Nick Turnbull awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Grant
Nick Turnbull, together with Rose Broad and Tom vander Beken, have been awarded a three-year research project grant to investigate anti-human trafficking and modern slavery policy practice in the United Kingdom and European Union.
is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and the project is a collaboration between Politics and Criminology.
It aims to contribute to policy theory by discovering how policy workers make interpretations, manage relationships and practice discretion in the course of governing the trafficking problem.
There is currently a lack of primary research and cross-national comparisons about anti-trafficking collaborative governance. There is also a lack of research on non-sexual exploitative labour.
The project will contribute to knowledge by discovering how policy workers' discretion impacts upon the prosecution, protection and prevention of trafficking. Moreover, the project includes people with lived experience of trafficking as co-producers.
The project will assess similarities and differences between policy practices across three countries: United Kingdom, Belgium and Romania. It focuses primarily on policy workers, their organisations, and inter-relations.
It examines how they make discretionary choices in policy implementation, including narratives they use in interpreting the policy problem and negotiating network relationships. These are set in the context of formal governance structures and the political narratives at work within them.
The overall research question for the project is: How is the human trafficking problem governed by interpretive policy workers making discretionary choices in the context of specific policy regimes?