Mental Health and Sub-National Productivity: The Role of Devolution

Abstract

The primary aim of the thesis was to examine how city-region devolution in England, might enable different, innovative responses to complex policy challenges. The policy challenge taken here was mental health and productivity because there is widespread concern about the negative impact of poor mental health and concern about stalling productivity growth. These issues that are mutually re-enforcing but largely considered separately in policy context. A promise of devolution is that siloed policy can be 'joined up' locally. Greater Manchester was selected for the research as a city-region in England with recently devolved health and economic responsibilities. Network governance approaches offered a promising conceptual framework to explore what devolution might add to an already well networked city-region setting and how policy makers develop policy in a new governance setting. A small number of core propositions underpinned the key questions that guided the empirical work and a qualitative methodology based on network ethnography, involving case studies, interviews and focus groups was developed to test them. Policy making was found to be influenced by public service reform and health responsibilities, the soft power of the Mayor, local knowledge and networks, a focus on prevention and early intervention including person-centred support programmes and economic policy that included raising employment standards. Policy makers addressed complex policy challenges using story-telling and cognitive frames of systems, demonstrating consistency with both network governance and complexity accounts. City-region networks morphed into devolved government, highlighting challenges for some aspects of network governance theory when considering the state and networks as dichotomous. The thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge in two main ways. It represents the first attempt, to the author's knowledge, to view the strengths and weaknesses of English devolution policy development process through a network governance lens, hence it opens up the possibility of further comparative research, potentially focusing on other complex challenges in different times and places. And because its policy conclusions provide a challenge to critical accounts which dismiss the potential of recent reforms in England, it opens up the potential for a more positive policy debate on the future advantages of the asymmetric approach to English devolution.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Anthony Rafferty (Supervisor)