wicked problems

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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Updating your course reading lists? Check out our essential reading recommendations for teaching Public Participation, Gender and the Policy Process, and Policy Innovation from Policy & Politics

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Elizabeth SarahElizabeth Koebele with Sarah Brown

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 →

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 →

Virtual issue on Evidence in policymaking and the role of experts

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p&p editors Sarah Ayres, Steve Martin and Felicity Matthews,
Co-editors of Policy & Politics

New virtual issues from Policy & Politics:
Evidence in policymaking and the role of experts

During the current coronavirus global health crisis, we reflect on the lessons learned in policy response terms from our most recent published research featuring crises in a range of diverse environments. Continue reading →

‘Scientific’ policymaking in a ‘complex’ world – what can we learn from the Finnish experience?

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ylostalo picture 2Hanna Ylöstalo

Policy solutions, interventions and reform revolve around specific societal diagnoses of the problems that policymaking is supposed to solve. One of the most influential societal diagnoses informing contemporary policy reform seems to be the following: the world has become more ‘complex’, problems have become ‘wicked’ ie intractable, and all policy solutions involve a great deal of ‘uncertainty’. This popular, but rather vague and unhistorical notion has sprung various new approaches to solve diverging political problems. These approaches are often legitimised with scientific knowledge and methods.   Continue reading →