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The World Health Organization as an engine of ideational robustness Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Jean-Louis Denis, Gaëlle Foucault, Pierre Larouche, Catherine Régis, Miriam Cohen, Marie-Andrée Girard
The paper focuses on the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in promoting a healthy world population as a generative and robust idea within health policy. The WHO’s health credo transcends national boundaries to promote health globally. It is embedded in norms, values, and standards promulgated by the organization and contributes in shaping the health responses of national governments. Ideational
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NGOs and Global Business Regulation of Transnational Alcohol and Ultra-Processed Food Industries Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Rob Ralston, Belinda Townsend, Liz Arnanz, Fran Baum, Katherine Cullerton, Rodney Holmes, Jane Martin, Jeff Collin, Sharon Friel
The intensification of efforts by state and nonstate actors to address issues affecting global health has produced a patchwork of transnational regulatory governance. Within this field, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are expected to perform authoritative roles in holding business actors to account and enhance the democratic legitimacy of institutions via their participation in governance processes
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Good models borrow, great models steal: intellectual property rights and generative AI Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Simon Chesterman
Two critical policy questions will determine the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on the knowledge economy and the creative sector. The first concerns how we think about the training of such models—in particular, whether the creators or owners of the data that are “scraped” (lawfully or unlawfully, with or without permission) should be compensated for that use. The second question
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Actors, alterations, and authorities: three observations of global policy and its transnational administration Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Kim Moloney, Tim Legrand
This Special Issue and its seven contributions seek to shift the gaze of public policy scholarship toward the authorities, legitimacies, and influences of transnational actors on the creation and implementation of global policy and its transnational administration. It is, in large part, both a demonstration of the analytical and explanatory value of accounting for the influence of non-state actors
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Policy dissidents: Understanding girl activism as creating “Tactical Crevices” Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Mary Ann Chacko
Global policymaking often seeks to create processes for the effective delivery of public goods and services. What happens when individuals critique or dissent such policies? In this paper, we examine the case of two activists—Greta Thunberg and Disha Ravi—who have been mobilizing attention toward climate change since their teenage years, and who have been both celebrated and vilified for it. While
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The rising authority and agency of public–private partnerships in global health governance Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2024-01-21 Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée
Global public–private partnerships (PPPs) have become prominent in efforts to address global challenges, particularly in the health field. In the scholarly literature, global PPPs have been conceptualized as arenas for voluntary public–private cooperation rather than agents of global governance. This paper challenges this approach, arguing that a sub-class of highly institutionalized partnerships have
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Policy sequencing can increase public support for ambitious climate policy Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Simon Montfort, Lukas Fesenfeld, Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen, Karin Ingold
Public support for ambitious climate policies and carbon prices that have direct costs for voters may depend on policy sequencing. Policy sequencing theory suggests that the strategic ordering of policies into sequences that initially create benefits can subsequently increase support for higher carbon prices. However, systematic quantitative evidence about the effects of sequencing on public support
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Blame avoidance and credit-claiming dynamics in government policy communications: evidence from leadership tweets in four OECD countries during the 2020–2022 COVID-19 pandemic Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Ching Leong, Michael Howlett, Mehrdad Safaei
Government information activities are often thought to be motivated by a classic calculus of blame minimization and credit maximization. However, the precise interactions of “blame” and “credit” communication activities in government are not well understood, and questions abound about how they are deployed in practice. This paper uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) machine-learning sentiment analysis
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“State captured” policy advice? Think tanks as expert advisors in the Western Balkans Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Irena Djordjevic, Diane Stone
Few scholars have dedicated their attention to the role of think tanks as policy experts within captured states. We investigate how, why, and to what extent think tanks are used in the captured states in the Western Balkans. Our assumption was that think tanks could become party to the processes of “capture”. However, original findings from focus group and interviews with think tankers show that think
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Expert knowledge for global pandemic policy: a chorus of evidence or a clutter of global commissions? Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Diane Stone, Anneke Schmider
“Global Commissions of Inquiry” have usually been associated with the multilateral initiatives of governments and international organizations. However, various styles of “global commission” have emerged over time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, global commissions have been a key aspect of the COVID-19 international policy landscape, quickly emerging, in 2020 and 2021, to corral knowledge and evidence
