research activity within the local authority using qualitative individual and focus group interviews, a rapid review of existing local research system models, scoping and description of the use of evidence in decision making and training opportunities and existing support for local government research.
Results: We identified four key themes important to developing and sustaining a research system: leadership, resource and capacity, culture, partnerships. Some use of research in decision making was evident but research training opportunities within the local authority were limited. Health research funders are slowly adapting to the local government environment, but this remains limited and more work is needed to shift the centre of gravity towards public health, local government and the community more generally.
Conclusions: We propose a model for a local authority research system that can guide the development of an exemplar whole system research framework that includes research infrastructure, data sharing, research training and skills, and co-production with local partners, to choose, use, generate, and deliver research in local government.
Contra [Martha] Nussbaum, fear can be rational and, contra [Zygmunt] Bauman, borne of knowledge, rather than ignorance. [Sara] Ahmed helps us see that structural inequality, which has only been exacerbated by the clusters of crises and poorly managed responses in recent years, means that fear is experienced unequally during pandemic. But what she fails to grasp is the qualified importance of fear politically; effective responses to COVID-19 may simultaneously require specific groups to experience ever greater fear of disease while at the same time being aware that efforts to achieve that may actually be self-defeating. (Degerman, Flinders & Johnson 2020, 17)
Our conclusion was that, as a consequence, there was space for new scholarship on the politics of fear. This issue is the most substantive iteration of that work.
Policy relevance
The transport sector is seen to be a difficult sector in which to achieve early cuts in carbon emissions. Understanding how to mobilize the many public- and private-sector actors in the transport sector is a key challenge to be addressed in many developed countries. This article provides practical insights from real decision makers about the difficulties that a slow incremental strategy creates. Whilst it builds flexibility into future decision making, it also leads to short-termism and generates uncertainty about investment and policy choices. This allows carbon policy to be crowded out by other agendas, most notably economic growth. Whilst there are aspirations for green growth strategies that grow jobs and substantially cut carbon, these remain elusive in the transport sector, with major new infrastructure often stimulating more carbon consumption. A clearer framework for carbon management is necessary if sound long-term mitigation policies are to be put in place.