As you plan reading lists for the coming academic year, this collection of recent articles offers fresh insights for units on emotions in public policy, the politics of environmental policy, and governance networks. Each article draws on cutting-edge empirical research combined with conceptual innovation, making them ideal for both undergraduate and postgraduate modules exploring the politics of policymaking.
We hope these suggestions save you time and effort in mining recent articles while ensuring your course materials reflect the latest research from the frontiers of the discipline.
Collaborative innovation is gaining recognition as a critical strategy for public organisations, especially when addressing complex “wicked” problems. These challenges demand fresh thinking, and collaboration—particularly in diverse teams—can make all the difference. By bringing together varied perspectives, policymakers can unlock creative solutions that might not emerge in isolated decision-making. Working collaboratively not only expands the range of options but also makes thinking “outside the box” more productive and impactful.
Despite its promise, the concept of “collaborative innovation” is still mostly grounded in theory. Empirical studies are limited, and when they do exist, they often rely on case studies that lump all forms of collaboration together. This approach overlooks the nuances of different collaborative arrangements and makes it difficult to understand how specific types of collaboration contribute to innovation. Some research hints at distinctions among setups, linking them to innovation in theory, but no one has systematically compared their actual impact.
This is where our study steps in. For policymakers to truly harness the potential of collaboration, they need clear evidence about which actors to involve and how. In our recent article published in Policy & Politics entitled “Fostering innovation through collaboration: A comparison of collaborative approaches to policy design”— we examine the innovative potential of different collaborative arrangements. As expected, we find that collaboration—whether within government or with non-public actors—is a game-changer. But there’s a catch: not all contributors bring equal value to the table. Some actors possess greater capacity to innovate than others.
Policy & Politics has been publishing innovative works at the intersection of public policy and politics for over 50 years. It is a world-leading, top quartile journal that is committed to advancing scholarly understanding of the dynamics of policy-making and implementation. By exploring the interplay between political actors, governing institutions and policy issues, the journal contributes to building policy process theory; and by reflecting on the evolving context in which these interactions occur, it provides timely and fresh insights into the influence of politics on policy and vice versa.
The journal’s co-editors invite proposals for a special issue that will make a significant contribution to our understanding of the nexus of public policy and politics.The journal only has space to publish one special issue each year, so this is a competitive process.
To be successful, proposals need to offer a coherent set of excellent original research articles that will reframe or develop knowledge on a topic that is at the leading edge of current debates and is clearly relevant to the journal’s worldwide readership. Proposals may include a mixture of theoretical, conceptual and empirical cases and a range of research methods, and must demonstrate how they will make a significant and lasting contribution to the field.
Special issues of this scope generally take at least eighteen months to two years from the acceptance of a proposal through to final publication. In return, we offer constructive and clear editorial guidance throughout the development process to optimise its readership and impact. In addition, we undertake significant article-level marketing for special issues, as we publish one of the most widely read journal blogs in the discipline and have the highest X (Twitter) following of all the journals in this field as well as our more recent presence on BlueSky. Our special issues are also eligible for consideration for publication in book form in the Policy & Politics series published by Policy Press.
The timetable for evaluating proposals is set out below:
Call for proposals open; submit to mailto:sarah.brown@bristol.ac.uk
2nd January 2025
Deadline for submitting proposals to P&P
28th February 2025
Decision on selection of one proposal announced by P&P
by Ringa Raudla, Egert Juuse, Vytautas Kuokštis, Aleksandrs Cepilovs, Matti Ylönen
Financial technologies (FinTech) used to be material for science fiction movies, but suddenly they are everywhere. In fact, people barely think of their novelty anymore when paying with their cell phones, or when they trade stocks, cryptocurrencies, or currencies with mobile apps that bypass traditional banks. FinTech can also be used for credit scoring, client profiling, robo-advising, and insurance, just to name some examples. An important question in public policy is: how should policy react to such pervasive technological transformations?
Given the systemic importance of the financial sector for the economy and the potential of the FinTech sector to contribute to employment and public revenue, governments’ policy stance towards FinTech is a topic of major importance. FinTech policy faces significant dilemmas when balancing risks and innovation, and the ensuing choices can profoundly affect financial systems and society. Hence, in choosing their national FinTech policy stances, governments are caught between competing pressures. They are expected to boost competition and innovation while containing risks, preventing the build-up of vulnerabilities, and avoiding reputational damage to a country’s financial system.
In our article entitled, “Why policy failure is a prerequisite for innovation in the public sector,” we explore the relationship between policy failure and innovation within public governance. Drawing inspiration from the “Innovator’s Dilemma,”—a theory from the management literature—we argue that the very nature of policymaking, characterized by myopia of voters, blame avoidance by decisionmakers, and the complexity (ill-structuredness) of societal challenges, has an inherent tendency to react with innovation only after failure of existing policies.
Our analysis implies that we need to be more critical of what the policy process can achieve in terms of public sector innovation. Cognitive limitations tend to lead to a misperception of problems and inaccurate assessment of risks by decision makers according to the “Innovator’s Dilemma”. This problem implies that true innovation (non-trivial policy changes) are unlikely to happen before an existing policy has failed visibly. However, our perspective does not want to paint a gloomy picture for public policy making but rather offers a more realistic interpretation of what public sector innovation can achieve. As a consequence, learning from experts in the policy process should be expected to correct failures in public sector problem-solving during the political process, rather than raise expectations beyond what is possible.
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.
Are you planning a new policy or politics-focused course? Or maybe you’re updating your existing syllabi with some of the newest research on policy and politics? We’re here to help! In this blog, we provide recommendations for new Policy & Politics articles (as well as a few older favorites) that make excellent contributions to syllabi for a diversity of courses. We hope this saves you time and effort in mining our recent articles while also ensuring your course materials reflect the latest research from the frontiers of the discipline. Continue reading →
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 →
This week we pause our special issue blog series on ‘Taking Risks and Breaking New Frontiers in Policy & Politics‘ to showcase some of our just-published articles while they’re hot off the press. In this quarter’s highlights collection, we feature three articles that provide a range of insights from different perspectives on the complexities of policy making. Continue reading →
Policy innovations and experiments have been considered a cornerstone of China’s economic rise in the past decades. However, the adoption of innovations by local governments is not always mandated by the central government, as one may expect in the case of a strong, centralised, and authoritarian state like China. Instead, higher-level governments often take a laissez-faire approach and merely sponsor some innovations without actively getting involved in the process of adoption. In our recent article in Policy & Politics, we aim to answer the question of why higher-level governments intervene proactively in local innovations in some cases but only offer their backing in others. Continue reading →
Elizabeth Koebele with Sarah Brown
Biao Huang and Felix Wiebrecht
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 