Social Policy

Virtual issue on Asian scholarship published recently in Policy & Politics

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Sarah Brown & Elizabeth Koebele

Sarah and Elizabeth

Welcome to our virtual issue featuring scholarship on Asia published in Policy & Politics in the last two years. We have a strong body of work surfacing a range of policy issues in the region with wider relevance as well and look forward to receiving similar submissions in the future!

As part of our focus on Asia, Policy & Politics is proud to be an official partner of the Annual Conference of the Asian Association for Public Administration (APPA 2022) in Shanghai, China on 3-4 December 2022. If you are presenting your work there, please consider submitting your final paper to Policy & Politics.

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The Democratic Qualities of Regulatory Agencies

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Libby MamanLibby Maman

Transparency, accountability, participation, and representation are concepts that are seen by many as positive and desirable attributes in the context of public organisations. Transparency means when a public organisation discloses information publicly, accountability means when it reports, answers, and justifies its actions to politicians or other state actors. Representation refers to the identity of the people working in the organisation, and participation means when public organisations consult with non-state actors in the rule-making process. Continue reading →

Making interpretive policy analysis critical and societally relevant: emotions, ethnography, and language

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Anna_Durnova.jpg
Portrait von Mag. Dr. Anna Pospech Durnova in Wien, Okotber 2021 Copyright: Eugenie Sophie

Anna Durnová

Retrieving meanings from texts is not just about reading or counting words; texts are more than words put on a paper or a screen. These two phrases have repeatedly accompanied my responses to a mainstream audience at academic meetings when explaining how interpretive approaches work. The interpretive tradition is significant, going substantially beyond political science and public policy, and encompassing many concepts and tools to retrieve meanings from texts. As structured traces of meanings (both audiovisual and textual), texts reflect the world around us and shape our view and thus can tell us how we look at this world. Continue reading →

Analysing boundaries of health and social care in policy and media reform narratives: the epic and tragic narratives of policy reform.

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Duijn Bannink NiesSarah van Duijn, Duco Bannink & Henk Nies

When we wrote this blog, Ukraine had not yet been invaded by Russia. However, it would feel inappropriate to us to publish this blog without acknowledging it. We are aware that we are no experts in the field of geopolitics or international relations. However, we cannot help but remark that the strategies we found in our article have become amplified in the rhetoric that surrounds the war in Ukraine. Indeed, the epic-tragic mechanism is part and parcel of democratic processes – as we show in our article – but it is also a part of incomparably worse phenomena such as (threats of) war. Continue reading →

How do policy transfer mechanisms influence policy outcomes in the context of authoritarianism in Vietnam?

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Hang DuongHang Duong

In my recent research article in Policy & Politics, I investigate how policy transfer mechanisms influence policy outcomes in the context of authoritarianism in Vietnam. My findings show that civil service reforms in Vietnam’s merit-based policies are influenced by both Western and Asian models of meritocracy. This makes it both closer to universal “best practices” and at the same time sharpens the distinctiveness of Vietnam’s policy. While reform imperatives urge Vietnam to seek lessons from the West, the context of an Asian authoritarian regime explains their prioritising of experience from similar settings like China and other Asian countries. The pragmatic calculations of political actors in combination with the context of a one-party authoritarian state have led to transfer from contrasting meritocratic philosophies and models through mechanisms of translation and assemblage, resulting in a hybrid of convergence and divergence. Continue reading →

An organisational approach to meta-governance – structuring reforms through organisational (re-)engineering 

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Jarle Trondal

Jarle Trondal

Innovation in the public sector has climbed to the top of government agendas with ambitions to make public administration flexible in the face of societal ruptures. There is a growing body of research which tries to identify how institutions and systems respond to surprises, uncertainty and errors. Studies also provide insights on how different institutional conditions enable individuals and organisations to respond to profound change. In my recent article in Policy & Politics, I argue that organisation theory may help to serve as a bridge between theory and practice linking scholarship to the realities of practice, concerned not just with how things are, but how things might be. Given certain goals, such as innovation in public organisations, organisation designers would thus be capable of recommending structural solutions. Continue reading →

Are resilience, robustness, agility and improvisation in policymaking all they’re cracked up to be?

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Perri 6Perri 6
Professor in Public Management
Queen Mary University of London

Summary of article

After crises and disasters, pundits regularly write articles and books calling for more resilience in policymaking, and the Covid-19 pandemic has been an especially rich opportunity for advocates of resilience (e.g., https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-70179-6_14). Business project management jargon about ‘agility’ gets used to urge politicians and their advisers to do their policymaking more fluidly in response to constant change. In 2016, even the Cabinet Office joined in the fun, issuing guidance on agility in open policymaking. Some writers now advocate greater use of improvisation in policymaking. Others argue for ways of working among policymakers which can lead to policy designs that can withstand shocks – or robustness. Long advocated by the RAND Corporation as way of handling uncertainty, academics too are now urging greater efforts to pursue robustness Continue reading →

The Implications of COVID-19 for Concepts and Practices of Citizenship

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Moon and ChoJae M. Moon and Shine B. Cho

Recently, there has been growing interest in the nature and scope of citizens’ roles in addressing complex wicked policy problems which perhaps has piqued during the COVID-19 global pandemic. This is largely due to recognition by governments and businesses that they cannot effectively solve seemingly persistent and intractable societal problems without active and voluntary participation from a range of policy actors, including citizens. Continue reading →

Conceptualising Policy Design in the Policy Process 

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Saba and CaliSaba Siddiki and Cali Curley

The study of policy design has been of long-standing interest to policy scholars. Considering the renewed attention to researching policy design in the last decade, it is an opportune time to forge new pathways for developing this critical line of scholarship. In their recent article in Policy & Politics, authors Saba Siddiki and Cali Curley seek to take stock of the developments in policy design research, especially as they coincide with other developments in the study of the policy process. Continue reading →

How diverse and inclusive are policy process theories?

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Tanya Mike BlogTanya Heikkila and Mike Jones

The various approaches to studying policy processes differ by their attention to distinct questions, issues and theoretical emphasis. Some zoom into particular “stages” of policymaking such as agenda setting (Multiple Streams Analysis), while others pay attention to long term patterns in policy evolution (Punctuated Equilibrium Theory). Several explore how policy actors form coalitions, communicate, strategize, and influence policy outcomes (Advocacy Change Framework, Narrative Policy Framework, Social Construction Framework). Continue reading →