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The paper presents and discusses the findings of a Strategic Insight Programme placement that explored the Youth Justice Board for Wales (YJB Cymru), a division of the YJB for England and Wales since the abolition of the regional structure in April 2012. The focus of the placement was on exploring the role of YJB Cymru in the development of youth justice policy and practice in the unique, partially devolved context of Wales. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The research was conducted over a six-month period from February to July 2013. A multiple methods design was adopted, consisting of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders (YJB Cymru staff, Welsh Government staff and Youth Offending Team staff), observations of policy and practice mechanisms (YJB Cymru meetings, YOT projects) and documentary analysis of YJB Cymru publications.

Thematic analyses demonstrated that YJB Cymru has an increasingly important role in policy and practice development structures and processes in England and Wales more broadly (e.g. within the YJB for England and Wales) and in the Welsh national context specifically. YJB Cymru fulfills a role of dual influence – working both with government (UK and Welsh) and youth justice practitioners (mainly YOT managers and staff) to mediate and manage youth justice tensions in the partially devolved Welsh policy context through relationships of reflective and critical engagement.

This study draws inspiration from the groundbreaking research of Souhami (2011) and builds on those findings to provide a unique insight into the organisation and role YJB Cymru in the complex and dynamic context of youth justice in Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to place on record the impact made on government policy and research by Autism Cymru, a small charity that existed in Wales between 2001 and 2014. The success of Autism Cymru resulted directly from philanthropic funding, applied with strategic vision and genuine ambition.

A retrospective, chronological viewpoint highlighting the creative process, drawing upon records held by the charity.

Autism Cymru initiated the concept and played a crucial role in steering the development of government policy for autism in Wales between 2001 and 2011. The charity also drove forward the initiative, which led to the establishment of the Wales Autism Research Centre at Cardiff University in 2010. This paper demonstrates that with astute philanthropic support, small learning disability/autism charities can elicit structural and sustainable change at the national level, leading to wide-ranging benefits for the communities they represent.

The strategic approach taken over 20 years ago in Wales by Autism Cymru, which led to the Welsh Government’s ASD Strategic Action Plan for Wales (Welsh Government, 2011), set in place a national policy model, which was then followed by The Scottish Strategy for Autism and the Northern Ireland Autism Strategy (Department of Health, 2013>; Scottish Government, 2011). The insightful and tenacious method used by Autism Cymru remains relevant today, demonstrating that any small charity supported by shrewd philanthropic funding can punch well above its weight by taking a planned, ambitious and strategic approach to policy, research and practice.

To describe the open‐source solution developed by Culturenet Cymru, for the Welsh Books Council, for presenting digitised books and other printed material online.

The challenges faced in the implementation of a pilot e‐book collection of nine out‐of‐print books is described.

The adoption of a number of international standards for the presentation, coding, conversion, metadata and searching of texts have resulted in a working pilot project.

It is hoped that many publicly funded bodies such as libraries and archives will make use of the system. A small collection of e‐books may be of some use, but it is the ability to search for, and access, e‐books across distributed collections which will provide real educational benefit.

Culturenet Cymru hopes to play a role in co‐ordinating the adoption of common standards for text digitisation in Wales.

The adverse impact of austerity on the available capacity of public bodies to give priority to engagement of older people means self-determination and older people representing the best interests of older people more generally – needs a fresh impetus if the voice of older people is to be heard and not marginalised. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The paper describes how a new direction for Cymru Older People’s Alliance was shaped, the engagement directly with older people that informed changes and key transitions negotiated to become a charity and form a democratically elected membership, with stronger structures and improved means to ensuring the “voice” of older people is heard.

Co-production, increased citizen engagement and promoting well-being are important new concepts in Welsh legislation but it is only through growing the infrastructure that enables older people to represent their own interests, that these new requirements will produce tangible results and progress can be made.

If we are to challenge ageism and recognise that older people need to be empowered and enabled to make their own decisions, then older people’s organisations need to change and adapt to the prevailing financial climate. This is not an easy pathway but it can be achieved through good planning, strong governance and effective engagement, listening carefully to older people’s views.

The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect upon the place of rugby union in contemporary Wales where the game is used as an important tool to promote images of the nation. Using Benedict Anderson's conceptualisation of the nation as an “imagined community” the paper aims to locate and analyse the game within and around discourses of Cool Cymru, a term coined in the late twentieth century to promote images of a new vibrant Wales as popularised through its leading music bands.

A critical sociological approach analyses and problematises notions of Welshness as it relates to the national sport of rugby.

The nation is often (re)presented and conceptualised as a monolithic whole where rugby's assumed centrality is rarely questioned. This essay focuses upon the areas of language, geography and gender to demonstrate the situated limits of these (re)presentations. Rugby union and Cool Cymru are also located alongside devolution and are examined further with specific reference to the postmodern sporting celebrity.

This work highlights an increasing primacy afforded to the capital city of Cardiff within a re‐imagining of the nation and the national game.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of enforcement action on individuals and families living in social housing as a mode of intervention for dealing with anti‐social behaviour.

