Public-private partnerships and contracted delivery arrangements for public services are ubiquitous across developed economies and yet their performance and value are increasingly questioned. High-profile failures, inefficiencies, and scandals - from the collapse of Carillion to the recent Post Office horror - highlight the need for new public contracting practices. Traditional contracting methods, focused on simple, adversarial transactions and short-term goals, are ill-equipped to address the complex, interconnected challenges faced by society, and thus fail service users, commissioners and taxpayers. This Future Leaders Fellowship Renewal advances a new form of public-private partnership that is accountable to citizens, adaptive to volatile conditions and social challenges, and purposeful in the way partners overcome barriers together. The Fellowship and Renewal pursue three objectives: 1. Advance pioneering scholarship that responds to the limited availability of cross-disciplinary studies to offer insights on alternative public contracting models. This is evidenced by high impact journal publications and a forthcoming monograph with Oxford University Press. The Fellow seeks to overcome limitations in comparative analysis by nurturing a data collaborative and pioneering open shared datasets. 2. Build bridges to impact with policymakers in central government, and practice-leads in local government by improving public service stewardship and complex contracting practice. The Fellow is recognised as one of Apolitical's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government and has presented work at Number 10 Downing Street to the Prime Minister's Policy Team. The Renewal seeks to overcome technical and cultural barriers to new forms of public contracting by advancing an executive education programme: 'Leading Cross-Sector Partnerships'. This is being piloted with 15 senior civil servants in 2024. This executive programme has the potential to sensitise officials to contracting approaches that move beyond the status quo and cultivate communities of practice. 3. Champion bold, problem-focused and discipline-spanning scholarly leadership at the intersection of complex market stewardship, contracting and frontline practice. The Fellow serves as co-Director of the Government Outcomes Lab and aims to influence both academic and policy realms bringing about outstanding research but also ensuring that this supports innovation in complex public service arrangements. The Renewal brings the opportunity to extend the Fellow's already vibrant publication record and emergent scholarly leadership. The Fellow has secured additional research grants yet these are narrow and fragmented. The Renewal brings the longevity and flexibility needed to braid together intellectual developments and invest in developing skills to manage a larger research centre. The host institution - the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford - offers strong and substantive endorsement of the Fellowship. Here Dr Carter and her current team at the Government Outcomes Lab are expected to be vital to the School's hub of expertise in public service excellence.

The use of market-inspired instruments for steering public service delivery has become ubiquitous across developed economies and yet the experience with contracting for complex services suggests that we are still in the steep portion of the learning curve on how to do this well. Under such approaches there are pervasive risks of wholesale market failure (as seen in the case of Carillion) as well as market malfunctioning, experienced in the repeatedly poor performance of more complex, cross-cutting public service delivery. The primary government response to this outsourcing dilemma acknowledges that large amounts of tax-payers' money will continue to be channelled through private sector and voluntary sector providers and offers recommendations for tightening up market stewardship and contract terms. This return - to what has elsewhere been described as a "byzantine tower of rules and regulations" (Brown et al., 2018, p. 740) - fails to connect with the latest empirical contracting practice from the private sector (as illustrated through emergent 'formal relational contracting' practice) or from smaller local experiments with networked governance arrangements (for example, City Region-level coordination via integration boards with prime 'outcome' contracts (Whitworth & Carter, 2018) and local authorities' use of social impact bonds). This Fellowship seeks to deploy a novel selection of research methods to identify and inform alternative governance and contracting practices that may be deployed to more effectively and efficiently coordinate service provision. The proposed project aims to investigate alternative commissioning approaches available when there is an ambition to foster collaboration and collective accountability across an interwoven network of provider organisations. The animating research question asks: How can government better steward complex networks of service provision to more holistically and better support citizens with complex lives and who currently interact with a range of public service actors? Crucially, the way the quasi-market and contracts are structured will have important implications for attuning the attentiveness of service providers to the priorities of either the state, service users, or providers themselves. This in turn is expected to have important implications for the quantity, cost, quality, distribution and cohesiveness of services and consequently on the lived experience and 'outcomes' of citizens engaged in social programmes. This ambitious, discipline-spanning Fellowship proposal seeks to entwine theoretical developments at the interface of public administration, applied economics and social policy, with empirical work facilitated through collaboration with two British central Government departments. Partnership with the Department for Work and Pensions and the Government Inclusive Economy Unit within the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport will elevate research impact and substantively enhance our understanding of the key mechanisms for successful public service contracting and stewardship. The planned Fellowship brings the opportunity to extend the applicant's already vibrant publication record and emergent scholarly leadership. The host institution - the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford - offers strong and substantive endorsement of the Fellowship. Here Dr Carter and her current team at the Government Outcomes Lab are expected to be vital to the School's future hub of expertise in public service excellence. Crucially, the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship brings the opportunity for Dr Carter to carve time to further develop an independent academic identity. The duration and explicit emphasis on the development of leadership potential make this Fellowship the ideal scheme for Dr Carter to bolster the intellectual underpinning of this emergent field at the intersection of social policy and public management.

