This research aims to investigate current volunteer use in public libraries in England. Volunteer use is not a new phenomenon, and has been an integral part of public library provision for many years. However recent Government policies, together with greater financial austerity, have resulted in a change in public service delivery. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of volunteers involved within the public library service, and the growth of community run libraries, resulting in much public and professional concern. An interpretivist research approach was used to investigate stakeholder opinions regarding volunteer use, and involved a two phase process. Initially a Delphi survey explored attitudes of 15 English public library service managers, followed by in-depth investigation of two case study library authorities, located in the North-East of England. Surveys, interviews and focus groups, helped to build a rich picture of volunteer use amongst the groups of stakeholders. Findings clearly indicated that volunteer use has moved from additionality to replacement of staff, and is increasingly being used by local authorities as a solution to budget reductions required as a result of economic austerity. A hybrid approach to library service provision has developed, using a combination of paid staff and volunteers, which indicates a fundamental culture shift within public libraries. Research results identified concerns relating to the long term viability of a hybrid approach, and how this impacted on the wider community in terms of service provision. Key concerns were raised concerning advocacy, sensitivity, the fragility of relationships, and the provision of an accountable and high quality service. Formal and informal control mechanisms need to be employed by library service managers to ensure that they reap the benefits of volunteer use, thereby avoiding social exclusion, clarifying stakeholder boundaries, and delivering a high quality accountable service. Training library managers in new volunteer management skills, and adopting a volunteer relationship management approach may help to ensure that this new arrangement is mutually beneficial for all concerned.

The aim of this research project is to critically investigate the intersection between british asylum policy and social care practice. The study evaluates normative frameworks present in the policy documents related to social care provision to asylum seekers and refugees, explores how front line social care workers' practice aligns with those policies, and looks into the consequences of their assessments and interventions on the lives of asylum seekers and refugees in England.

England and Wales have the same criminal justice system, but devolution in Wales has created some differences between the two countries. In Wales all child and young person related services, with the exception of youth justice, are devolved to the Welsh Government. It is claimed by some that devolution has resulted in youth justice policy in Wales diverging from that of England. This is because of the Welsh Government’s adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been incorporated into its domestic legislation. This is not mirrored in England, as the UK Government’s youth justice policies during the New Labour period have been characterised as punitive, risk-led and managerialist. Although attitudes and approaches changed during the Coalition Government’s administration, the fundamental features of the system have not. Youth justice in Wales has been described as taking a ‘children first, offenders second’ approach to children and young people in trouble with the law, which by inference suggests the opposite for youth justice in England. The purpose of this study is to examine whether there is a different youth justice in Wales. This was done by scrutinising a range of evidence that included the policies of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales and the Welsh Government and the interface and relationship between them, to determine what youth justice in Wales looks like and how it compares to youth justice in England. This was supported by an analysis of YJB data about the operation of the system, which disaggregated information about Wales from national statistics, to establish if outcomes for young people in Wales differed from their counter-parts in England. Finally, the perspectives of practitioners in two youth offending teams in England and two in Wales were explored to establish what their practice cultures looked like and the extent to which practitioners had similar or different views about how the system should and does operate, whether a ‘children first’ philosophy is dominant in Wales and how this relates to the policy positions of the respective governments.

As with other forms of green crime, timber trafficking is frequently overlooked by traditional criminology. This research is an exploratory investigation into the problem of timber trafficking in Vietnam, which aims to obtain a detailed understanding of the typology of, victimisation from, and key factors driving this crime. To achieve this aim, 41 semi-structured interviews with seven different cohorts (environmental police, investigative police, forest protection officers, commune authorities, forest-based inhabitants, timber traders, and green NGO staff) were conducted. Over one hundred pages of official documents (criminal case records, operational reports, and conference papers), and more than two hundred relevant newspapers were collected and analysed to enhance and triangulate the primary data. This research reveals a multifaceted typology of timber trafficking in Vietnam, comprising five different components: harvesting, transporting, trading, supporting, and processing. Each of these components is further constituted by distinctive, parallel forms of illicit operation. There are, for example, three parallel forms of illegal timber harvesting, termed small-scale, medium-scale and large-scale (SSITH, MSITH and LSITH). While having certain overlaps, in general SSITH, MSITH and LSITH are fundamentally distinctive not only in terms of the volumes of illicit timber they produce and the methods of illegally felling trees they employ, as typically identified in the previous studies, but more importantly in terms of the harvesters‘ attributes, their motivations, and the sophistication and security implications of the criminal operations. It is thus argued that the typology of illegal timber harvesting in this research challenges the typical classification in the existing literature, and offers an alternative way of understanding more comprehensively the dynamic of illegal logging. Regarding the victimisation from timber trafficking, due to the employment of a broad conceptual framework of human security, it is revealed that timber trafficking has substantial harmful impacts on all seven elements of human security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political. These impacts are closely interconnected, but vary between different groups of victims. These findings culminate in the proposal that there are three main typical characteristics of green victimisation: suffering hierarchy, victim-offender overlap, and multidimensionality. Additionally, the employment of a human security paradigm in this research leads to another proposal that it is highly achievable and productive to integrate perspectives from the field of security studies into the discipline of green criminology, for the purpose of systematically examining green victimisation. Finally, this research offers five solutions to control timber trafficking in the context of Vietnam, by refining the current policy framework of forest governance and improving the efficiency of law enforcement.

The post-conflict nature of the Kosovo society and economy led to an urgent need to address educational policy, specifically to raise the quality of the reconstituted formal schooling system. To address this priority major foreign aid and government subsidies were targeted at both the demand (students) and supply (school) side. One of the major contributors, the World Bank, aimed to improve the supply side by allocating development grants to schools in order to improve student performance. In this thesis the following four research questions are addressed: how appropriate are current evaluation strategies of education policy initiatives in developing countries, what has been the impact of school development grants on student dropout, attendance and student attainment, what are determinants of pupil dropout, attendance and attainment and what are the implications of the answers to the above questions for the reform of education policies in developing economies and the evaluation of policy initiatives. This is the first study that critically reviews previous attempts at evaluating educational initiatives in Kosovo and then employs econometric methods to measure the impact of school development grants on educational outcomes. A quasi experimental approach is utilised and comparisons made between schools with treatment and schools without treatment. A similar study for Cambodia serves as a reference for our research, though we have extensively refined the approach taken in that study. The empirical evidence presented in this thesis suggests at best only a marginal positive impact of these policy initiatives on educational outcomes. More specifically there is some evidence of reduced dropout but no effect is found on student attendance and attainment. These findings are consistent with the results of recent reviews of the literature on this type of policy initiative. This study seeks to act as an example of best practice which can be followed in future evaluations of policy initiatives in countries like Kosovo. It draws important conclusions about the need at the policy design stage to formulate appropriate evaluation strategy and to address related issues about data quality, collection and analysis.