Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder studied 70 public organisations in 5 countries, interviewing over a thousand people, for this book.

It shows how bottom-up driven innovation can achieve truly remarkable results - for small extra investment. Something surely of interest to the incoming British Labour Government - in fact any government.

Listen to my fascinating discussion with them - including how it does, and doesn't, mesh with Labour's "Mission Driven Government".

And buy and read the book.

William Eggers and Don Kettle's new book 'BRIDGEBUILDERS' isn't the first to address the issue of how Governments can 'catalyse' problem solving on the big issues. But it's a great updating, and refining, of the issues, methods and pitfalls of 'Bridgebuilding'. With lots of fascinating examples.

A worthy successor to 'Reinventing Government' (Osborne and Gaebler 1992) which three decades ago informed a lot of what the Clinton administration and Blair Government went on to do.

(This is the first in what I hope will be a mini-series around these issues).

The advertising for Al Roberts new book SUPERSTATES says

"In this century, the world will conduct an extraordinary experiment in government. In 2050, forty percent of the planet's population will live in just four places: India, China, the European Union, and the United States. These are superstates – polities that are distinguished from normal countries by expansiveness, population, diversity, and complexity."

In this episode of STATECRAFT Al and I discuss his latest book. What are 'superstates'? How do the different from empires? Was the USSR a superstate? All this and more in our discussion. Enjoy - I did!

SUPERSTATES is published by Polity Press

There are not many* attempts to write a full, global, history of Government since its inception 4-5 millennia ago.

Grant Duncan has written one which doesn't cover everything - but focuses instead on the ideas (and realities) of government from a more global perspective - starting with historical Chinese thought and practice.

I hope our discussions captures some of his ideas - but it's worth reading the book!

*The two biggest attempts are Samuel Finer's 'The History of Government' (3 volumes) and more recently Francis Fukuyama's two books on 'Political Order'. Grant has packed his survey into one volume.

Graeme Garrad argues that for the past 40 years some governments have tried to 'roll back the frontiers of the state'. Although they succeeded in a lot of economic areas, they were much less successful at reducing the welfare state.

Now Graeme sees the possible emergence of what he calls the "Public Interest State".

Join us for a fascinating discussion.

Graeme Garrard, THE RETURN OF THE STATE, Yale University Press, 2022.

Traditional debates in political science about states and governments have focussed on fairly abstract definitions, usually starting from Max Weber's definition of the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

Paul suggests this is clearly inadequate to discussing modern states and in any case is a simplification of what Weber actually said.

Join us for what was, for me anyway, a fascinating discussion with one of the UK's top public policy academics.

https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/states-and-welfare-states

In this short (12 min) episode I discuss how the UK Governments - plural - handled Covid. And especially how the Whitehall Government did - or mostly did not- coordinate with other tiers of Government Of which there are many more than you would think.

This is part of my project to promote serious discussion around what is known as "multi-level governance" in the UK and beyond.

This talk was given as part on an online forum called "World Wide Wednesday" organised by Mary Gregory up on Merseyside.

BUURTZORG is an innovative method for organising the delivery of human services. Starting in community nursing in the Netherlands, it has captured the majority of providing community nursing services there.

In this initial exploration, I talk to Brendan Martin about the Buurtzorg philosophy and practice.