This chapter examines how growing policy portfolios and administrative burdens affect environmental and social policy implementation in Denmark. Despite Denmark’s relatively modest overall policy growth, local environmental authorities face increasing overload, resorting to policy triage where tasks are postponed or selectively neglected. By contrast, central environmental agencies—the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, Nature Agency, and Energy Agency — experience similar expansions in policy tasks but display minimal triage due to greater resource mobilization opportunities and a strong sense of policy ownership. In social policy, national agencies likewise show no triage despite decentralized responsibilities for unemployment and welfare programs. Notably, municipal job centers also avoid triage despite rising task complexity, leveraging clear political attention, central–local consultation, and reimbursement schemes that encourage sufficient funding. Taken together, these findings underscore that policy expansion does not uniformly result in triage. Instead, blame-attribution structures, resource mobilization channels, and organizational commitment determine whether implementers can compensate for chronic overload.

This chapter examines how elite women used writing to establish expertise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on Beatrice Webb (1858–1943). It considers the early work as a social investigator that she undertook before marrying the prominent Fabian socialist Sidney Webb. The Webbs’ co-authored political writings are well-studied by historians, and Beatrice’s diaries and autobiography interest feminist scholars – this chapter combines these perspectives. It explores how Beatrice sought public recognition through writing, analysing her choice of topics, styles, and intended audiences. It also considers paths she avoided, shaped by the constraints of a woman writing on traditionally ‘masculine’ issues. Beatrice’s personal archive, particularly her diary, reveals her pursuit of influence and expertise on social and economic matters, from low wages to state welfare reform. Her approach highlights the challenges female authors faced when entering male-dominated genres like political economy. A final section discusses her autobiography, My Apprenticeship (1926), which became an authoritative account of the Victorian era. This work deepens our understanding of how Beatrice’s identity evolved as a writer and illustrates the complex relationship between gender, authorship, and expertise in political writing.

This conversation draws on an online discussion involving Brazilian Indigenous hip-hop artists Bruno Veron and Kelvin Peixoto, of the Brô MC’s duo, and Kunumi MC (a.k.a. Owerá). The Brazilian rap movement began in São Paulo in late 1980s, led by Black performers and activists, among them DJ Thaide and Racionais MC’s. As in other countries, Brazilian rap and hip-hop are mostly urban. Racionais MC’s focus on youth life in the peripheral areas of urban São Paulo, featuring topics such as racism, social inequality and drug violence. These themes held clear appeal for Indigenous peoples confronting racism, displacement and violence in Brazil. Performing in a combination of Guarani and Portuguese, Brô MC’s emerged in 2009 as the first Indigenous rap and hip-hop group, speaking to the violence and racism against Indigenous peoples that are particularly intense in the region they come from, Mato Grosso do Sul.

Chapter 3 discusses Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “philosophical draft” The Closed Commercial State (1800) and its blueprint for a world system of centrally directed, self-sufficient national economies that abandon commercial and political connections but remain interrelated through state-supervised intellectual exchanges. I argue that although not explicitly labeled as Weltliteratur, this design of cultural cooperation among otherwise insular national states is a paradigmatic configuration of world literature that offers an alternative economy of circulation in the form of planning. After outlining the mechanisms driving intercultural circulation in this model, the chapter examines how its underlying cosmopolitan universalism morphs into patriotic cosmopolitanism (and eventually collapses into a sense of German superiority) in Fichte’s later philosophy. I also argue that this design cast a long shadow in the twentieth century as it prefigured the most potent counter-system of “capitalist world literature”, the command economy of socialist internationalism in the Soviet Republic of Letters.

The Conclusion summarises the arguments of the book and points to the anxieties that male and female family members felt about childbearing and their efforts to impose order on it. Childbearing was habitually represented as women’s work in prescriptive and personal writings. This was because this fitted with an idealised model of gendered domestic labour. However, male family members invested considerable financial, emotional and bodily energy into securing positive procreative outcomes. This was in equal parts motivated by the centrality of childbearing to male status and honour, and by its prominence in larger familial narratives about godliness and fruitfulness. The Conclusion suggests the important implications this has for history of medicine and everyday life in early modern England.

