This book explains a major gap between the stated aims of governments and the actual outcomes. Based on systematic theoretical and empirical analysis, the book helps us understand the puzzle enough to warn against repeating many mistakes of the past.

If 'prevention is better than cure', why isn't policy more preventive? Policymakers only have the ability to pay attention to, and influence, a tiny proportion of their responsibilities, and they engage in a policymaking environment of which they have limited understanding and even less control. This simple insight helps explain the gap between stated policymaker expectations and actual policy outcomes. Why Isn't Government Policy more Preventive? uses these insights to produce new empirical studies of 'wicked' problems with practical lessons. The authors find that the UK and Scottish governments both use a simple idiom - prevention is better than cure - to sell a package of profound changes to policy and policymaking. Taken at face value, this focus on 'prevention' policy seems like an idea 'whose time has come'. Yet, 'prevention' is too ambiguous until governments give it meaning. No government has found a way to turn this vague aim into a set of detailed, consistent, and defendable policies. This book examines what happens when governments make commitments without knowing how to deliver them. It compares their policymaking contexts, roles and responsibilities, policy styles, language, commitments, and outcomes in several cross-cutting policy areas (including health, families, justice, and employability) to make sense of their experiences. The book uses multiple insights from policy theory to help research and analyse the results. The results help policymakers reflect on how to avoid a cycle of optimism and despair when trying to solve problems that their predecessors did not.

This book focuses on two key ways to improve the literature surrounding policy analysis. Firstly, it explores the implications of new developments in policy process research, on the role of psychology in communication and the multi-centric nature of policymaking. This is particularly important since policy analysts engage with policymakers who operate in an environment over which they have limited understanding and even less control. Secondly, it incorporates insights from studies of power, co-production, feminism, and decolonisation, to redraw the boundaries of policy-relevant knowledge. These insights help raise new questions and change expectations about the role and impact of policy analysis.

Is prevention better than cure, or treatment more important because people need rescue? In this volume the prevention-treatment relationship is examined factually by economists and scholars of health policy and evidence-based medicine.

Prevention is better than cure. This adage has become an important guideline for governments in recent years. Prevention of terrorist attacks, of recidivism among habitual offenders, of dropouts among problem adolescents, or of obesity among children: the existing repertoires of the constitutional state and the welfare state are complemented by a preventive intervention repertoire in a broad range of policy domains. But what does this transformation imply for our understanding of the state in late-modern society? This study reconstructs the emergence of 'the preventive gaze' in politics and policymaking, and discusses its consequences for the relation between state and society. Prevention seems to be a logical answer in the face of contemporary social issues such as security, education, welfare, and public health. However, prevention also has an expansive logic and pushes the state towards an ever more detailed, comprehensive, and timely approach to risks. As a consequence, the emergence of the 'prevention state' tends towards a slow and silent politicization of society and usurpation of the state-free domain.

Building on a deep theoretical foundation and drawing on numerous examples, we examine how policies spread across the American states. We argue that for good policies to spread while bad policies are pushed aside, states must learn from one another. The three ingredients for this positive outcome are observable experiments, time to learn, and favorable incentives and expertise among policymakers. Although these ingredients are sometimes plentiful, we also note causes for concern, such as when policies are complex or incompatible with current practices, when policymakers give in to underlying political biases, or when political institutions lack the capacity for cultivating expertise. Under such conditions, states may rely on competition, imitation, and coercion, rather than learning, which can allow bad policies, rather than good ones, to spread. We conclude with lessons for reformers and policymakers and an assessment of our overall argument based on state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This provocative Element is on the 'state of the art' of theories that highlight policymaking complexity. It explains complexity in a way that is simple enough to understand and use. The primary audience is policy scholars seeking a single authoritative guide to studies of 'multi-centric policymaking'. It synthesises this literature to build a research agenda on the following questions: 1. How can we best explain the ways in which many policymaking 'centres' interact to produce policy? 2. How should we research multi-centric policymaking? 3. How can we hold policymakers to account in a multi-centric system? 4. How can people engage effectively to influence policy in a multi-centric system? However, by focusing on simple exposition and limiting jargon, Paul Cairney, Tanya Heikkila, Matthew Wood also speak to a far wider audience of practitioners, students, and new researchers seeking a straightforward introduction to policy theory and its practical lessons.