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Dealing with the challenges of legitimacy, values, and politics in policy advice Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Giliberto Capano, Michael Howlett, Leslie A Pal, M Ramesh
Policy advice has been the subject of ongoing research in the policy sciences as it raises fundamental issues about what constitutes policy knowledge, expertise, and their effects on policymaking. This introduction reviews the existing literature on the subject and introduces the themes motivating the articles in the issue. It highlights the need to consider several key subjects in the topic in the
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Expert legitimacy and competing legitimation in Italian school reforms Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Maria Tullia Galanti
In the face of the complexities of problem-solving , experts are gaining centrality in policymaking (Weiss, 1979). At the same time, they are increasingly challenged in their legitimacy, which is not only technical but also political. Challenges to the legitimacy of experts suggest that other types of legitimacy are important for policymaking. Issues of legitimacy are particularly important for sound
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When bargaining is and is not possible: the politics of bureaucratic expertise in the context of democratic backsliding Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-08-21 Natália Massaco Koga, Ana Paula Karruz, Pedro Lucas de Moura Palotti, Marcos Luiz Vieira Soares Filho, Bruno Gontyjo do Couto
In looking at the complex relationship between expertise and power in policymaking, what is amiss are studies on how the expertise exchange bargain between politicians and bureaucracy works in practice, especially in antidemocratic contexts. To deal with this limitation, we use Christensen’s (Christensen, J. (2022). When bureaucratic expertise comes under attack. Public Administration) expertise bargain
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Citizensourcing policy advisory systems in a turbulent era Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-08-17 M. Jae Moon, Seulgi Lee, Seunggyu Park
Extending previous works on major changes in policy advisory systems (PASs), such as externalization (locus) and politicization (government control), this study examines whether and how democratization (citizensourcing) of PASs works based on the case of the Kwanghwamun Citizensourcing Policy Platform, which operated for 4 years under the Moon Jae-in administration in South Korea. Analyzing more than
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“I do not consent”: political legitimacy, misinformation, and the compliance challenge in Australia’s Covid-19 policy response Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-08-11 Melissa-Ellen Dowling, Tim Legrand
This paper examines the relationship between policy compliance, the emergence of alternate epistemes and authorities in online spaces, and the decline of trust and legitimacy in democratic institutions. Drawing on insights from public policy, regulation theory, and political theory, the paper critically engages with scholarship on “policy-takers” to illuminate the tensions of compliance and legitimacy
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Assessing the crisis management of the COVID-19 pandemic: a study of inquiry commission reports in Norway and Sweden Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Tom Christensen, Per Lægreid
This article examines the inquiry reports from the commissions charged with investigating government crisis management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway and Sweden. Such postcrises commissions have been a common feature in many countries as they seek to systematize their experiences and learn from the crisis. In this article, we used various dimensions of governance capacity and governance legitimacy
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Pragmatism, partnerships, and persuasion: theorizing philanthropic foundations in the global policy agora Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Janis Petzinger, Tobias Jung, Kevin Orr
Foundations are one of the oldest organizational forms globally; their number and resources, as well as their socio-political and economic importance, have steadily continued to grow. Yet, foundations’ attributes, activities, and actual achievements remain underexplored and poorly understood. This is particularly noticeable in the context of global policy and transnational administration, an area where
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Exclusion by design: a case study of an Indian urban housing subsidy scheme Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Manav Khaire
The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban)—Housing for All mission (PMAY-U), a flagship mission of the Government of India, aims to address the need for affordable housing in urban areas through five different schemes. One of these schemes is a housing subsidy scheme, the Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme (CLSS), which has significantly contributed to the success of PMAY-U. However, the design of the CLSS scheme
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The vicious circle of policy advisory systems and knowledge regimes in consolidated authoritarian regimes Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Caner Bakir
So far, interest in policy and political sciences has mostly centered around the varieties of policy advisory systems (PASs) and knowledge regimes in consolidated democracies rather than in consolidated autocracies, which largely remain as black boxes. Drawing on a hybrid literature review, this article aims to fill this gap. It reviews selected articles published between 1992 and February 2023 in
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Speaking good to power: repositioning global policy advice through normative framing Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-06-24 Leslie A Pal
The delegitimization of policy advice has generated a defensive response that combines an assertion of the superior scientific character of expertise with a forthright affirmation of social and political values. This more value-driven discourse of policy expertise is examined with the case study of the Global Solutions Summit/World Policy Forum, launched in 2017 to support the Think20 network of global