Climate change, a multifaceted challenge interwoven with social, economic, and environmental dimensions, defies simplistic solutions. Despite global efforts, the pursuit of sustainability has fallen short, hindered by a narrow technical focus. This limited perspective has impeded the development of integrated, context-specific solutions. In response, AGREE champions transformative sustainability, emphasising interdisciplinary methodologies and societal shifts. It explores the intricate link between cultural heritage governance, climate adaptation, and community resilience, rooted in responses to flooding in urban contexts. AGREE promotes the Historic Urban Landscape concept for integrative decision-making in climate adaptation, considering community resilience amidst environmental changes. An interactive Geographic Information System (GIS) platform will illuminate this interplay over time. An innovative AGREE's contribution is a decision-making model grounded in the HUL paradigm. This model juxtaposes current national and local policies enabling cultural heritage integration in climate adaptation with historical data sources revealing urban resilience lessons and changes in the built environment over time. AGREE employs transformative governance concepts to evaluate decision-makers' comprehension of these synergies and their perspectives. It advances transformative climate adaptation by uncovering potentials and barriers within heritage governance in case studies from the UK, Norway, and Italy. Beyond research, AGREE will shape policies with multi-scalar and cross-sectoral governance, interpreting climate intricacies through cultural heritage. It will strengthen global, national, and local heritage-focused climate strategies through partnerships with the British Council, ICCROM, and the UK's Department for Culture, Media, and Sport and local stakeholders, such as Hull City Council (UK) and Innlandet Region (Norway). AGREE also engages the public, raising climate adaptation awareness and mobilising collective action, benefiting governmental climate efforts.

This project will be the first to develop a theorisation of care in the cultural industries by holistically considering the interrelations between production, participation and policy in the UK's reality television (RTV) sector. RTV is a significant and highly controversial site of media production that has rapidly expanded over the last two decades with an increasing share of the UK's £1.48bn global TV export market. High profile concerns around mental health risks have led to changes to Ofcom's Broadcasting Code around improved welfare for participants, whilst broadcasters increasingly understand a need for the continued evolution of care practices across the sector. Most policy and industry initiatives have thus far focused on risk management around mental health concerns for individual participants, without any interrogation of the broader contexts of cultural labour and working practices. This project will use a cultural industries approach (Hesmondhalgh 2019) to investigate how care is understood and experienced across reality television by asking four overarching research questions: 1. Production. How is care understood, mediated and practiced by different workers across reality television production? 2. Participation. How should the working experiences of participants inform our understanding of care in RTV? 3. Policy. How is care understood, inscribed and implemented in policy and industry decision-making? 4. Care. How can the analysis of care be incorporated into theorisations of cultural labour in the creative industries? A large programme of qualitative empirical research across four work packages will include policy analysis, media tracking, and qualitative interviews with a diverse range of key stakeholders. The research will centre the previously overlooked experiences of production workers and non-professional participants alongside contemporary policy debates and public concerns around duties of care. The findings will be synthesized and analysed using a feminist theoretical model of care (Tronto 2013, Held 2006) to develop new insights into the interrelationships at work across RTV's media ecology in the UK. Our investigation into how care is mediated and practiced within cultural production will have wide application across academic scholarship and the creative industries. The project will work with the co-operation of all the UK Public Service Broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Viacom/Channel 5 and Channel 4) and three key project partners. We will be partnering with BECTU, the media and entertainment workers' union, in order to understand how care is implemented