LIST OF PANELS

Although there is a flourishing body of literature on policy processes, the main focus is on western democracies (Jones et al., 2016). English-language studies that apply existing theories to non-western non-democracies remain limited in number and scope. As a result, the extent to which existing policy process theories can be used to explain policy change in non-democracies remains unclear. In our globalized world, domestic issues can easily travel to other parts of the world. COVID-19 is just one example of this. Therefore, it is pivotal to better understand policy making across the world, not just in democracies. The multiple streams framework (Kingdon, 1984; Zahariadis, 1999, 2007b, 2014) is a case in point: despite it being one of the most popular theories of the policy process (Jones et al., 2016), existing literature almost exclusively focuses on democracies, especially on democracies with advanced economies (Herweg et al., 2017; Jones et al., 2016; Zohlnhöfer et al., 2015). Jones et al. (2016) identified only a handful of English language applications in non-democracies, including Iran, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates, and China. Very few attempts have been made to systematically scrutinize its applicability to non-democracies with the aim of contributing to recent theory developments. As a result, it is unclear to what extent the multiple streams framework (MSF) can be used to explain policy change in non-democracies. This research gap has also been noted by Herweg et al. (2017), who explicitly encourage scholars to adapt the framework to and test it in nondemocratic contexts. In response, the aim of this panel is to explore the applicability of the multiple streams framework to non-democracies. Key questions are the extent to which the framework needs to be adjusted in order to fit non-democratic contexts and how any such adjustments are best made and how an adjusted framework is best tested. Another relevant question is how to execute such studies given the different research environment of non-democracies and potential obstacles in data collection. Answering these questions will not only contribute to a better understanding of policy making in non-democracies, but also has the potential to contribute to MSF theory development. References Herweg, Nicole, Nikolaos Zahariadis, and Reimut Zohlnhöfer. 2017. "The Multiple Streams Framework: Foundations, Refinements, and Empirical Applications." In Theories of the Policy Process, edited by Christopher M. Weible and Paul A. Sabatier. 4th ed., 17-54. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Jones, Michael D., Holly L. Peterson, Jonathan J. Pierce, Nicole Herweg, Amiel Bernal, Holly Lamberta Raney, and Nikolaos Zahariadis. 2016. "A River Runs through it: A Multiple Streams Meta-Review." Policy Studies Journal 44 (1): 13-36. Kingdon, J. W. (1984). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies. Little, Brown. Zahariadis, N. (1999). Ambiguity, Time, and Multiple Streams. In Theories of the Policy Process (pp. 73–93). Westview. Zahariadis, N. (2007). The Multiple Streams Framework. Structure, limitations, prospects. In P. A. Sabatier (Ed.), Theories of the policy process (2nd ed., pp. 65–92). Westview Press. Zahariadis, N. (2014). Ambiguity and Multiple Streams. In Theories of the policy process (3rd ed., pp. 25–58). Westview. Zohlnhöfer, R., Herweg, N., & Rüb, F. (2015). Theoretically refining the multiple streams framework: An introduction. European Journal of Political Research, 54(3), 412–418. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12102

The Advocacy Coalition Framework: Rising to Contemporary Challenges Given the changes in the world from the global pandemic, political strife, and growing inequalities and inequities, this panel seeks papers that take on these challenges and many more with the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). This panel seeks papers on the ACF that advance our understanding of contemporary issues and the approach itself. This includes papers that might focus on innovations in the following areas: 1. Advancing the ACF theoretical, possibly in existing strengths of coalitions, learning, and policy change, but also in many others, from questions involving stories, framing contests, and blame games to understanding instances of collaborations and conflicts. 2. Advancing the ACF methodologically, this might span from qualitative to quantitative approaches embracing a variety of epistemological and ontological assumptions. 3. Informing contemporary challenges, from the pandemic to economic, political and social inequities. 4. Tackling normative questions, such as how the ACF can be used to advance democratic ideas, reveal relationships of power, inform topics of policy successes/failures, and be used in political advocacy. 5. Promoting comparative questions that span space and time. This might include questions about how coalitions, learning, and policy change compare between countries and across topics. 6. Applying the ACF in rarely applied settings and topics, such as applications outside western democracies. 7. Exploring the insights of the ACF in contexts of crises response and management, from catastrophic climate events to pandemics.

