LIST OF PANELS

Public policy is becoming increasingly confounded by transnational policy challenges. The proliferation of global policy dilemmas - climate change, migration, terrorism and economic instability, and so on - diminishes domestic officials’ capacity to deliver local policy outcomes without some form of international collaboration. This ‘global-local dilemma’ provokes substantial concerns of how policy officials reconcile international and domestic imperatives in managing modern transnational policy challenges, and whether they are adequately equipped to do so.  Public policy scholars predominantly conceptualise international influences on domestic policy via the policy transfer framework, which stresses policy officials’ agency and, especially, ideational propinquity with states with similar cultural, political or legal frameworks. Meanwhile, International Relations scholars tend to favour a ‘global governance’ approach to considering transnational challenges, relinquishing agency in favour of structural imperatives. Although, separately, these two scholarly cohorts offer considerable insights to the domestic and international implications of global policy issues, the overlap and interplay of these perspectives remains relatively unexplored. There are promising avenues of research; for example, in recent years a nascent literature on transgovernmentalism has identified discrete network arrangements between state officials that operate informally to share ideas, policies and expertise on shared policy dilemmas. However, significant questions remain: How do domestic officials understand transnational policy problems? What strategies do they pursue to overcome transnational policy problems? Does international collaboration produce policies without a domestic democratic mandate? This panel welcome papers that address transnational policy dilemmas and/or endeavour to reconcile domestic/international conceptual perspectives on public policy from the fields of public policy, public administration, organization theory, international relations and political science, or any other related field.

This panel seeks to encourage public policy scholars to develop new modes of theorising and researching transnational policy dilemmas, and enhance our awareness of contemporary domestic policy agenda-setting, development and implementation. While public policy scholars are adept at dissecting domestic policy-making processes, the influence of the international domain is generally only articulated in terms of the structural constraints of globalisation; relatively little research has been dedicated to determining how domestic officials influence (and are influenced), interpret (and are interpreted), act (and respond) in the international domain, especially with regard to transnational policy issues. In particular, it will promote conceptual dialogue between Political Science/International Relations communities and offer a platform for researchers with an interest in pioneering public policy models that reconcile both perspectives. To do so, the panel welcomes papers with a conceptual emphasis on transnational policy dilemmas allied to an empirical case study from across political science and public policy sub-fields.