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Article
Publication date: 14 August 2023

Maj Nygaard-Christensen and Esben Houborg

This paper aims to examine policy innovation among street-level bureaucrats at low-threshold services to people who use drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark.

133

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine policy innovation among street-level bureaucrats at low-threshold services to people who use drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper builds on two research projects conducted during the first pandemic lockdown in Denmark. The first is a case study of how COVID-19 impacted on people who use drugs (PWUD) and services for PWUD at the open drug scene in the neighborhood of Vesterbro in Copenhagen. The second is an ethnographic study of how users of services at the intersection of drug use and homelessness were impacted by lockdown.

Findings

Drawing on Kingdon’s “multiple policy streams” approach, this study shows how lockdown opened a “policy window” for innovating services to people who use drugs. This paper further shows how the pandemic crisis afforded street-level bureaucrats new possibilities for acting as “policy entrepreneurs” in a context where vertical bureaucratic barriers and horizontal cross-sectoral silos temporarily collapsed. Finally, the authors show how this had more lasting effects through the initiation of outreach opioid substitution treatment.

Social implications

In Denmark, the emergence of a “policy window” for street-level bureaucrats to act as street-level “entrepreneurs” occurred in a context of rapid government response to the pandemic. For crises to act as “policy windows” for innovation depends on strong, preexisting institutional landscapes.

Originality/value

This paper adds to existing literature on policy innovation during COVID-19 in two ways: methodologically by contributing an ethnographically grounded approach to studying policy innovation and theoretically by examining the conditions that allowed policy innovation to occur.

Details

Drugs, Habits and Social Policy, vol. 24 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2752-6739

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 9 February 2022

Maj Nygaard-Christensen and Bagga Bjerge

The authors investigate two contrasting, yet mutually constitutive strategies for regulating open drug scenes in the city of Aarhus, Denmark: A strategy of dispersing marginalized…

314

Abstract

Purpose

The authors investigate two contrasting, yet mutually constitutive strategies for regulating open drug scenes in the city of Aarhus, Denmark: A strategy of dispersing marginalized substance users from the inner city, and a simultaneous strategy of inclusion in a new, gentrifying neighbourhood.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors apply a multi-temporal ethnography approach, including data from studies dating back to 2002. This enables us to scrutinize reconfigurations of processes of exclusion and inclusion in urban city life based on studies that in different ways feed into the broader picture of how socially marginalized citizens are included and excluded in urban space.

Findings

The municipality of Aarhus sways between strategies of dispersion and exclusion and those of inclusion of marginalized citizens. Taken together, these strategies constitute a “messy middle ground” (May and Cloke, 2014) in responses to the street people rather than either clear-cut punitive or supportive strategies. Finally, we point to the limit of inclusion in more recent strategies aimed at including marginalized citizens in urban planning of a new, gentrifying neighbourhood.

Originality/value

The article builds on studies that in critical engagement with the dominating focus on punitive or revanchist approaches to regulation of homeless citizens' presence in urban space have shown how such regulating practices are rarely punishing alone. We contribute to this literature by showing how seemingly contradictory attempts to exclude, disperse and include socially marginalized citizens in different urban settings are relational rather than in outright opposition. In continuation of this, we show how dispersal strategies both depend on and are legitimized by the promotion of alternative and more inclusive settings elsewhere.

Details

Journal of Organizational Ethnography, vol. 11 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2046-6749

Keywords

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Article
Publication date: 4 April 2022

Bagga Bjerge and Jonas Strandholdt Bach

325

Abstract

Details

Journal of Organizational Ethnography, vol. 11 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2046-6749

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