Great Policy Successes

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY NC ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Despite their many failings and the perennial political controversies that surround them, governments sometimes ‘get It right’ in a big way. We can learn much from examining when and how this occurs. In this spirit, this book tells the story of fifteen instances of highly successful government reforms, programs, and projects from around the world, including Singapore’s public health system, Copenhagen and Melbourne’s rise from stilted backwaters to the highly liveable and dynamic urban centres they are today, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia poverty relief scheme, the US’s GI Bill, and the Netherlands’ forward-looking water management strategies designed to literally preserve the low-lying country in the face of climate change and sea level rises.