Do Black and non-Black elected officials differ in how much of their rhetorical outreach is centered on high-profile racial issues? We address this question in Chapter 4. We argue that discussions of high-profile racial topics represent a reactive form of outreach. In contrast, elected officials engage in proactive racial rhetorical representation when they discuss issues which are not politically salient. Using a combination of over 500 race-related terms and google trends data, we identify high-profile forms of racial outreach which include racial issues like voting rights and discussions of popular Black public figures like Rep. John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr, and Rosa Parks. We combine this analysis with our previously coded press releases and tweets to explore the percent of racial outreach which contains reference to a high-profile topic. We find that a smaller proportion of racial outreach from Black elected officials in press releases and on Twitter are centered on high-profile topics than racial outreach from White, Latino/a, and Asian American elected officials. We further test our hypothesis that Black elected officials will speak about lower profile topics by exploring whether discussions of police reform are greater during periods where Black Lives Matter is being searched more on google. We find that when Black Lives Matter is a high-profile topic, non-Black elected officials are more likely to speak out about police reform. The salience of Black Lives Matter in the public is a weaker predictor of these same discussions for Black elected officials. Overall, this chapter demonstrates than when Black elected officials speak about race, they are more likely to discuss topics which are not in the public eye.

Germany’s traditionally robust public administration faces escalating challenges as policy portfolios expand, complexities increase, and resource allocations lag behind. This chapter examines how federal, state, and local authorities in the environmental and social sector cope with growing implementation burdens. While Germany’s federal structure can foster high-quality governance, it also enables policymakers to shift blame across levels. Consequently, local offices and agencies with weaker political leverage are especially vulnerable to overload. In the environmental realm, tasks increasingly cascade downward, forcing local authorities — frequently short-staffed — to engage in trade-offs that compromise monitoring and enforcement. By contrast, higher level bodies like state ministries and offices can still manage most obligations, typically deferring only nonmandatory or long-term planning. The German social sector displays a slightly different scenario: The Federal Employment Agency demonstrates strong resilience, leveraging flexible resources and effective crisis management, whereas the Pension Insurance and some regional welfare agencies struggle with increasing task loads. Despite generally moderate instances of policy triage, critical support and preventive planning are often neglected, fueling organizational frustration and jeopardizing long-term governance capacity.

This conversation draws on an online discussion ‘Casa Adentro (Inside the House): Anti-Racist Art Practices’ (21 May 2021) held with the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro and the Afro-Colombian art collective Colectivo Aguaturbia. The participants explore the concerns and creative processes that reflect on the durability of racialised social orders and the way racism is manifest in various areas of the lives of Afro-descendant men and women in Colombia. The artists reflect on these issues on the basis of their anti-racist artistic practices.

This chapter explores the pronounced divide in England’s environmental and social policy implementation, painting a highly diverse picture of policy triage across organizations. The Environment Agency, initially envisaged as an integrated “one-stop shop,” now exemplifies frequent and severe triage. Chronic underfunding, staff attrition, and politically induced blame-shifting in combination with ever-increasing workloads undermine its monitoring, enforcement, and crisis-preparedness functions. In contrast, most local authorities sustain only moderate triage levels, where increasing implementations tasks are mitigated by a broader range of financing avenues and political networks. In the social sector, the Department for Work and Pensions displays striking levels of triage despite minimal formal policy growth, as unrelenting welfare reforms, departmental downsizing, and inadequate cross-agency collaboration spur severe and frequent trade-offs. Meanwhile, The Pensions Regulator remains a near-anomaly, effectively managing regulatory expansion. The English case study thus underscores how variation in blame-shifting, opportunities for resource mobilization, and organizational overload compensation can yield a highly diverse triage scenario — even within a country.