Latest from the Policy Commons

By Philipp Lottholz and Karolina Kluczewska The difficulty of reaching practitioners and experts is one of the main challenges faced by early-career researchers in particular, and one that can overshadow fieldwork experiences and attempts to produce new knowledge....

By Brian Martin - Media stories about universities often focus on shortcomings; the routines of good teaching, solid research and maintaining high standards rarely merit attention. Moreover, universities can sometimes find themselves under attack in spite of their...

By Michael O'Brien and Susan Kemp - If social investment is the next (or perhaps current) big policy idea (as some commentators seem to suggest), then it requires some very careful review and discussion what it is and how it is designed to work. The new government...

By Tim Dunlop - If you want to understand how transformative a universal basic income, or UBI, might be, it’s hard to beat the story told by Guy Standing during the lecture he gave in Melbourne in 2015. He was talking about a UBI trial he had supervised in India in...

By Tim Tenbensel - Anyone taking a casual interest in health policy in New Zealand in 2017 would have a strong impression, based on recent media coverage, that our health system is currently severely stretched. Hardly a week has gone by without a new story about...

By Jemaima Tiatia-Seath - One life lost to suicide, is one life too many. The World Health Organisation estimates that globally, 800,000 people die by suicide each year. This is equivalent to a suicide death every 40 seconds. It is predicted that by the year 2020,...

By David Williams - An interdisciplinary team of University of Auckland staff from Social Anthropology and Law are nearing the completion of their work on a Marsden Fund project. We are preparing a book manuscript entitled The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the...

By Barry Milne and Nichola Shackleton - What can we do to get the biggest reductions in obesity, and the greatest improvements in mental health and educational outcomes for NZ children? This is the question that Knowledge Lab, an interactive policy model of...

By Kieran Booluck - Previous posts in our series on the Impact of LSE Blogs project examined the effects of blogging on the academic sphere, looking more closely at citations to the original research outputs and also to the blog posts themselves. But what about the...

With Kevin Jenkins - Space has suddenly become big in New Zealand. Rocket Lab is just one example of what is starting to look like exponential growth in commercial activity, research is following a similar path, and the Government is active in policy and...

By Tom Warshawski and Mary Lewis - Proposed restrictions on food and beverage advertising to kids should include youth up to age 16 We shield our children and young teenagers (16 and under) from many things: overt portrayals of sex and violence on TV and in movies,...