Search

This paper seeks to understand how the UK government's headline climate change targets are translated into action at the local level in the transport sector drawing on the findings of research in two English regions. In doing so, these headline targets are identified as a symbolic meta-policy that results in little action on the ground and which challenges established conceptions of policy implementation. Both the 'meta' and 'symbolic' aspects of the policy offer part of the explanation for the lack of substantive action on the ground. As a meta-policy, the headline targets across government require the elaboration of other policies at other levels such as targets for government departments and local authorities, but these are largely absent, leaving the meta-policy without teeth. Over time, these headline targets have developed into a symbolic policy, serving political goals but having little practical effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to build on Peter Burnham's analysis of New Labour's depoliticisation statecraft as set out in an earlier volume of this journal. While Burnham provides a convincing account of how this new governing strategy differed from earlier ‘politicised’ methods of governance, we know less about why such change took place. Burnham makes a start by suggesting that developments in the international financial system go some way to explaining this shift. The main argument of this article is that this account of change needs to be supplemented by a focus on domestic factors. It is asserted below that politicised strategies failed in part because state managers governed within a strategically selective context which penalised the deployment of more activist and discretionary policy instruments in industrial affairs. Instead, this context was more favourable to the depoliticisation techniques which have emerged in the 1980s and the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]