School of Social and Political Science

Background

My research has tended to gravitate towards similar questions about how policy problems are understood, who gets to shape them, and through what means. Most recently, my research has begun to explore the epistemic dimension of such questions

On the one hand this has involved studying the role of civil society and NGOs and the role non-state actors play in policymaking, both in the design and implementation of policies. My first book, Civil Society and Europeanisation(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and later Neoliberalism and the Voluntary and Community Sector (with Ciaran Hughes, Policy Press, 2021), both grew out of working in very different contexts (Turkey and Northern Ireland) while asking similar questions about the ways state and donor funding shape the role of non-state actors. What role do NGOs play in how policy problems are framed, and when do they act as countervailing forces to the state, if at all? When do NGOs provide a genuine alternative to business-as-usual, and can this happen without

On the other hand, my approach to this has been methodological. I am interested in the multiple uses of language in policymaking, from how issues are framed to the role of storytelling in policymaking. I am particularly interested in narratives and stories as sense-making devises, and how we use stories to make sense of the complex web of events happening around us. Narratives not only convey meaning but provide the listener with a way of seeing issues and noticing implications of events that require further (policy) action. Interpretive and discourse-based methods let me ask how actors construct the stories that make certain policies feel necessary and others unthinkable. I've had chances to explore this in relation to education policy, environmental populism, rivers.

In my most recent work I have had a chance to explore these themes together. I work on forest policy, and in particular on community ownership of woodlands and how this can lead towards genuine alternatives to the business-as-usual anthropocentric perspectives to policymaking. Can community ownership, and local communities grappling with the tensions of reaching both social and ecological goals simultaneously through woodland management practices, offer examples of how we start to move past the epistemic barriers the prevent us from seeing the common needs between the social and natural worlds?

From 2015 to 2022 he served as a member of the Social Policy Association's Executive Committee. From 2019 until 2022 he was the Honorary Secretary of the SPA. He is a co-editor of the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy. 

If you are interested in being supervised by Markus Ketola, please see the links below (open in new windows) for more information:

• PhD in Social Policy
• MSc (R) Social Policy