in production, which will inform the creation of a report and training materials. We will be partnering with Equity, the trade union for creative practitioners, to listen to participants' voices, understand their needs, and to consider whether and how they can be formally recognised as cultural workers. This will lead to the production of a video for would-be participants which informs them of their rights and helps them to negotiate the complex terrain of RTV production. We will be partnering with the DCMS select committee to integrate findings from production, participation and policy, both to consider the current protections in place and to propose future policy recommendations. In order to generate a dialogue between our analysis of working practices and concerns around mental health, we will consult with the Chair of the British Psychological Society's Media Advisory Board (Prof John Oates) to understand how our findings can support developments around mental health protections, which will also inform our report to the DCMS select committee. The empirical knowledge produced by this project has transformative potential for re-conceiving care in RTV production, whilst the new theoretical framework, derived from careful empirical analysis, will offer a far-reaching academic agenda for care in the creative industries more widely.

Coventry UK City of Culture 2021 is a year-long programme of cultural activities and participation. It is being delivered in a partnership between the City of Culture Trust, Coventry and Warwick Universities, and Coventry City Council. UK Cities of Culture are held every four years, the last one was Hull in 2017. What is argued as different about Coventry's year is how it is targeting its activity especially to, first, increase long-term cultural participation in the city and, second, in the belief that such cultural participation can deliver longer term social, economic and environmental benefits to the city. It is argued that the year is a 'city change model', through culture targeted at residents and citizens throughout the city. Activities are much more community-based around the city than the usual big city centre-based spectaculars. Residents are co-creating their ideas of culture and participating in all sorts of local activities in community centres, pubs, clubs, parks and streets - even a graveyard - as well the usual theatres, galleries and other venues. Given the scale, scope and nature of this 'mega-event', there is great interest as to whether Coventry's version of culture-led social and economic development will achieve the benefits and changes for the city it is seeking. Will it become a model of culture-led social and economic development? Led by the two universities, a very large range of research and evaluation studies and quantitative and qualitative data collection has been put in place to research what has happened. Much of this research is innovative in how it will collect evidence and the types of evidence it will use to see if Coventry City of Culture 2021 has made a (lasting) difference to the city. There is much interest across towns, cities and regions as to the experience of Coventry, its research and the evidence it has found - because many places are very interested in culture as a way of regenerating and/or growing their local places as places where residents and people can happily work, rest and play. One example is that twenty places across the UK have submitted Expressions of Interest to be the next City of Culture in 2025. This project will support all this research material on City of Culture 2021 to be engaged with, understood and discussed. A programme of engagement activity is targeted at those organisations and people who bid for and or spend public money on places. Both locally, like Coventry City Council and partners in the city interested in culture but, also, places around the country such as the City of Culture 2025 bidders. The aim is for them to use the new knowledge from the research on culture-led development in their plans and bids for spending on their places. These organisations have been involved in planning a range of knowledge exchange activities for the project which include activities like their own Knowledge Exchange Champions, Lightning Talks, Demonstration Events, Knowledge Cafes/Sandpits, and the facility to ask specific questions of researchers. Led by Coventry University in partnership with the University of Warwick, the project will employ a specialist Knowledge Exchange Officer for 2021 - 2022 with a budget to support this range of activities with local and regional partners such as Coventry City Council, Culture Change Coventry and the City of Culture Trust.