Dr Paul Bridgen

Paul Bridgen joined the Department of Sociology Social Policy and Criminology in 1998 and is an Associate Professor in Social Policy. His main interest is in comparative social policy, with a particular focus in the last three years on the challenges presented to welfare states by the environmental crisis.

My main current focus is on if and how welfare states are changing in response to the environmental crisis. What would a just socio-ecological transition look like and what evidence is there that this is occurring?

Paul is a member of the Social Policy Association’s Climate Change and Social Policy (CUSP) network and the European Sustainable Welfare and Eco-Social Policy network.

Before Paul’s current focus on environmentalism and social policy, he worked and published widely on comparative pension policy and the social policy implications of migration. On pensions, he recently contributed a book chapter on comparative pension retrenchment to an Edward Elgar handbook on Austerity, Retrenchment and the Welfare State. On migration, his work has recently been published in Ageing and Society (with Lisa Davison and Traute Meyer) and The Journal of Poverty and Social Justice (with Traute Meyer).

Paul also has a longstanding interest in theories of the policy process, particularly those associated with the historical institutionalist tradition, and the methods for testing them.