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The politics of COVID-19 experts: comparing winners and losers in Italy and the UK Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Paul Cairney, Federico Toth
This article analyzes the “politics of experts”—or the struggle between scientific advisers to gain visibility and influence—in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and the UK. Modifying classic studies of policy communities of interest groups and civil servants, we classify relevant policy experts in the two countries into the following categories: “core insiders,” “specialist insiders
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How welfare wins: Discursive institutionalism, the politics of the poor, and the expansion of social welfare in India during the early 21st century Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Indrajit Roy
The worldwide explosion of social welfare has been described as the “quiet revolution” of our time. This paper analyses the expansion of social welfare in India during the early part of the 2000s. What explains this expansion of encompassing social welfare in India, following a history of disparate and fragmented social policies? The answer, I argue, lies in recognizing the importance of the “politics
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Assessing public support for social policy in times of crisis: evidence from the Child Tax Credit during the COVID-19 era in the United States Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-05-20 Mariely López-Santana, Lucas Núñez, Daniel Béland
The 2021 American Rescue Plan included the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC)—the largest individual income tax credit program in the United States—for most families with children. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, how did the public perceive this social policy benefit for families, especially in relation to other traditional social programs? By focusing on the CTC, an understudied
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Discourses of growth in megaproject-based urban development: a comparative study of Poland and Finland Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Magdalena Rek-Woźniak
The paper aims to add to the debate on the varieties of neoliberalism and the homogenizing effects of megaproject-based urban development. It examines the acculturation of the growth imperative as the master discourse that supports the development and implementation of two projects aimed at transforming the centers of Tampere, Finland, and Łódź, Poland. The selected cities shared similar traits as
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Bridging the “consent gap”: mechanisms of legitimization in a cross-border megaproject Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Silvia Lucciarini, Rossana Galdini
In the recent debate on megaprojects (MPs), greater attention is devoted to the functioning of the interorganizational and multiactor networks that are one of the most innovative features in recent years. The complexity of these structures brings out governability issues for an MP’s management. Mutual recognition and consent become elements capable of inaugurating more collaborative processes and practices
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Comparisons as a discursive tool: shaping megaproject narratives in the United Kingdom Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Natalya Sergeeva, Johan Ninan
The mobilization of narratives is essential in integrating people and constructing identities that help in navigating complexity, uncertainty, and conflictuality. This paper explores how comparisons are used as a discursive tool to shape narratives and bring about changes in policy and society, using the High Speed Two megaproject in the UK as a case study. We examine the comparisons that promoters
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The development of large public infrastructure projects: integrating policy and project studies models Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Pierre-André Hudon, Serghei Floricel
Project management theory often reduces development to a simplistic and smooth process of consultation leading to a consensual set of requirements. However, in large public infrastructure projects, this is rarely the case as development is often subject to major power struggles. This article shows that public policy theory has an excellent potential to shed a fresh light on project development. An
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Nonuse and hypocritical use of strategic narratives in Megaprojects: The case of the Florence high-speed railway Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Fabrizio Coticchia, Marco Di Giulio
Since megaprojects are costly, impactful, and often contentious policymaking processes, scholars have started to look at policy narratives as instruments that actors use strategically to justify their preferences and achieve their goals. But is this really the case? Do actors always adopt a narrative to support their goals? Do they develop arguments that are consistent with their official goals and
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“Scales of justice. Large dams and water rights in the Tigris–Euphrates basin” Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Alessandro Tinti
The paper explores the politics of scale associated with the top-down planning of large hydraulic infrastructures in the Tigris–Euphrates basin. Against the backdrop of a worsening water crisis and the lack of cooperation between riparian countries, dams and reservoirs across the transboundary river system are sites of contestation between competing claims over dwindling and disputed resources. Drawing
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The politics of military megaprojects: discursive struggles in Canadian and Australian naval shipbuilding strategies Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-02-04 Andrea Migone, Alexander Howlett, Michael Howlett
Large-scale military platform procurement is an essential but understudied component of the policy studies of megaprojects. Procurement decisions in this area, from ships to aircraft, are examples of a specific type of often very expensive purchases which feature complex multi-actor and multiyear processes characterized by high degrees of conflict between actors over purchases and planning horizons
