In this issue

Citation

Frank, V.A., Bjerge, B., Duke, K., Klein, A. and Stothard, B. (2015), "In this issue", Drugs and Alcohol Today, Vol. 15 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/DAT-10-2015-0061

In this issue

Article Type: In this issue From: Drugs and Alcohol Today, Volume 15, Issue 4.

Research on stakeholders and policy analysis are displayed in different ways in the five articles in this issue. Ritter describes how researchers, especially due to an evidence-based policy paradigm, have become knowledge brokers in policy processes who are active in shaping solutions and the ways in which a given problem comes to be understood. The aim of the paper is to investigate how this kind of knowledge intersects with other voices in policy processes for instance “ordinary” citizens. By outlining four analytical perspectives on policy processes, Ritter points to how careful researchers as experts have to be with the ways in which they set up and constitute their ways of understanding a given problem and how this actively constitute policies. To illustrate how these perspectives can provide us with a clearer understanding of the complexities of policy processes, Ritter examines a case of policy responses to alcohol-related violence in Sydney, Australia. Further, the paper argues for the importance of reflecting on ways to incorporate the voices of “ordinary” citizens to ensure that policy processes are also democratic processes. Experts and non-experts should be working together as collaborators, or at least where “ordinary” citizens' knowledge is taken seriously in policy processes concerning the common, societal interest such as, e.g. drug and alcohol problems.

In the next paper, drawing on the advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1999) and Weiss' model of the research-policy relationship (Weiss, 1999), Rossow and Baklien's paper explores the ways in which two distinct advocacy coalitions used research in local alcohol policy-making processes around the issue of on-premise trading hours in Norway – an area which has been the subject of constant policy change, political debate and media attention. Through an analysis of city council documents, newspaper articles and broadcast interviews, two advocacy coalitions were identified. The restriction coalition, made up of mainly politicians from the Christian Democratic party, police and representatives of the temperance movement, favoured restricted trading hours on the basis of social responsibility and concerns regarding public health and safety issues. On the other hand, the liberal coalition, made up mainly of hospitality industry stakeholders and politicians from the Conservative party and the Progress party, favoured extended hours on the basis of liberal values such as individual freedom to choose when pubs and bars were open and the economic interests of the hospitality industry. The two coalitions employed research findings from two published studies in different ways to support their pre-existing points of views and arguments and were not receptive to new evidence that challenged their core beliefs. The restrictive coalition promoted findings that demonstrated the health and safety benefits of restricting trading hours, while the liberal coalition highlighted evidence that indicated negative effects on the hospitality industry. The authors argue that the use of research was facilitated by the timing of its publication which coincided neatly with the policy-making cycle and heightened media attention. The paper provides important insights into how specific research findings played key roles in the local debates and decision making around alcohol availability in Norway, the political use of research by distinct advocacy coalitions with particular sets of values and beliefs and the facilitating factors that aided the use of research findings.

In the paper “Heroin assisted treatment and research networks” Houborg and Andersen investigate how epistemic or knowledge communities at the supra-national level acquire an authoritative voice when debating the “evidence” around heroin-assisted treatment (HAT). They map out 11 different epistemic or knowledge communities and describe what kind of knowledge each of these communities produce. In order to see how and which epistemic communities were producing knowledge on HAT, the authors adopt a social network analysis by looking for co-authorship on the topic in Web of Science. They identified 20 central researchers or “seed authors”, who represent their starting points for mapping out these 11 networks. In order to measure the importance of these networks the data are analysed in different ways. First, as “simple” relations between co-authors, meaning who has written with whom. Second, as “weighted relationships” between co-authors, meaning how often has one author written with other co-authors. And, third, as “betweenness centrality”, meaning how central an author is to the collaborative networks. While the first two ways of analysing the data were almost identical in results, the third one uncovered several new actors in central positions. The paper provides important insights into what kind of knowledge becomes “evidence”. While the authors were expecting treatment intervention and clinical methods to be dominating treatment research, the absence of the social sciences in HAT research came as a surprise. The value of this research approach is precisely in demonstrating what kind of knowledge comes to be used as “evidence” in policy processes and decision making.

The paper by Bjerge, Duke and Frank take as the only paper in this issue a comparative approach. It compares how the medical professions have played an important role as stakeholders in both Denmark and the UK in relation to opioid substation treatment (OST) policies, however, in very different ways. Their idea is to explore the different spaces that a stakeholder group – here medical professionals – occupy in policy processes. Both countries have a long history of providing opioid substitution treatment to drug users. But their being different kinds of welfare states – Denmark described as “social-democratic” and the UK as “liberal” – has also opened very different policy spaces for medical professionals to navigate in. Based on qualitative interviews with key-informants and policy document analyses in both countries, the paper starts out with a brief history of medical stakeholders in the two countries. This shows how different drug use has been defined as a problem, how different solutions to the problem has been implemented, even though both countries have adopted OST as an important solution. But the way OST has been implemented differently has constructed different kinds of spaces for stakeholders to operate within. An important difference is that medical stakeholders in Denmark have gain more and more significance, and there is a trend towards what the authors call a “medicalisation” of OST and change towards defining drug use as a health problem rather than a social problem, while in the UK medical professionals historically always have played an important role, but lately have been challenged by the recovery (abstinent oriented) movement in the UK. With its comparative perspective the paper takes up a very important issue in both stakeholder analysis and policy research. Too few studies are comparative in scope, but by applying this – also rather difficult – task to the paper, we gain insight into how different ways of defining, conceptualizing and problematizing drug use and treatment leads to the development of different kinds of spaces that stakeholders can occupy in policy processes.

The last paper is a description and a discussion of the Danish SSP-model, which is a network of schools, social services and the police applying a cross-disciplinary approach to prevention work with young people, including drug and alcohol use. The SSP-model is, apart from similar networks in Norway, a unique Danish construction. The paper describes the origins of SSP dating back to concerns about youth crime in the 1970s as well as its adaptation by local authorities and the present status and challenges of SSP in Danish society. In the discussion, the paper draws on international experiences of official responses to prevention and young people. Further, the paper discusses questions of who is regarded as responsible for the behaviours of youth in different social policies in the USA and Europe. That is, the state or the individual?

Vibeke Asmussen Frank, Bagga Bjerge, Karen Duke, Axel Klein and Blaine Stothard

References

Sabatier, P.A. and Jenkins-Smith, H.C. (1999), “The advocacy coalition. An assessment”, in Sabatier, P.A. (Ed.), Theories of the Policy Process, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, pp. 117-65

Weiss, C.H. (1999), “The interface between evaluation and public policy”, Evaluation, Vol. 5 No. 4, pp. 468-86