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This article examines New Labour's approach to joined-up government within UK urban policy. In particular, it analyses the government's success in achieving greater degrees of integration in urban governance. It suggests that the growth in the number of multi-sectoral partnership schemes and area-based urban policies under Labour produced tensions with key elements of its joined-up government agenda. The article examines the rationale underpinning the government's approach to 'joined-up governance' and explores the processes by which the government sought to encourage the reorganization of urban governance through the institutional development of strategic and single-purpose partnership bodies. It also highlights the effects of these processes on the ground through an examination of developments in the city of Sheffield. It explores changes in the structure of urban governance in the city in response to national restructuring and local agendas, highlighting the importance of local leadership in providing coherence to urban governance and indicates some democratic tensions that have arisen.

This paper examines how key differences in the very manner in which the environment/welfare nexus is experienced and understood in both the global North and the global South are managed in favour of the former over the latter. We show how in the case of the global North — the more affluent world, such as Britain — environmental issues have been usually construed as post-materialist and/or post-industrialist. We argue that predominantly Northern-based post-materialists see environmental welfare (largely through the rhetoric of sustainable development and ecological modernization) as either something separate from humans (for the welfare of the 'rest of nature') or for the welfare of unborn, future generations. We use the concept of the 'post-political' to interpret how the global North dominates debates on the environment and how it can be quite dismissive, and even negligent, of welfare issues in the global South. In the case of the majority world, green welfare policy agendas are littered with the consequences of environmental devastation incurred through centuries of Northern oppression and resource exploitation. In the global South green welfare goals concentrate on the alleviation of those more basic needs of survival — provision of shelter, water availability, air quality, food sovereignty, and energy security — for those humans actually living on the planet; rather than those who may at some time in the future. In short, issues of environmental debt are writ large, rather than those of an imagined environmental future.

This article considers the role of ideas in New Labour's approach to the governance of urban regeneration and characterizes this approach as 'embryonic associationalism'. This approach contrasts with the economic rationalism of previous Conservative governments and leads to a more determined effort to empower local community groups within the policy process. We analyse the effects of this shift in approach in practice through a comparative case study of changing patterns of governance in different areas of the English city of Sheffield over a ten‐year period. We conclude that while other factors are important in shaping the nature of community empowerment, New Labour's approach has promoted a political environment in which it is increasingly difficult for local state actors to ignore the voice of local communities. However, while we refer to this as 'New Labour's approach', we are clear that this relates to a tradition of ideas that is far from new in Labour thought.

The paper uses a case study of urban regeneration policy in Sheffield, UK, to explore local public entrepreneurship in a system of multi-level governance. Recent analyses of public entrepreneurs have directed attention to the macro-political structural and institutional conditions that enable and constrain these actors, and to their individual characteristics and attributes. The stress has been on the national level and on individual action at the expense of the agency of local networks of entrepreneurs. In order to address this lacuna, we consider how local policy entrepreneurs work across governance levels and develop ideas, institutional structures and support in pursuit of their goals, using Kingdon's notion of policy streams as a vehicle for our analysis. We highlight the contingent and path-dependent nature of such entrepreneurship. In particular, we identify the temporal sequencing of agenda shifts and entrepreneurial actions as a crucial aspect of the policy process.

Previous authors have argued that trust may be based on the extent to which risk communicators are seen as good at discriminating safety from danger, are unbiased in their assessments, and share their audience's values. Residents of two English urban regions rated their trust in six potential sources of information about the risk of contaminated land in their neighborhood (independent scientists; local council property developers; residents' groups; friends and family; local media), and how expert, open, accurate, or biased these sources were and how much they had residents' interests at heart. Overall, scientists were trusted most and developers least, but this was only partly due to their greater perceived expertise. Resident groups and friends/family were also trusted, despite being seen as relatively inexpert, since they scored highly on openness and shared interests, these latter two attributes being more important predictors of trust in individual sources than perceived expertise. We conclude that, where a source is seen as motivated to withhold, distort, or misinterpret information, this will undermine public trust even in apparently knowledgeable sources, hence supporting the view that trust depends on a combination of perceived expertise and perceived motives as complementary processes.

This paper challenges "Big Society (BS) Localism", seeing it as an example of impoverished localist thinking which neglects social justice considerations. We do this through a critical examination of recent turns in the localist discourse in the UK which emphasise self-reliant communities and envisage a diminished role for the state. We establish a heuristic distinction between positive and negative approaches to localism. We argue that the Coalition Government's BS programme fits with a negative localist frame as it starts from an ideological assumption that the state acts as a barrier to community-level associational activity and that it should play a minimal role. "BS localism" (as we call it) has been influential over the making of social policy, but it also has implications for the achievement of environmental goals. We argue that this latest incarnation of localism is largely ineffective in solving problems requiring collective action because it neglects the important role that inequalities play in inhibiting the development of associational society. Drawing upon preliminary research being undertaken at the community scale, we argue that staking environmental policy success on the ability of local civil society to fill the gap left after state retrenchment runs the risk of no activity at all.