Chapter 6 examines the development and implementation of Peru’s 2009 Universal Health Insurance (Aseguramiento Universal en Salud (AUS)) reform. Unlike other Latin American cases, Peru’s party system at the time was highly fragmented and non-programmatic – political parties lacked core values and were therefore disengaged from health policy. This void allowed technocrats, particularly those supported by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the private sector, to dominate the process. The AUS reform provided formal insurance coverage to millions but failed to specify long-term funding or infrastructure development. Debate around the reform was limited, and key decisions were made by a small group of technocrats and advisors rather than through participatory party politics. As a result, the law was poorly specified, with insufficient attention to state capacity and the practical challenges of expanding healthcare access. The reform led to dramatic increases in theoretical insurance coverage, but actually achieving access to care was hampered by resource shortages, inconsistent funding, and limited political commitment. The Peruvian experience highlights how non-programmatic party systems defer policy authority to technocrats, risking unsustainable reforms that do not deliver on their promises, particularly in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chapter 5 examines the creation and evolution of Mexico’s Seguro Popular, a health reform implemented in 2003 to expand insurance coverage for the uninsured. Despite the existence of institutionalized political parties, the legislation was driven mainly by technocrats rather than by programmatic party commitment. The National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, PAN), in power at the time, endorsed the reform but did not participate in shaping its content because it did not align with its core values. The Health Secretary and the Seguro Popular technocratic team introduced the initiative, lobbied for support, and were in charge of key decisions. The reform was passed in Congress, largely because it promised increased resources to state governments, rather than due to ideological consensus. Its implementation met with significant challenges. Coverage increased, but funding and infrastructure lagged, limiting access to services. Political parties failed to ensure sustainable funding and robust oversight. The reform ultimately struggled with insufficient programmatic commitment from PAN, PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; Institutional Revolutionary Party), and PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática; Party of the Democratic Revolution), which undermined the quality of the legislation and its long-term success. Seguro Popular was replaced in 2020, and its end reflected both partisan competition and the original lack of cross-party support and detailed policy design.

Chapter 3 presents a comparative analysis of the healthcare reforms in Chile, Mexico, and Peru during the 2000s. It focuses on whether political parties or technocrats shaped the legislative and implementation process. The core argument is that reforms closely aligned with political parties’ core values (programmatic commitment) resulted in higher-quality policy, better funding, and more effective, sustainable access to healthcare. Chile’s AUGE (Acceso Universal con Garantías Explícitas; Universal Access with Explicit Guarantees) reform exemplifies a programmatic path: parties were directly engaged in agenda-setting, debate, and implementation, leading to policy endurance and real improvements in coverage, funding, and infrastructure. In contrast, Mexico’s Seguro Popular (Popular Insurance) and Peru’s AUS (Aseguramiento Universal en Salud; Universal Health Insurance) followed a technocratic path, with disengaged parties and reforms dominated by technocrats. These reforms achieved expanded formal coverage but suffered from unstable funding, inadequate infrastructure, and an inability to deliver on the promise of effective access. The study finds that other factors – such as economic growth, state capacity, clientelism, or federalism – do not, by themselves, explain the variation in reform quality. Only genuine party commitment to the reform’s core values ensured its success and longevity. The chapter underscores the importance of aligning party values with social policy to achieve meaningful, lasting reform outcomes in Latin America.

Chapter 4 examines the policymaking process behind Chile’s AUGE healthcare reform, enacted in 2004. Driven by the center-left Concertación coalition, the reform aimed to expand equitable access to healthcare by providing explicit guarantees for prioritized diseases. The Chilean parties’ strong programmatic commitments were central, ensuring cohesion from agenda-setting through implementation. Political debates focused on balancing public and private sector roles, sustainable funding, and gradual expansion of coverage. Internal disagreements on strategy existed, yet the coalition’s programmatic nature enabled compromise and long-term planning. The reform introduced new regulatory institutions, increased public funding, and improved infrastructure and human resources. Opposition came from right-wing parties, private insurers, and medical groups, but political leadership and consensus-building allowed the reform to pass and be sustained under subsequent governments. Ultimately, AUGE expanded insurance coverage, reduced unmet healthcare needs, and demonstrated how programmatic party commitment shapes effective and sustainable social policy.

This chapter provides a summary of the book’s main findings, followed by a discussion of its theoretical and practical implications. It concludes that political parties’ programmatic commitments are crucial to the success and quality of healthcare reforms in Latin America. When parties have core values directly linked to healthcare, they actively shape reforms, ensuring sustainable funding, robust infrastructure, and better implementation – as demonstrated by Chile’s AUGE reform. In contrast, when political parties lack strong core values or have no programmatic commitment, technocrats lead reforms, as seen in Mexico and Peru, resulting in policies with unstable funding and less effective access to care. The chapter stresses that being a programmatic party alone is not sufficient; what matters is whether a party’s core values align with the policy issue at hand. The chapter also highlights potential paths for future research in healthcare and other social policies, arguing that the involvement, values, and commitment of political parties are crucial for sustainable policy design and implementation. Ultimately, strong party commitment leads to more successful and lasting reforms, while weakly committed or absent parties result in less effective policies.

This chapter concludes the book by exploring options and opportunities for readers to implement, investigate and evaluate the ideas and suggestions for translanguaging in ELT presented in this book. It identifies an important difference between research-in-practice and research-on-practice and discusses how, predominantly through a research-in-practice approach, teachers can conduct both informal and formal inquiry into the appropriacy and effectiveness of approaches, methods and activities in their own classroom. It explores a number of feasible ideas for busy teachers, including journalling, self-observation, learner focus groups, buddy observations, learner reflective writing, exploratory practice, action research and matched pairs research. The chapter concludes with recommendations for possible first steps for teachers who are new to translanguaging pedagogy.

