Illuminating Policy for Health: Insights From a Decade of Researching Urban and Regional Planning [Hardcover]

This book unpacks policy and politics for health, equity, and wellbeing. With a critical realist lens, the book provides a methodology for sophisticated health focussed policy analysis which situates public health within complex political processes and systems. The application of that lens is demonstrated with insights from a decade of research into urban and regional planning.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part 1: Methodology matters.- Chapter 2: The positioning of health in public policy (with an urban flavour).- Chapter 3: Healthy Public Policy analysis switches on the floodlights.- Chapter 4: The steps in critical realist analysis.- Chapter 5: Drawing out the essentials for analysing public policy for health: the policy cube, etc.

Patrick Harris is Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation at UNSW, Sydney, Australia.

Harris has extensive experience in public health policy research and uses it to great effect ... His aim is to use what we know about public health problems, and policy processes, to inform sophisticated policy analysis. This approach requires analysts to situate their potential policy solutions in the context of a political audience more or less receptive to their ideas, and a complex policymaking environment out of their full understanding and control

Paul Cairney, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Stirling, UK

Turning the floodlights on healthy public policy, Harris adopts a Critical Realist lens to highlight the importance of theory, framing, policy and governance in metropolitan planning, urban transport infrastructure, impact assessment, coal mining and climate change.  Supported by raw and insightful observations about his personal navigation of research and writing, Illuminating Policy for Health&nbló.