Academics and practitioners alike recognize that global governance institutions suffer from a democratic deficit. A large body of literature suggests that civil society can reform global governance, but a countervailing body of work indicates that civil society may actually facilitate new forms of elite domination. This thesis seeks to contribute to this debate by examining the impact of civil society on policymaking at the World Bank. This thesis' core question is: 'Do data about the World Bank support the idea that civil society can democratize global governance.' Using three case studies, the thesis examines how civil society organizations engaging with the Bank interact with one another, set their agendas, and achieve their impacts, and how these organizations engage with local civil society and governments in developing countries. The resulting data are analyzed using a framework for democratic legitimacy derived from the work of Uhlin, Scharpf, and Dingwerth. The case studies reveal civil society is far more atomized than indicated in much of the literature. Strong ideological commitments, coupled with financial incentives, inhibit dialogue between organizations and make it difficult for international organizations to respond to the concerns of grassroots stakeholders. Civil society advocacy increases stakeholder control over the World Bank, but new channels of influence are controlled primarily by elite organizations based in the global North. Civil society organizations also utilize state power to achieve their objectives, soliciting the assistance of the Bank's major donors in ways that marginalize developing country governments. The thesis finds that civil society has abundant impact on the World Bank and that some impacts, like improved transparency and accountability, facilitate direct stakeholder influence over the institution. However, the thesis concludes that because transnational civil society consolidates that influence in the hands of a minority of stakeholders, it does not democratize the World Bank.

This thesis is motivated by the phenomenon of sub-optimal decision-making, where a person is unable to make effective choices that promote her best interests and as a result her life goes badly, and asks how a just social welfare policy should respond to it. Accordingly, it is concerned with two conflicting sets of expectations, both of which are at the heart of current debates concerning welfare reform in Britain. Firstly, that people should be responsible for meeting their own welfare needs through the prudent exercise of their right to personal autonomy. Secondly, that the state should provide a safety net of publicly-provided welfare goods for those who are unable to satisfy their own needs. Policymakers have sought to regulate the tension between these with the principle of welfare conditionality, which holds that those deemed culpable for their own welfare needs, or their inability to satisfy them, are disqualified from public assistance. However, I will argue that these expectations, and the public policy principle they have given rise to, are precariously founded on a mistaken assumption; namely, that individuals who have mental capacity as defined in current law are necessarily autonomy-competent, and, as such, equipped with the skills and dispositions required for effective decision-making that promotes their best interests. I locate impaired autonomy-competence on a continuum of personal autonomy in the neglected terrain between moral failure and mental incapacity and claim that, insofar as welfare conditionality fails to acknowledge this gap, it is prone to holding sub-optimal decision-makers unjustly responsible and perpetuating the prudential failures it claims to discourage. Accordingly, I argue that the state has a role in promoting the conditions for prudent self-government, and that autonomy-enhancing intervention, not traditional forms of welfare conditionality, is the best means through which the great expectations of personal autonomy and responsibility can be realised.

Welfare reform in middle income countries, where formal institutions conventionally have an exclusionary character and informal institutions are central to social welfare, has been marked by a drastic rise of means-tested social assistance schemes. This dissertation analyses, with an empirical focus on Turkey, the potential of these schemes to expand social rights by creating new formal entitlements for previously excluded groups. The number and the scope of social assistance schemes in Turkey have shown a remarkable increase, especially after the 2001 economic crisis, accompanied by significant institutionalisation. Yet, we argue that whilst social assistance has grown distinctively and become an integral part of the emerging welfare regime, certain characteristics of the previous regime were ultimately reproduced within new institutions due to the content of current schemes and the institutional structure of implementation. These include the association of mainstream welfare institutions with social insurance, the ambiguous role of the state towards the excluded parts of the society, the reliance on family relations and informal employment, and the prevalence of paternalist or clientelist motivations. Consequently, the potential of social assistance to extend formalised rights to the entire population was undermined, and the outcome has been the consolidation of a semi-formal welfare regime. To substantiate this argument, the dissertation develops a historical institutionalist framework and examines the elements of institutional change and continuity as well as the processes of change. Our three empirical chapters then focus on the development of legal, organisational, ideational and political bases of social assistance; trends in policy outcomes from the perspectives of decommodification, commodification, defamilialisation and declientelisation; and the functioning of social assistance through semi-autonomous foundations at the local level. Empirically, we build our argument on a comprehensive evidence base including a wide range of policy documents and qualitative interviews. Theoretically, we discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on welfare regimes and institutionalism, stressing the importance of implementation structures, the co-existence of institutional change and continuity, and the suggestion of a semi-formal regime type.

