LIST OF PANELS

The local level has emerged as an important site of policy innovation to address global climate and health challenges. Local jurisdictions are often key actors in the implementation of interventions to improve health outcomes—e.g., on air quality, active transportation, and access to nutritious food—while also advancing climate goals through measures like energy-efficient housing provision, renewable energy adoption, and transport planning. Importantly, they also serve as incubators for innovative or radical policy ideas. Cities are, for example, at the forefront of a growing movement to regulate outdoor advertising for health-harming and high-carbon products (Reeve et al., 2015). Beyond sectoral policies, locally driven governance innovations like participatory budgeting have been translated to local and national settings globally (Peck & Theodore, 2015).

Many of these local-level innovations have occurred within the context of devolution of power and responsibility to the regional and local level, which has opened up possibilities for action but also introduced new burdens on local-level actors. In the United Kingdom, devolution of responsibility for several key agendas, including public health, took place in a context of increased managerial oversight, austerity, and lack of cohesive national guidance on how to integrate and reconcile priorities between policy areas (e.g., Clifford 2022). Existing scholarship, e.g., documents the role of policy entrepreneurship and learning in driving local policy innovation, as well as resistance by local publics and local, national, and transnational commercial actors (e.g., Toke, 2005; Lauber et al., 2021; Maltby, 2021). There also exists a tension between the potential for ‘bottom-up’ policy innovation and entrepreneurship at a local government level, and the institutional and political constraints which shape local decision-making in the context of multi-level governance. How policy ‘problems’ are constructed and operationalised locally impacts how such limitations are mitigated and managed, thereby having a key role in enabling or constraining policy change.

Scholarship which explores the role of ‘the local’ or ‘the urban’ in addressing global challenges has emerged from different disciplines and focused on different substantive policy areas such as health, climate, and biodiversity while adopting a range of theoretical perspectives. This panel aims to foster dialogue between different perspectives on the local level as a site of policy innovation and entrepreneurship, spark comparative analyses between policy areas and discourse, and encourage nuanced and theoretically informed approaches to studies of local policy action.

References

Clifford, B. (2022). British local authority planners, planning reform and everyday practices within the state. Public Policy and Administration, 37(1), 84-104.

Lauber, K., Hunt, D., Gilmore, A. B., & Rutter, H. (2021). Corporate political activity in the context of unhealthy food advertising restrictions across Transport for London: A qualitative case study. PLoS Medicine, 18(9), e1003695.

Reeve, B., Ashe, M., Farias, R., & Gostin, L. (2015). State and municipal innovations in obesity policy: why localities remain a necessary laboratory for innovation. American journal of public health, 105(3), 442-450.

Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2015). Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism. University of Minnesota Press.

Toke, D. (2005). Explaining wind power planning outcomes: some findings from a study in England and Wales. Energy Policy, 33(12), 1527-1539.

We welcome both theoretical and empirical papers across any policy areas related to health and climate change, which engage with local-level policy innovation and entrepreneurship. The relation to health and climate change is conceptualised broadly here—including, for example, interventions targeting transport, housing, and the built environment—and we encourage contributors to incorporate considerations of equity in their analyses.

In particular, we welcome conceptually or theoretically innovative and interdisciplinary papers from less well-researched contexts, and those adopting critical and interpretive approaches to policy analysis. This may include, for example, analyses centring framing and discourse to explore how policy problems and solutions are constructed locally. In addition, we welcome contributions on the role of different interest groups across multiple levels of governance, both in promoting and obstructing policy innovation. This may include, for example, investigations of corporate political activity in local settings, governance of perceived conflicts of interest, the role of evidence and knowledge in policy making and contestation, as well as the role citizens’ advocacy plays in driving policy innovation (see e.g., Walls, Hawkins, & Durrance-Bagale, 2021; Maltby, 2019). Incorporating an explicitly urban lens for policy analysis which de-centres the nation state to explore decision-making and networks across scales may also prove fruitful (Kaufmann & Sidney, 2019).

Potential substantive foci further include the role of national and supranational policies such as national planning policy frameworks or supranational legislation; the role of neoliberal reforms and austerity, for example, the rhetoric of reform and localism in neoliberal regimes outside of the United States, Australia, and the UK; and the impacts on local policy-making of shifting national political priorities, fluctuating capacity and resources, and dominant discourses such as economic regeneration and individualism (see e.g., Theodore, 2020; Mavrot & Sager, 2024).

References

Kaufmann, D., & Sidney, M. (2020). Towards an Urban Policy Analysis: Incorporating Participation, Multilevel Governance, and "Seeing Like a City”. PS: Political Science & Politics, 53(1), 1–5.

Maltby, T. (2019). Power and capacity in urban climate governance: Germany and England compared. Local Government Studies, 45(4), 595–597.

Mavrot, C., & Sager, F. (2024). The local tackling of global issues: a governance paradox in federal states. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1-20.

Theodore, N. (2020). Governing through austerity:(Il) logics of neoliberal urbanism after the global financial crisis. Journal of Urban Affairs, 42(1), 1-17.

Walls, H., Hawkins, B., & Durrance-Bagale, A. (2021). Local Government Stakeholder Perceptions of Legitimacy and Conflict of Interest: The Alcohol Industry and the" Drink Free Days" Campaign in England. International Journal of Health Policy and Management, 11(8), 1505-1513.