This article explores how organizational policy capacity can be developed, drawing on a study conducted in a large human services agency in Australia. Building policy capacity within government agencies is widely acknowledged as important for successfully responding to complex policy problems. The existing literature suggests a range of strategies for building organizational capacity. Findings from interviews with policy workers support the principles for building policy capacity identified in the literature but uncovered a surprising degree of scepticism pointing to significant barriers to their realization. These barriers are identified as emerging out of the tensions between policy capacity and two other domains of governing capacity: administrative capacity and state capacity. These tensions however are highly contingent and dynamic; managing them requires a degree of discretion and judgement, in brief, policy leadership. A focus on developing policy leadership at the level of policy units and teams may present a strategic approach to building organizational capacity for policy work.
Background: The health sector in Australia faces major challenges that include an ageing population, spiralling health care costs, continuing poor Aboriginal health, and emerging threats to public health. At the same time, the environment for policy-making is becoming increasingly complex. In this context, strong policy capacity -broadly understood as the capacity of government to make "intelligent choices" between policy options -is essential if governments and societies are to address the continuing and emerging problems effectively.
Past research has found that sports journalism has remained an area of gender disparity. However, in recent years, female sports broadcasters have increased their visibility in the UK. By comparison, while newspaper sports coverage has increased rapidly in recent years, how much progress have women sports writers made in the print media? This research first examines the current visibility of women sports journalists in the sports section of the national UK press, counting by-lines to examine the prevalence of female sports writers. Secondly, a study is carried out to see if the 2012 London Olympic Games had any effect on the proportion of female sports writers in the UK press, by comparing sports by-lines in a sample six months before the Olympics and six months after. Furthermore, these results are compared to a decade earlier to see if the situation has improved over a longer period of time.
Key words
Equality
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