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Participatory governance in megaprojects: the Lyon–Turin high-speed railway among structure, agency, and democratic participation Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Giovanni Esposito, Andrea Felicetti, Andrea Terlizzi
Megaprojects are increasingly common across countries and attract substantial political attention from a variety of actors. Recent studies have highlighted the need to move from an understanding of megaprojects as linear and rational processes towards a more nuanced approach that accounts for non-linear and conflictual aspects. Participatory governance is often proposed as a valuable resource in this
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Critical policy capacity factors in the implementation of the community health worker program in India Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Bijoya Roy, Fabiana da Cunha Saddi, Stephen Peckham, Maria Pereira Barretos
This paper employs the policy capacity framework to develop a multidimensional and nested policy analysis that is able to examine how different types of capacity—analytical, organizational, and political from different related levels of the health system—have contributed to both policy success and failure during the implementation of a politically significant national community health worker (CHW)
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Political legitimacy and vaccine hesitancy: Disability support workers in Australia Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Helen Dickinson, Anne Kavanagh, Stefanie Dimov, Marissa Shields, Ashley McAllister
People with disability are an at-risk group in the COVID-19 pandemic for a range of clinical and socioeconomic reasons. In recognition of this, Australians with disability and those who work with them were prioritized in access to vaccination, but the vaccination targets were not met. In this paper, we analyze qualitative data generated from a survey with 368 disability support workers to identify
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Analytical capacity as a critical condition for responding to COVID-19 in Brazil Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Natália Massaco Koga, Pedro Lucas de Moura Palotti, Pedro Arthur de Miranda Marques Pontes, Bruno Gontyjo do Couto, Marcos Luiz Vieira Soares
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic posed several challenges to the Brazilian health system, among them the general context of ambiguity and uncertainty and the conflicting positioning of the government in power concerning scientific advice resources. Different aspects can be analyzed to explore the dynamics of strengthening and resilience of the system. This paper focuses on its analytical
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Remaking the Sustainable Development Goals: relational Indigenous epistemologies Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-07-28 Johannes M Waldmüller, Mandy Yap, Krushil Watene
While the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were inclusive in their design, the reliance on official measurement infrastructures has upheld narrow definitions of both the terms of sustainability and development. Indigenous and non-Indigenous “governance beyond the state” approaches call these definitions into question. They highlight that disaggregated official data are unable to fully reflect alternative
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When indicators fail: SPAR, the invisible measure of pandemic preparedness Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Sakiko Fukuda-Parr
Recent literature on indicators as technology of global governance has shown the power of numbers in shaping knowledge and policy priorities. But not all indicators have powerful effects; some remain invisible. Are such indicators an obverse of powerful indicators? Are the same process of indirect exercise of power to indirectly achieve social and economic effects at work? This paper explores the case
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Statistical capacity development and the production of epistemic infrastructures Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-07-14 Marlee Tichenor
Designating statistical capacity development as a target for measurement in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) created a dilemma for statistical decision-makers in the United Nations system, as some saw the inclusion of statistical capacity in SDG17 as a “conflict of interest,” making their work both a goal of the SDGs and a means to achieve them. In 2022, there are five indicators for measuring
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Governance and societal impact of blockchain-based self-sovereign identities Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-06-13 Rachel Benchaya Gans, Jolien Ubacht, Marijn Janssen
Traditionally, governments and companies store data to identify persons for services provision and interactions. The rise of self-sovereign identities (SSIs) based on blockchain technologies provides individuals with ownership and control over their personal data and allows them to share their data with others using a sort of “digital safe.” Fundamentally, people have the sole ownership of their identity
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COVID-19, crisis responses, and public policies: from the persistence of inequalities to the importance of policy design Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Daniel Béland, Alex Jingwei He, M Ramesh
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has once again highlighted the importance of social inequalities during major crises, a reality that has clear implications for public policy. In this introductory article to the thematic issue of Policy and Society on COVID-19, inequalities, and public policies, we provide an overview of the nexus between crisis and inequality before exploring its importance for
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Maintaining trust in a technologized public sector Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-05-17 Balázs Bodó, Heleen Janssen
Emerging technologies permeate and potentially disrupt a wide spectrum of our social, economic, and political relations. Various state institutions, including education, law enforcement, and healthcare, increasingly rely on technical components, such as automated decision-making systems, e-government systems, and other digital tools to provide cheap, efficient public services, and supposedly fair,
