Analysis of 60,000 contracts awarded by English councils between 2015–19 reveals that austerity constraints are a key predictor of councils outsourcing services to for-profit suppliers, regardless of their political control. Conservative Party-controlled councils are also more likely to...

We analysed 90,000 contracts involving UK local authorities between 2015 and 2019 to examine patterns and potential drivers of regional sourcing. We found councils in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are much more likely to select suppliers based within their regions compared with their...

Empirical studies that use the multiple streams approach often examine cases of reactive policymaking in response to "focusing events", rather than proactive policymakers who seek to broker or construct problems that their preferred solution might address. Drawing on publicly-available debates...

Climate mitigation and climate adaptation are crucial tasks for urban areas and can involve synergies as well as trade-offs. However, few studies have examined how mitigation and adaptation efforts relate to each other in a large number of differently sized cities, and therefore we know little...

The literature on policy mixes tends to focus on the instruments that different jurisdictions adopt to tackle public problems, and how policies may complement or conflict with each other. Fewer studies examine the factors that influence instrument choice, particularly within multilevel contexts,...

We examine how local socioeconomic, institutional and political factors shape climate transformation pathways in 23 mid-sized German cities. We group our cities into three types: industrial cities (which may have experienced recent structural change), historic cities (in which a significant...

Following multiple critical reviews of local audit arrangements, the UK government is poised to improve public oversight of English council finances to try to identify and address risks as they emerge. This article traces the growing realization that previous audit arrangements were ineffective...

Drawing on data for the 104 largest German cities, and deeper analysis of six mid-sized cities (including forerunners, followers and latecomers in climate mitigation and adaptation), we find that the spread of local mitigation and adaptation strategies across Germany can be explained by a...

Defining and measuring progress in adaptation are important questions for climate adaptation science, policy, and practice. Here, we assess the progress of urban adaptation planning in 327 European cities between 2005 and 2020 using three ‘ADAptation plan Quality Assessment’ indices, called...