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This thesis deals with New Labour’s development of Community Cohesion and welfare reform policy between 2001 and 2010. It argues that there was a disjuncture between the linguistic presentation and the actual aims of cohesion and welfare policy. This was symptomatic of deeper processes of coercion and consent, designed to create citizens amenable to socioeconomic adjustment and increasing responsibility onto the citizen. Discourses in policy are contrasted with everyday narratives of people living in Bradford and Birmingham to draw out this disjuncture, but also to show elements of dissent from dominant discourses, as well as the multiple ways in which the everyday narratives conform to a series of discursive logics, potentially lessening the impact of this disjuncture. The thesis uses a critical analytical framework, adopting Gramscian concepts of ‘common sense’ and hegemony, within which the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis and focus groups are used. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to analyse cohesion and welfare documents from between 2001 and 2010, whilst focus group research investigates the plausibility of the disjuncture between language and aims, as well as the underlying construction of a common sense understanding of ‘cohesion’ based on hegemonic discourses. However, these hegemonic discourses can still be challenged through what Laclau calls ‘contamination’, providing the everyday narratives with the capacity to question discursive logics and subtly alter the discourses themselves. The thesis’ contribution to knowledge comes from the combined use of critical discourse analysis and focus groups within the Gramscian analytical frame, as well as its findings that a disjuncture between the language and aims of policy, and how citizens in selected areas have reacted to this, points to wider questions about community, empowerment and responsibility in the New Labour years. This is placed in the context of New Labour’s approach to, and ambitions of, creating British citizens that followed an appropriate ideology (Bieling, 2003: 66) based on community as a new plane from which to administer micro-moral relations (Rose, 1996: 331).

National and international policy actors use social enterprises in health system reform, but their meaning is contested. This inter-disciplinary research examines the logics of social enterprise. It contributes to health policy development in England and Tanzania by developing knowledge and theory of how and why they are used in health system reform. Institutional logic provides the inductive research framework using comparative, cross sectional case study design. Data collection methods included interviews with policy actors, literature, websites and other media using content, context, time series and narrative analysis. Three core characteristics of social enterprise were common to England and Tanzania: a social purpose, furthered with use of profits and social entrepreneurial outlook of actors in response to a market. The social determinants of health could be aligned with organisations’ social purpose. Three groups of organisations emerged: Holistic, Health care and Lifestyle. Social enterprises’ organisational strategies and their business models in each of these groups both respond to and are contingent on the state and market design of the health system. Socio-cultural and resource contexts constrained or enabled social entrepreneurs’ ability to achieve social innovation. The contribution of social enterprises to achieving health equity goals are not translated into the logic of state funded health care services or the market in either country. This is despite advocacy by policy actors and social enterprise policies in England. In Tanzania policy makers do not recognise the potential of social enterprises to achieve health equity goals. In both countries policy implementers and influencers were able to demonstrate how they contribute to health equity through their organisational strategies. Some social entrepreneurs acted collectively as institutional entrepreneurs to advocate for health system change. A framework and a diagnostic tool have been developed which contain the contingent variables required to introduce this logic into a health system.

The essential purpose of foreign aid is to reduce poverty and to help millions of people in the developing world. Yet, already the Marshall Plan demonstrates that donor governments frequently use development assistance as a foreign policy tool in order to promote their interests at the international stage. This ambivalence points to the need for a clear understanding of aid allocation, also as starting point for a better comprehension how aid affects development. Furthermore, the study of foreign aid allocation is not only fundamental for our knowledge on aid effectiveness, but also allows insights into the foreign policy preferences of rich governments toward the developing world. In order to address this, the following thesis highlights the importance of foreign aid as a foreign policy tool and illus- trates in three substantial chapters how developed states use financial assistance to buy policy concessions from developing countries. In this context, the author first contrasts the official aid doctrine with the actual, more hidden agenda over the last six decades, and also emphasizes important av- enues for further research. Second and by building upon existing research, the dissertation shows how donor governments strategically distinguish between con- ditional and unconditional aid to support more democratic developing countries that face political turmoil. Third, the thesis focuses on the public and private good aspects of aid, and explores how foreign aid might be used for access to raw materials - a case with potentially clear negative externalities to other donors. It is argued that donor governments allocate more aid to possible trading partners in mineral ores to secure their companies access to these resources. Against this background, the theoretical and empirical analyses of donors' aid allocation behavior illustrate that donor governments use foreign aid as a policy tool to further their very own interests in developing countries. Yet, this may not necessarily be detrimental to recipient needs. With the increasing international integration and the rise of more, heterogeneous donor countries, recipients become ever more important. Consequently, also the political economy of foreign aid.

