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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on older people, in terms of their susceptibility to the disease and increased fatality rates, while also by creating barriers to health care access, social isolation, psychological and financial burdens. Policy responses provide an opportunity to understand whether the demands of this crisis have led to the development of policy innovations to meet the needs

The aim of this article is to explore the nature of policy change in the domain of public finance (fiscal policy) in the wake of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic as well as for a post-Covid era. It draws upon the literatures of path dependency and ideational change in public policy to consider three broad questions: (1) whether the pandemic really is a critical juncture for policy change;

Policy windows emerge through alignment among specific policy problems, political forces, and proposed policy responses. During policy windows, it becomes possible for change to occur, driven by the agenda-setting of policy entrepreneurs. We consider how the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) created a significant policy window. As we do so, we seek to advance theorization of the conditions under which

Education has been extremely affected by the coronavirus disease crisis, with almost all countries temporarily closing their schools in 2020. After the first stage of the pandemic, in which national governments focused on guaranteeing the academic year’s continuity, key international organizations emphasized the need to adopt structural policy reforms to face the challenges posed by the crisis. Based

The COVID-19 pandemic has revived discussions about universal basic income (UBI) as a potential crisis response. Yet despite favorable circumstances, little actual policy change in this area was observed. This article seeks to explain this absence of policy change and to reflect on the prospects for introducing UBI schemes after the pandemic in European democracies. I argue that public opinion on UBI

The coronavirus pandemic has interrupted labor markets, triggering massive and instant series of experimentations with flexible work arrangements, and new relationships to centralized working environments. These approaches have laid the basis for the “new normal,” likely extending into the organization of work in the post-pandemic era. These new arrangements, especially flexible work arrangements,

The societal and policy transformations associated with the coronavirus disease pandemic are currently subject of intense academic debate. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by adopting a systemic perspective on policy change, shedding light on the hidden and indirect crisis effects. Based on a comprehensive analysis of policy agenda developments in Germany, we find that the pandemic led to

The coronavirus disease pandemic has exposed differences in the capacity of governments around the world to integrate and coordinate different policy instruments into a coherent response. In this article, we conceptualize and empirically examine policy integration in responses to the coronavirus disease crisis in 35 countries. We then discuss how the interplay between restrictions, health protection

This article joins with others in this special issue to examine the evolution of our understanding of how the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic impacted policy ideas and routines across a wide variety of sectors of government activity. Did policy ideas and routines transform as a result of the pandemic or were they merely a continuation of the status quo ante? If they did transform, are the transformations

Crises are often viewed as catalysts for change. The coronavirus disease crisis is no exception. In many policy sectors, proponents of reform see this global crisis both as a justification and an enabler of necessary change. Policy scholars have paid ample attention to this crisis-reform thesis. Empirical research suggests that these proponents of crisis-induced change should not be too optimistic

In a globalizing world, cross-border enforcement networks are rapidly emerging as important mechanisms to tackle illicit transnational markets. As a relatively recent mode of cross-border governance, both the IPE and public policy literatures have only just begun to explore the dynamics and implications of cross-border policy networks in general and security networks in particular. Cross-border enforcement

Globalisation, the ever increasing economic and socio-political international interactions, poses challenges to public policy theory and practice. This paper aims to (a) draw an outline of a discussion and research agenda for theorizing the policy process under globalisation, by (b) identifying some theoretical consensus across disciplines and epistemological paradigms. The literature shows a consensus

As the state has become more susceptible to global pathologies, public policy scholars have found increasingly common ground with their IPE cousins. The development of these relatively young fields of study – increasingly they are sub-disciplines – has been commensurate but rarely intersecting. Yet contemporary maelstroms of global politics, economics, health, and security, span borders with ease,

The first decade of the 21st century recognised the growing salience of transnational or global governance as an analytical field of inquiry and as a normative project. In this introductory article, we argue that IPE offers a wider and deeper contextual understanding of the ‘global’ in a way that the scholarship of international relations, on the one hand, and that of international economics, on the

Critical decolonial assessments of International Political Economy (IPE) curricula have found a continued dominance of Euro-Western perspectives. However, these critical assessments have often been of specific programs or courses. In this article, we open the canvas wider in our quantitative assessment of privilege and marginalization, by conducting an analysis of IPE curricula from universities from

This paper considers the link between policy tools and governance modes – the characteristic ways frontline staff are meta-governed. It asks: Are substantive policy tools coupled to procedural tools (governance modes) that can guide local service delivery agencies and the work of individuals delivering welfare services? The substantive policy tools in this case are those typically utilised to reform

Central banking as an avenue of research has been of interest to scholars from International Political Economy (IPE) and Public Policy and Administration (PPA) disciplines. Nevertheless, there is very little dialogue between these two perspectives to bridge macro, meso, micro-level analyses and examine the reciprocal relationship between the global and domestic political economy context and monetary

