This issue of the European Respiratory Journal (ERJ) sees the first of a new bimonthly section of articles entitled the European Lung Corner. The European Lung Corner will introduce topics of European Union (EU) affairs relevant to respiratory medicine and science. As you may or may not be aware, the European Respiratory Society (ERS) has an office in Brussels, Belgium, situated in the heart of...

Healthcare reforms aim to change certain parts of the health system to improve quality of care, access, or financial sustainability. Traditionally, healthcare reform is understood as an action undertaken by a government at a national or local level. However, bottom-up changes can also lead to improvements in the health system. This paper describes the efforts of a coordinated multi-stakeholder ...

Many countries are in the earliest stage of reforming the care sector. Reformers face challenges as they develop public policy to expand family based care and shrink institutional care. To mention a few: installing the keystone component of care reform - a system to monitor and support children post-institutionalization; enabling children to grow up where they belong, in families; meeting child...

This article develops a classificatory framework for analyzing advocacy group strategy in S&T policy domains — an area of increasing citizen activism since the 1960s. In such domains, activists may be locked out by what I call the ‘expertise barrier’, which blocks those lacking specialized knowledge from full participation. This article argues that activists’ strategies to break through the exp...

This article initiates exploratory empirical research on how civil society collective action has reacted to and affected communication–information policy (CIP), a policy domain that has been reshaped by technological and industrial change. It reviews the relevant theory on social movements, citizens groups, and interest groups from political science. Data are gathered on two dimensions of the r...

Despite a widespread conviction that children ought to be independently represented in child protection court proceedings in the United States, there is little consensus as to what the role of that independent child advocate ought to be or, indeed, who should fulfill that role. This study accomplished three purposes: articulated an aggressive, ambitious and continuous role for the child's repre...

In his perspective “Navigating between stealth advocacy and unconscious dogmatism: the challenge of researching the norms, politics and power of global health,” Ooms argues that actions taken in the field of global health are dependent not only on available resources, but on the normative premise that guides how these resources are spent. This comment sets out how the application of a predomina...

The complexities of multi-level advocacy within the EU create a number of challenges and opportunities for research. Here I focus on three issues: Advocacy, venues, and framing. Scholars investigating lobbying in the EU have made great strides and are now fully integrated into an international community of scholarship, more so than in previous decades. Being clear about the wide range of actors...