Relevant housing legislation and policy documents are reviewed. The paper then draws on empirical data from Shelter Cymru's case file records of households in social housing who have been subject to enforcement action following an allegation of anti‐social behaviour. Evidence obtained from other studies on housing intervention projects is used to contrast the position of the households studied with those in similar situations who have been provided with support as an alternative to enforcement action.

The legislative framework favours enforcement as a means of dealing with anti‐social behaviour. A number of remedies utilise the management role of social landlords, and the framework of housing tenure, to introduce the concept of “conditionality” into housing entitlement. This approach to the management of anti‐social behaviour compounds the social disadvantage of already vulnerable households by undermining long‐term security of tenure and thereby increasing the risk of homelessness and social exclusion. These outcomes contrast with those from studies of similar households in receipt of support within housing intervention projects which have been shown to deliver reductions in anti‐social behaviour and sustainable outcomes for families, communities, and landlords.

The findings provide important lessons for the future direction of anti‐social behaviour policy throughout the UK and beyond. In the context of devolved polity in the UK the paper argues for the Welsh Assembly Government to take a lead in developing policies and legal responses which recognize the housing rights of marginalised groups, and for the introduction of support into social housing to counter the trend toward punitive treatment of social tenants as a response to anti‐social behaviour.

The unique nature of the empirical data set from Shelter Cymru's case file records provides an important insight into the social impact of anti‐social behaviour law and policy on some of the most vulnerable members of society.

Here we examine some of the contemporary challenges facing Plaid Cymru — the Party of Wales, the principal nationalist political party and one of the mainstays of the nationalist movement in Wales. Against the backdrop of the establishment of the first directly-elected national government forum in Wales for 600 years, we present new research and explore how the party's response to the ‘inclusive’ politics of the mid-1990s was central to Plaid Cymru's recent dramatic electoral breakthrough into the political mainstream and how it will be crucial to hopes for its future advancement. We contextualise this as part of this nationalist party's overall transformation during the last 75 years. This has been a journey from espousing an exclusive to purportedly inclusive nationalist ideology. Such development has been shaped along a number of non-discrete axes that include: the geographical spread of the party's organisational structures and electoral support, its readiness to embark upon co-working with other parties and groups, its evolving policy agenda, its stance on the Welsh language and, latterly, its response to ‘inclusive’ politics and constitutional reform. We test what Plaid's former leader has described as, the ‘inclusive philosophy’ underpinning Plaid Cymru's ‘civic nationalism’ against the party's record of engagement with some of the most marginalised groups in Welsh society: women, disabled people and people from an ethnic minority. These groups must be engaged if Plaid's claims of inclusiveness are to be meaningful and it's growing influence in Welsh, U.K. and European politics consolidated. We base our discussion and findings on the analysis of published interviews and documents together with transcriptions of 280 semi-structured interviews undertaken between May 1999 and September 2000. We have interviewed over a third of the Assembly Members of the National Assembly for Wales, key officials, members of Plaid Cymru, managers of ninety membership organisations and over 150 key individuals and practitioners associated with the marginalised groups under study.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of Welsh‐language provision on the web sites of political parties contesting the 2007 Welsh Assembly elections.

Expert inspection was carried out on the web sites of 18 of the 19 parties contesting the election. Goal‐directed walkthroughs were conducted on four web sites judged to be making a bilingual provision.

Overall, the Welsh language was highly marginalised. While Welsh‐language elements were identified on ten of the 18 web sites, only four web sites attempted to make a bilingual provision. On three of these, a user intending to interact with the web site through the medium of Welsh would still encounter English language content and/or navigation. Only one web site offered a fully Welsh‐language experience.

This paper only considers the web sites of political parties and presents only a high level analysis. It does not consider the impact of Welsh‐language provision on the electorate.

This is the first paper to systematically examine Welsh‐language provision on party web sites during elections for the National Assembly for Wales. In contrast to many studies of election‐related internet activity in the UK, it considers a regional election rather than a UK general election.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how care homes can be de-institutionalised and what factors are key in independence for residents?

This paper takes the form of a review of the current life of residents in care homes with insight from My Home Life Cymru.

This research identifies eight best practice themes which together form a vision for care homes in the twenty-first century.

Care homes play an important role in social care, providing services to some of our most vulnerable citizens. By focusing on the quality of life in care homes for older people, we can play a part in delivering services that people want, in the way that they want them.

This paper aims to outline the developments and strategies employed to supply online library services in Wales through a national platform: library.wales.org These services include: the “Cat Cymru” cross‐catalogue search, centrally procured subscription resources and local library microsites.

The paper reviews the key areas of development against the backdrop of current library policy in Wales.

By reviewing the strategic and policy background, outlining the key elements of the projects, and reviewing the future directions for this work, the paper shows how a national approach is leading to an improved cohesive delivery of services to Welsh citizens.

The work outlined in this paper represents the significant and valuable progress made in Wales in regard to the provision of centrally funded online services to all libraries and library users.