Flinders, M. orcid.org/0000-0003-3585-9010 (2024) The new politics of public inquiries. The Political Quarterly. ISSN 0032-3179
Abstract
This article argues that it is possible to identify a ‘new’ politics of public inquiries. A sizable seam of scholarship and parliamentary discussion has for at least a century bemoaned the limited independence of public inquiries. The ‘old’ politics of public inquiries has traditionally been defined by a largely internalised and administrative focus on the capacity of ministers to control the terms of reference, appoint the chair, control the resource framework, deflect findings and ignore recommendations, etc. The great value of the September 2024 report by the Statutory Inquiries Committee in the House of Lords is that a bridge can be seen to be built between the ‘old’ politics of public inquiries and a ‘new’ politics which emphasises ‘range and variation’ in the design of inquiry processes, and defines social healing and collective catharsis as core inquiry functions alongside the traditional roles of blame allocation and policy learning.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). The Political Quarterly published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Keywords: | public inquiries; policy learning; blame; agenda setting; democratic design; trust; catharsis; social healing |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 13 Dec 2024 16:39 |
Last Modified: | 13 Dec 2024 16:39 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/1467-923x.13485 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:220621 |
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