The concept of environmental rule of law plays a pivotal role in enhancing the effectiveness of environmental governance by integrating principles of the rule of law into environmental legislation with a nuanced application. Emerging from the recognition of the distinctiveness of environmental law and the stark implementation gap, it seeks to move environmental laws beyond mere legislation to their effective implementation, compliance, and enforcement. Formally acknowledged within the UN system in 2013, the roots of the principles of the rule of law, albeit sporadic, trace back to the 1970s within the realm of environmental law. Gradually, the concept has significantly evolved, gaining global prominence, institutionalization, and ultimately becoming a fundamental guiding pillar in the 2019 Fifth Montevideo Programme for the Development and Periodic Review of Environmental Law. This chapter chronicles the evolution of the concept, delineating its journey from scattered elements to a robust holistic framework. Cognizant that the concept continues to evolve, the chapter underscores critical issues that demand further research to maximize the benefits of the environmental rule of law.

Our task was not helped by the fact that the civil service had been prevented by the Cameron government from making any preparations for a leave vote. In fact, the civil service and No. 10 generally were still in a state of shock. The only real European policy experts all came from the ‘Remain’ side of the fence. While their professionalism was not in doubt, it was clearly going to be a huge task for them to pivot to embrace the new reality of the UK’s changed status with the EU. It wasn’t long before the UK’s long-serving Ambassador to the EU, Ivan Rogers, was moved on. His expertise was never in question, but in the weekly meetings with the Prime Minister in her study behind the Cabinet Room, he barely sought to disguise his dismay at the UK’s decision. Treating Brexit as a problem to be managed rather than an opportunity to be seized was never going to go down well with the Brexiteers still drunk on their own success. What Ivan saw as pragmatism, the Brexiteers saw as pessimism. He quickly became public enemy number one and was swiftly replaced.

The promise to hold a referendum on EU membership looked like politicking to the top of the German government. By the end of 2012 debate about the UK’s future in Europe was cresting. But, as often happens, the moment of peak interest passed. At the start of 2013, however, Cameron resurrected the topic. Merkel was bemused, and then nettled when it seemed that the speech to launch the referendum idea would clash with celebrations in Berlin to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Élysée Treaty. No. 10 responded to German lobbying: the speech was delivered at breakfast time on 23 January in Bloomberg’s offices in the City of London, German and French legislators having gathered in the Reichstag building the day before. The speech was twenty minutes of Euro-boilerplate followed by five minutes that grabbed the headlines. Cameron was confident that the referendum could be won; confidence that was so pronounced that the Chancellery wondered why the referendum was necessary. It seemed to Merkel’s advisers that the Prime Minister had created a bargaining chip to discard in coalition negotiations with the Lib Dems after the next general election.

Perhaps the greatest turning point for Parliamentary involvement in the Brexit process was the 2017 general election. Having won an unlikely majority in 2015, Cameron bequeathed to May a relatively functional dynamic in Parliament. But, tempted by artificial sentiment in polling, May and her team decided to call the 2017 election in an attempt to secure a greater popular mandate for her administration. That decision was fatal. The prior polling was erroneous, or at the very least misread the public appetite for an election, and the campaign May ran was self-defeating. The loss of the Conservative majority at the election left May in the treacherous position of needing a confidence and supply deal with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Even in normal times, the instability of such an arrangement creates complications and often disaster for the ruling party. When you add in the unique circumstances of Brexit, plus the fact that the Northern Irish questions in Brexit were the most difficult and contentious elements of the negotiations, May’s dependence on the DUP was fatal.

This chapter focuses on implementing organizational design through a structured, dynamic, project-based approach. Using the policy deployment model, it outlines how to define change tasks, assign responsibilities, set milestones, and ensure progress via feedback and follow-up. Implementation is not a one-time event but must integrate with ongoing operations. A time-aware, information-processing perspective helps balance change with daily work, using critical events and capacity to guide timing. The model applies across various organizational types, including agile, hybrid, and decentralized forms, all requiring clarity on roles and timing. The drill-down and policy deployment logic offer a flexible yet structured path to support coherent, adaptive, and sustainable transformation.

Exploring the use of our methods has highlighted the importance of defining the boundaries of the system being studied and attending to features of underlying systems that afford causal processes. We note that our limited application of our methods cannot confirm that all the implementation actions were necessary, though our examination of L shows how this might be shown by broader study. We note that, while our methods may seem daunting, they’re no more detailed than statistical methods used in quantitative research and have practical advantages in supplying more detailed qualitative evaluations. They may also be used for ex ante appraisal. We stress the importance of understanding mechanisms in practical research and note that actual research involves back-and-forth between evidence and theories of change, even though we detail the former first in our evaluation. We note the value of such evaluations in combatting problems such as, relevantly, costly failed reforms.

As a further example of our approach, we offer a detailed post-hoc case study of the implementation of the Signs of Safety practice approach in child protection. This is chosen because it has been deployed in multiple places but evidence suggests it is often only partially implemented. Our case study is of a child protection agency M which evidence shows achieved a high standard of implementation. In this case study we had a rich evidence base to work with, both of background research on child protection implementations able to provide evidence from afar of systemic factors that might be causally important and of local evidence available from extensive contemporaneous documentation in M. Our method helps to illustrate and explain the range of changes needed to support Signs of Safety as the organisational practice approach in M.