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This paper starts from the familiar premise of evidence-based policy, and examines the active role that researchers play in policy development processes. The interactive nature of much research translation immediately suggests the need to consider the dynamic way in which problems come to be understood, which is explored in this paper. Furthermore, the integration of research knowledge with the knowledges of “ordinary” citizens is a key challenge. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper represents a synthesis of recent studies conducted by the author and her colleagues along with other drug policy literature.

The interactive and dialogic processes that researchers engage with, whether as knowledge brokers or participants in elite policy development forums, have implications for how policy problems (and solutions) come to be constituted. Four perspectives and theoretical approaches are briefly outlined: research design; policy processes; problematization; and critical social sciences analyses. These offer different ways of seeing, understanding and analyzing the relationship between problems, policy solutions and the policy processes. Yet all have lessons for the ways in which research evidence and researchers constitute policy. This needs to sit alongside the role of other drug policy stakeholders – notably the “ordinary” citizen. It is argued that the elite role of research can be tempered with engagement of ordinary citizens. While it can be challenging to reconcile general public views about drugs with the evidence-base, deliberative democracy approaches may hold some promise.

This paper draws together a number of central themes for drug policy processes research: where the evidence-based policy paradigm intersects with participatory democracy; how problems are constituted; and the privileged role of research and researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to map research communities related to heroin-assisted treatment (HAT) and the scientific network they are part of to determine their structure and content.

Co-authorship as the basis for conducting social network analysis with regard to degree, weighted degree, betweenness centrality, and edge betweenness centrality.

A number of central researchers were identified on the basis of the number of their collaborative relations. Central actors were also identified on the basis of their position in the research network. In total, 11 research communities were constructed with different scientific content. HAT research communities are closely connected to medical, psychiatric, and epidemiological research and very loosely connected to social research.

The first mapping of the collaborative network HAT researchers using social network methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an outline of the origins, rationale and ways of working of the Danish schools, social services, police (SSP) system.

Narrative account of origins and contexts and discussion of implications for other nations and contribution to knowledge of prevention work.

The SSP system represents an involvement by Danish state institutions in the welfare and development of young people. Practice indicates its broad acceptance by parents, young people and professionals. Recent extension of SSP work is demonstrating some of the limitations of the approach in working with alienated young people.

The present SSP system relies on local evaluation and assessment. Wider national and longitudinal evaluation needs further consideration.

The need for a career structure and continuing and nationally consistent professional development opportunities was identified in a previous evaluation.

SSP enjoys broad acceptance amongst parents, young people and professionals in that it provides a universal input into young people’s well-being and social integration. It is proving less successful in work in some urban areas with high levels of alienation amongst older young people. There is also a need for re-statement of confidentiality aspects.

The paper provides an insight into and overview of a cross-disciplinary approach to young people’s development and well-being where the state plays a key and accepted role. The rationale is equally relevant to the UK and other countries.

On-premise trading hours are generally decided at the local level. The purpose of this paper is to identify relevant advocacy coalitions and to assess to what extent and how these coalitions used research in the alcohol policy-making process concerning changes in on-premise trading hours in Norway.

Theory-driven content analyses were conducted, applying data from city council documents (24 Norwegian cities) and Norwegian newspaper articles and broadcast interviews (n=138) in 2011-2012.

Two advocacy coalitions with conflicting views and values were identified. Both coalitions used research quite extensively – in the public debate and in the formal decision-making process – but in different ways. The restrictive coalition, favouring restricted trading hours and emphasising public health/safety, included the police and temperance movements and embraced research demonstrating the beneficial health/safety effects of restricting trading hours. The liberal coalition of conservative politicians and hospitality industry emphasised individual freedom and industry interests and promoted research demonstrating negative effects on hospitality industry turnover. This coalition also actively discredited the research demonstrating the beneficial health/safety effects of restricting trading hours.

Little is known about how local alcohol policy-making processes are informed by research-based knowledge. This study is the first to analyse how advocacy coalitions use research to influence local alcohol policy-making.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the current state of political and administrative ethnography in political science and public administration before suggesting that focus groups are a useful tool in the study of governing elites. They provide an alternative way of “being there” when the rules about secrecy and access prevent participant observation. Briefly, it describes the job of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff before explaining the research design, the preparations for the focus group sessions, and the strategies used to manage the dynamics of a diverse group that included former political enemies and factional rivals.

It outlines the approach to analysis and interpretation before reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of focus groups for research into political and administrative elites.

It concludes that focus groups are a valuable tool for making tacit knowledge explicit, especially when all participants work in a shared governmental tradition.

It is the first project to use focus groups to study the political elites of Westminster systems, let alone Australian government.

The paper ethnographically explores modes of urban resistance emerging in tandem with climate change mitigation programs in Copenhagen.

Building on 11 months of fieldwork with a Danish construction enterprise, the paper examines the politics of urban climate change mitigation programs through the lens of a group of builders' struggles to rethink and resolve dilemmas related to environmental concerns in construction and urban development.

Based on an analysis of a specific construction project connected to a larger urban climate change mitigation program in Copenhagen, the paper shows how the builders deliberately move between different perspectives and positions as they navigate the shifting power relations of urban planning. The paper argues that this form of crafty resistance enables the builders to maneuver the political landscape of urban planning as they seek to appropriate the role of “urban planners” themselves.

Taking up recent discussions of “resistance” in anthropology and cognate disciplines (e.g. Theodossopoulos, 2014; Bhungalia, 2020; Prasse-Freeman, 2020), the paper contributes an ethnographic analysis of struggles between diverging and, at times, competing modes of engagement in urban climate change mitigation programs and thus sheds light on how professional actors negotiate the ambiguity of “sustainability” in urban planning.