Policy tools are a critical part of policy-making, providing the ‘means’ by which policy ‘ends’ are achieved. Knowledge of their different origin, nature and capabilities is vital for understanding policy formulation and decision-making, and they have been the subject of inquiry in many policy-related disciplines and sector-specific studies. Yet many crucial aspects of policy tools remain unexplored

This article considers how nation states steer transnational forums by examining how the Australian government has ‘metagoverned’ the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, a multilateral forum with 50 plus members (nation states and international agencies) that was created in 2002 to promote policy dialogue, information sharing and practical cooperation

As local governments have limited formal powers and less substantive policy instruments at their disposal, they are a particularly rich area for the study of procedural policy tools. This paper examines the role played by procedural policy tools deployed by local governments in Australia around the policy formation for, and approval of, major projects. This research analyses two Australian case studies:

Students of public policy have spent considerable effort setting out the types of policy instruments or tools available to policymakers in different stages of the policy process. A nascent strand of this important work concerns the agend-asetting phase, where scholars aim to understand the instruments – procedural and substantive – that government uses to shape the issues that it has to address. There

Welfare state reform is understood to be risky, difficult and still ongoing. As such, there is a need for analytic tools that can aid understanding of how governments are able to overcome the various barriers they face in seeking change, and the challenges of managing complex and hybridised welfare arrangements. This article argues that the policy tools literature provides several promising avenues

Contemporary research in the policy sciences places effectiveness as the central goal of policy design. This emphasis permeates both micro-level design considerations for specific policy calibrations, as well as more meso-level policy tool and tool mixes. Effective instrument design, therefore, augments the task of looking at individual tools to considering them as tool ‘compounds’, that comprise of

In this article we conceptualise the public inquiry as a procedural tool and address the question of what makes a public inquiry an effective policy instrument. The issue of control is central to our arguments. In our conceptual work, we use control as a means of introducing the concept of the ‘catalytic procedural tool’ to better capture the variance in autonomy, location and function that can be

Procurement has received scholarly attention as a valuable policy tool to reach desired outcomes in society, such as innovation. While interest has grown in analyzing the impact of the ‘substantive’ function of procurement (purchasing of goods and services), procurement is much more than purchases, and most public buyers’ activities are ‘procedural’, as they are aimed at improving the many internal

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new, but recent years have seen a growing concern about the technology’s political, economic and social impact, including debates about its governance. This paper describes how an analysis of the technology’s governance should build on the understanding of AI as the creation of artificial agents, and that the challenge that governance seeks to address is best understood

Climate policy integration (CPI) is a key strategy for implementing climate policy action, spanning policy sectors and levels of governance. As a central agenda-setting actor in the EU, we argue that understanding the institutional capacity for CPI inside the European Commission is especially important for understanding the advancement of CPI in the EU overall. We focus on the inner workings of the

Coordination is a long-term issue for regional policy that has gained traction in academic and practitioner circles in recent years. The capacity challenges of responding to a broadening set of issues that cut across sectoral and administrative boundaries focus attention on regional policy coordination. Various concepts have emerged to study policy coordination processes, but efforts are ongoing to

The rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the intensification in the adoption of AI in domains such as autonomous vehicles, lethal weapon systems, robotics and alike pose serious challenges to governments as they must manage the scale and speed of socio-technical transitions occurring. While there is considerable literature emerging on various aspects of AI, governance of AI is a significantly

Around the world, cities have committed themselves to urban climate action strategies with targets that go beyond those of their national governments. To implement their strategies, cities have embraced a range of alternative governance instruments and approaches (‘governance alternatives’). While they have long been lauded by academics, policymakers, and practitioners for doing so, these ‘frontrunner’

Although policy integration research has been burgeoning over the past decade, numerous blank spots exist in our understanding of the rationale, the policy-making implications and implementation challenges of integrated policy designs. This study aims at improving our knowledge in this field by reflecting on the relevance of administrative capacities for the development and implementation of integrated

Robots are increasingly appearing as a potential answer to the ‘care crisis’ facing a number of countries. Although it is anticipated that many positives will flow from the application of these technologies, they are also likely to generate unexpected consequences and risks. This paper explores the use of robots within disability and aged care settings in the Australian and New Zealand contexts. Informed

Researchers have argued that political parties in government matter for policy integration reforms, but the way they do so remains somewhat undetermined. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by tackling two interrelated open questions: How does the presence of different political parties in government, which rely on policy programs on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, shape the

The issue of institutional capacity has received increased attention in the research on policy integration, bringing about the proliferation of conceptions aimed at capturing the linkage between cross-sectoral aspects of policy designs and the specific attributes that governmental institutions and processes should possess in order to effectively formulate and implement integrated policies. This article