Joined-up government (JUG) is a major pillar of the Labour Government's Modernising Government agenda in the United Kingdom (UK). To date, however, there are still surprisingly few detailed empirical studies of how well JUG initiatives are performing. This paper takes the policy challenge of...

The United Kingdom is an international leader in the application of environmental policy appraisal (EPA). From the late 1980s until 2004, the UK's system sought to produce ex-ante assessments of the potential environmental impacts of different policy options. Critics maintain that it had a very...

The concept of ecosystem services is increasingly being promoted by academics and policy makers as a means to protect ecological systems through more informed decision making. A basic premise of this approach is that strengthening the ecological knowledge base will significantly enhance...

The ‘ecosystem services approach’ (ESA) to policy making has refocused attention on how knowledge is embedded in policy. Appraisal has long been identified as an important venue for embedding, but suffers from well-known difficulties. This paper examines the extent to which an ESA appears in...

Procedures for the ex ante assessment of public policies are currently in vogue across the OECD. Their design is typically informed by an instrumentally rational model of problem solving, which assumes that knowledge is collected, evaluated and then translated straightforwardly into 'better...