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The education sustainable development goal and the generative power of failing metrics Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-05-16 Sotiria Grek
The article traces the development of the epistemic infrastructure of the education sustainable development goal (SDG) in order to examine the ways that the incremental buildup of the discourse, technical expertise, and necessary—although always fragile—alliances facilitated a paradigmatic policy shift in the field of education: This is the move from the measurement of schooling to the measurement
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Producing decent work indicators: contested numbers at the ILO Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-04-30 John Berten
The article investigates the production of decent work indicators within the ILO, to demonstrate that developing measurement infrastructures in global policymaking requires political work. The concept of decent work responds to the perceived marginalization of the ILO in social and labor policy and was supposed to provide a new unifying normative framework for the organization. The article shows that
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Global public policy in a quantified world: Sustainable Development Goals as epistemic infrastructures Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-04-27 Marlee Tichenor, Sally E Merry, Sotiria Grek, Justyna Bandola-Gill
Despite the multiplicity of actors, crises, and fields of action, global public policy has known one constant, that is, the ubiquity of indicators in the production of governing knowledge. This article theoretically engages with the phenomenon of hyper-quantification of global governance in the context of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), debated and introduced in 2015. Increasingly metrics—such
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Participatory methodologies and caring about numbers in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Isabel Rocha de Siqueira, Laís Ramalho
Calling for a “data revolution,” the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seek to promote progress in matters related to planet, people, prosperity, peace, and partnerships (the “5Ps”) by mobilizing an all-encompassing datafying system that heavily relies on quantification. As such, the SDGs serve as a unique window that showcases the most up-to-date materials, methods, and forms of
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Blockchain-based application at a governmental level: disruption or illusion? The case of Estonia Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-04-12 Silvia Semenzin, David Rozas, Samer Hassan
Blockchain technology enables new kinds of decentralized systems. Thus, it has often been advocated as a “disruptive” technology that could have the potentiality of reshaping political, economic, and social relations, “solving” problems like corruption, power centralization, and distrust toward political institutions. Blockchain has been gradually gaining attention beyond finance and is thus applied
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Statistical entrepreneurs: the political work of infrastructuring the SDG indicators Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Justyna Bandola-Gill
Governing by indicators has emerged as the predominant mode of global public policy. Consequently, global governance has become a field in which different indicators compete for policymakers’ and public attention. This begs a question—what makes some indicators successful when others become irrelevant? This paper explores this problem through the inquiry into the measurement of multidimensional poverty
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Race, power, and policy: understanding state anti-eviction policies during COVID-19 Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Jamila Michener
In the United States, striking racial disparities in COVID-19 infection and mortality rates were one of the core patterns of the virus. These racial disproportionalities were a result of structural factors—laws, rules, and practices embedded in economic, social, and political systems. Public policy is central among such structural features. Policies distribute advantages, disadvantages, benefits, and
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Health reforms and policy capacity: the Canadian experience Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Jean-Louis Denis,Susan Usher,Johanne Préval
Abstract Recent work on health system strengthening suggests that a combination of leadership and policy capacity is essential to achieve transformation and improvement. Policy capacity and leadership are mutually constitutive but difficult to assemble in a coherent and consistent way. Our paper relies on the nested model of policy capacity to empirically explore how health reformers in seven Canadian
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Contagious inequality: economic disparities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-03-17 Bishoy Louis Zaki,Francesco Nicoli,Ellen Wayenberg,Bram Verschuere
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to consider multiple and often novel perspectives on contemporary policymaking in the context of technically complex, ambiguous, and large-scale crises. In this article, we focus on exploring a territory that remains relatively unchartered on a large scale, namely the relationship between economic inequalities and excess mortality during the COVID-19
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The use of blockchain by international organizations: effectiveness and legitimacy Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-03-08 Georgios Dimitropoulos
Blockchain is a new general-purpose technology that poses significant challenges to policymaking, law, and society. Blockchain is even more distinctive than other transformative technologies, as it is by nature a global technology; moreover, it operates based on a set of rules and principles that have a law-like quality—the lex cryptographia. The global nature of blockchain has led to its adoption