This thesis deals with knowledge about the mechanics and effects of quality reforms in public service as advanced by critical policy studies. Critical policy studies have identified managerialism and marketization of public services as key conditions in introducing quality reforms. The argument has been built in opposition to proponents of quality who argue that marketization, when introduced to services, enhances their quality. In contrast, critical studies have shown that quality reforms have restructured organizational contexts of public services where quality acted mainly as a rhetorical figure, and where improvements remain dubious. The real effects of quality reforms, they argue, are increased control over practitioners’ labour process and de-professionalization. This thesis is a case study of a recent Czech social care reform. The Czech case is a case of a quality reform without marketization and managerialism, yet with a similar outcome in the form of managerialised care. As such, the Czech case offers an opportunity to further our knowledge about the mechanics of quality reforms provided we make a methodological step outside the analytics of managerialism. The thesis undertakes this methodological shift by drawing on Actor Network Theory. The question this thesis asks is how could managerialised care be achieved without either marketization or managerialism? Methodologically, the thesis argues that mapping social alliances among policy actors is necessary but in itself not sufficient to explain the outcome. The thesis traces the Czech quality reform from its inception as a policy project at the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs to its circulation in social care sector. The Czech case shows how articulating quality service in quality standards re-organised care by extending (both conceptually and practically) its boundaries. Care traditionally understood as interactional bodywork was extended horizontally to include practices and forms outside the practitioner-client interaction (such as support planning), and it was extended vertically shifting the agency in care from an equipped practitioner to an equipped service. The contribution of the thesis is twofold. It shows that quality has gained a life in its own outside the managerialist causation model and may not necessarily follow in the footsteps of marketization and managerialism. Mainly, the thesis shows that quality is a complex shibboleth able to re-format the content of practitioner work rather than merely re-structure organizational contexts of public service provision.

Co-design emerged as method to promote social sustainability under New Labour (1997 – 2010). Socially focused design specialisms, such as a 'service design', 'transformation design', and 'social design and innovation', have used co-design to address some of the UK’s most complex social challenges. These range from increasing public engagement to public service reform and health improvement, and are addressed by designers working collaboratively with a range of people affected by the challenges, such as the public, service providers and frontline workers. This thesis examines the use of co-design for the promotion of social sustainability as it emerged from a number of coinciding agendas under New Labour, and as it faces a different future under the Coalition government. The research maps the ways in which co-design was promoted within the design industry, and supported by non-departmental government bodies such as the Design Council, NESTA, and the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. An extensive review of the existing literature on co-design, social sustainability, New Labour’s social policy, and design and innovation agendas, provides a context for a range of interviews examining the reasons for the emergence of co-design. These twenty-five interviews were carried out with designers practicing co-design for social sustainability, senior professionals commissioning and promoting co-design and senior professionals working in engagement, education, social sustainability, social innovation and social policy. The completed research describes and summarises a hitherto undocumented area of modern design history, and provides an understanding of the reasons for the emergence of co-design for social sustainability, for academics, government and practitioners. Ultimately the research allows the practice to reflect upon itself, providing an opportunity to help shape its future development.

This thesis aims to contribute to a personalist approach to policy. First, it covers representations of the social and by implication the person in third way approaches from New Labour to Conservative policy. To empirically demonstrate what views of the person exist, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is conducted in the area of higher education governance. The argument put forward is that a view of the social and person exists in higher education governance and this affects policy proposals and initiatives. Thus, it is viewed necessary to present an explicit view of the person that then informs alternative policy directions. For this purpose, the work of Margaret Archer is utilised but with some revisions proposed. The argued realist model of personhood presented is then adopted as the basis of a relational policy direction defined by a homo relatus conception of personhood.