Call for Papers

Global Public Policy and Governance: Theories, Methods and Cases

https://www.ippapublicpolicy.org/conference/icpp5-barcelona-2021/panel-list/13/panel/global-public-policy-and-governance-theories-methods-and-cases/1052

Submission Deadline

Jan 29th 2021

ICPP Information

https://www.ippapublicpolicy.org//conference/icpp5/13

General Objectives, Research Questions and Scientific Relevance

Since the 1980s, the speedup of flows and exchanges (of capital, products and information) all over the world, well known as globalization, has made national economies, societies and cultures more interconnected and integrated than ever before. This change brought both opportunities and challenges to public policy and governance. As for the positive consequences, globalization facilitates international cooperation in various domains, such as business investments, cross-culture communication and technology sharing. However, as for the negative consequences, on the one hand, many regional and national governance problems that are endemic for centuries have taken on a new look. For example, although the frequency of military conflicts between countries declines, the number of conflicts in economic exchanges and international organizations increases in recent years. On the other hand, globalization also raises new problems for decision-makers. For example, traditional ideas and practices may no longer be efficient and costless to deal with newly-emerging transnational problems in a globalized world. This suggests that decision-makers need to adopt a global and comparative perspective to develop strategies and solutions. Furthermore, in more recent time, marked by a series of shocking events (e.g. 2008 international financial crisis, 2020 Covid-19 global pandemic), globalization is entering into a new era in which de-globalization is accelerating and gains supports in several regions and countries. Although this rollback may not lead to a fundamental collapse of current integration trend, it probably poses major challenges to existing global governing systems.

Against this background, there are an increasing number of studies which focus on the issues regarding global public policy and governance. While offering valuable insights, current discussions still require further elaboration and improvement:

As for theoretical advancements, many classic theories regarding public policy and governance are developed at the national or regional level. Despite this, we still know little about the situations at the global level.

As for research methods, current studies rely more on traditional quantitative (e.g. regression) and qualitative (e.g. comparative case study) techniques. However, the development of computational social science equips social scientists with more efficient tools to build huge cross-national datasets and make comparative analysis. Considering that the lack of good quality data is still a major obstacle to scholars who are interested in cross-national comparative studies, it is significant to promote methodological advancements in the field of global public policy and governance.

As for cases, there still remains many new governing phenomena with global relevance to be explored. Providing more cases covering comparative public policy and governance, domestic public policy and governance with global relevance, public policy diffusion across national borders will deepen our understanding of the complexity of public policy and governance in the increasingly globalized world.

By offering theoretically informed and empirically sound studies, this panel aims to fill the abovementioned research gaps and contribute to the current discussions on global public policy and governance in the aspects of theories, methods and cases.

Institute for Global Public Policy (IGPP), Fudan University, China plans to host this panel. IGPP aims to advance research on global public policy and build up an international platform of policy studies and degree education with a genuine global and multidisciplinary perspective. For more details, please see: https://igpp.fudan.edu.cn/igppen/main.htm

Call for papers

The panel welcomes theoretical, empirical and methodological research that explores public sector reforms and developments in an increasingly globalized world.

In terms of the theoretical advancements, many classic theories regarding public policy and governance are developed at the national or regional level. Despite this, we still know little about the situations at global level. For example, policy diffusion has been widely identified by policy process scholarship as a major mechanism for subnational governments to learn from the success. However, few studies explore whether it is still the case for countries? If the answer is yes, how does the recent resurgence of de-globalization affect the diffusion process?

In terms of the methodological advancements, to what extent will the newly-emerging computational and experimental methods empower the cross-national comparative studies? For example, the burst of social media data and advancements of machine learning text analysis techniques (e.g. topic model) seems to make it possible for scholars to collect data regarding the feelings, emotions and opinions of citizens in different countries and conduct comparative analysis. Will they be good supplements to previous comparative methods, such as using cross-national social surveys (e.g. European social survey, Euroborameter)? If the answer is yes, is there any best research practice?

In terms of the cases advancements, what are the broad implications of de-globalization to global public policy and governance in the post-Covid19 era? For example, international organizations have long been expected to play the key roles in international coordination in the past decades. However, in responding to the global pandemic of Covid19, international organizations experienced a hard time in coordinating countries around the world into one community to collaborate with each other and fight together. In what ways and to what extent are de-globalization affecting international organizations’ policy formulation, implementation and outcome?

Acceptances are not limited by areas of public policy and preference is given to topics of widespread significance to the advancements of theories, methods and cases of global public policy and governance. After the panel meeting, authors will be invited to submit the accepted papers to the Global Public Policy Journal (GPPG) and go through the peer review process. GPPG is an English academic journal hosted by IGPP. GPPG focuses on issues regarding global public policy and governance which is in line with the theme of this panel. The journal home page is https://www.springer.com/journal/43508/