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Hybrid knowledge production and evaluation at the World Bank Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-03-04 Kate Williams
Before problems can be solved, they must be defined. In global public policy, problems are defined in large part by institutions like the World Bank, whose research shapes our collective understanding of social and economic issues. This article examines how research is produced at the World Bank and deemed to be worthwhile and legitimate. Creating and capturing research on global policy problems requires
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Blockchain tools for socio-economic interactions in local communities Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Cristina Viano, Sowelu Avanzo, Monica Cerutti, Alex Cordero, Claudio Schifanella, Guido Boella
Blockchain technology is generating interest in novel applicative fields such as co-production of public services. Our CommonsHood project is a “wallet app” that uses the Blockchain as a tool to support sustainability of the local economy. Its tokenization mechanism allows everyone to create new types of cryptographic tokens on the Blockchain in order to digitalize assets, augment the availability
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The alegality of blockchain technology Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Primavera De Filippi, Morshed Mannan, Wessel Reijers
Similar to the early days of the Internet, today, the effectiveness and applicability of legal regulations are being challenged by the advent of blockchain technology. Yet, unlike the Internet, which has evolved into an increasingly centralized system that was largely brought within the reach of the law, blockchain technology still resists regulation and is thus described by some as being “alegal”
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Covid (In)equalities: labor market protection, health, and residential care in Germany, Sweden, and the UK Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Nick Ellison, Paula Blomqvist, Timo Fleckenstein
How have differently institutionalized welfare regimes dealt with the Covid-19 crisis? In particular, how have they confronted the social and economic inequalities exposed by the virus? Taking three European countries—Germany, Sweden, and the UK, corresponding broadly to conservative-continental, social democratic, and liberal regime types—this paper tracks the virus response in the areas of income
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Inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil: Analyzing un-coordinated responses in social assistance and education Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-02-11 Catarina Ianni Segatto, Fernando Burgos Pimentel dos Santos, Renata Mirandola Bichir, Eliana Lins Morandi
This paper contributes to discussions about subnational responses to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in federal countries. In the scholarship on federalism and public policy, few studies seek to understand the factors that shape subnational differences in welfare levels. This article seeks to better understand this issue in Brazil by exploring how, in a context with little national-level
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Explaining public officials’ opinions on blockchain adoption: a vignette experiment Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Diego Cagigas, Judith Clifton, Daniel Díaz-Fuentes, Marcos Fernández-Gutiérrez, Juan Echevarría-Cuenca, Celia Gilsanz-Gómez
Blockchain is emerging as one of the major disruptive technologies of our times. In the context of public administration, blockchain heralds major transformations of public service provision and has the potential to increase the transparency of, and citizens’ trust in, public administration and its services. However, the introduction of blockchain to public administrations means potentially changing
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COVID-19, poverty reduction, and partisanship in Canada and the United States Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Daniel Béland, Shannon Dinan, Philip Rocco, Alex Waddan
Poor people proved especially vulnerable to economic disruption during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which highlighted the importance of poverty reduction as a policy concern. In this article, we explore the politics of poverty reduction during the COVID-19 crisis in Canada and the United States, two liberal welfare-state regimes where poverty reduction is a key policy issue. We show
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Cultivating health policy capacity through network governance in New Zealand: learning from divergent stories of policy implementation Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Tim Tenbensel, Pushkar Raj Silwal
Wu, Howlett, and Ramesh’s understanding of policy capacity has been used to identify generalizable strengths and weaknesses of specific jurisdictions and policy sectors such as health. In an extension of this work, Howlett and Ramesh have argued that the mode of governance of a policy sector accentuates the importance of specific elements of policy capacity. In this paper we focus on the implementation
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Health policy and COVID-19: path dependency and trajectory Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Azad Singh Bali, Alex Jingwei He, M Ramesh
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has tested the mettle of governments across the globe and has thrown entrenched fault lines within health systems into sharper relief. In response to the outbreak of the pandemic, governments introduced a range of measures to meet the growth in demand and bridge gaps in health systems. The objective of this paper is to understand the nature and extent of
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Long-term policy impacts of the coronavirus: normalization, adaptation, and acceleration in the post-COVID state Policy and Society (IF 10.104) Pub Date : 2022-01-22 Giliberto Capano, Michael Howlett, Darryl S L Jarvis, M Ramesh
This paper offers an analysis of the theoretical and empirical challenges the coronavirus pandemic poses for theories of policy change. Critical events like coronavirus disease are potentially powerful destabilizers that can trigger discontinuity in policy trajectories and thus are an opportunity for accentuating path shifts. In this paper, we argue that three dynamic pathways of change are possible