Traditionally public policy analysis has been producing concepts, methods and theories considering phenomena that occur inside State jurisdictions. However, with the increase of globalization, international learning processes among governments and practices of formal and informal cooperation to address solutions to public problems, required new analytical tools to capture the reality of "public policies beyond the state" (Moloney and Stone, 2019). In fact, an important part of contemporary public policy-making includes both international and domestic logics, as processes of transnational transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Hadjiisky et al., 2017; Stone et al., 2019), global agenda setting (as the New Urban Agenda, 2030 Agenda or the Paris Agreement), the implementation of sectoral programs of international organizations as the World Bank and United Nations Specialized Agencies, development cooperation assistance carried by different types of donors, city networks actions, among others. The coronavirus global pandemic made the connection between the national and the international even more flagrant. Certainly the pandemic represented a pathbreaking event in public policy-making and policy analysis. A few dimensions of this reality are worth noting: - The tension between single countries' responses to fight against Covid-19 and the global recommendation of international organizations such as the World Health Organization, as well as other sectoral institutions. This complexity also was extended to subnational governments, where in certain countries, as Brazil for example, were fighting the pandemic by their own means. - The dimension of “cooperation and competition” among governments using their policies to show off and distinguish from others, as shows examples in Latin American countries (Chile and Argentina). In addition, international and regional organizations are living a critical moment. The World Health Organization has been under attack for its actions by countries such as the United States. The European Union dealt with the pandemic during a fragmentation crisis and Latin American organizations were discredited and had a very limited role during the pandemic, as Unasur and Prosur. - It is also possible to observe various processes of translation of the same type of policies. If basic income became a worldwide response to tackle social and economic issues during the pandemic, countries have designed very diverse alternatives to deliver cash transfer, food or other supplies to families. - Paradoxically if states globalizations made states strictly intertwined, policy transfer coordination to address responses to the global pandemic seemed to be low and disorganized. - Under circumstances where meetings, summits, workshops, etc. became impossible due to social distancing, Zoom-diplomacy arose and transnational policy transfers and learning became “indirect”, rather than using direct strategies of transmissions. An ensemble of questions are important to be addressed in order to understand contemporary policies beyond the states: What are the practices, means and dynamics of formal and informal international cooperation in the production of public policies? What is the role of policy transfer in international public policy-making? Why and in which ways policies are translated from one context to another? How international and global coordination is performed and what is its impact on public policy-making?

Cochaired by ESAP-Colombia (www.esap.edu.co), GIGAPP Policy Research Network (www.gigapp.org) and FLACSO-México (www.flacso.edu.mx), and with the support of Prof. Juan Guillermo Vieira (U.A. Manizales and ESAP), this panel aims to explore the study of public policy change (PC for short) in Latin America, with special focus to the most important contextual factors that explain it. It also focus on relevance and limits of mainstream theoretical frameworks used to advancing policy change analysis for the region. So, we consider relevant to advance this debate and to moving forward in consolidating a related research agenda. Some years ago, important efforts have been made to bring the issue into debate. Based on a comparative perspective, Fontaine (2015) and Fontaine et al. (2018) led the publication of two special issues on the topic PC in Latin America. More recently, del Castillo and Dussauge (2020) publish a collective work (in spanish language) about theoretical approaches for public policy, in which PC posits as a central topic. In moving forward and reacting to those scholars and researchers previous efforts, we consider necessary to advance this debate and follow Velasco’s recommendation (2016) about the need to advance in the definition of a coordinated regional research objectives over this topic, and in defining the rudiments of a more stable research program. This need to be based on systematic case studies analysis and making possible a more focused theoretical dialogue around relevant regional specific topics on policy change. Research questions are: - What is the role of context and how it shapes policy stability and change processes in Latin America? - Which are the specific factors or variables of change to explain specific policy sectorial dynamics, mechanisms, and policy trajectories in the region? - Which is the applicability, usefulness, limitations and contributions of mainstream policy change theories for Latin American countries? ______________________________ References - Capano, G. (2009). Understanding Policy Change as an Epistemological and Theoretical Problem. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 11(1), 7–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13876980802648284 - del Castillo, G., & Dussauge, M. (Eds.). (2020). Introducción, en Enfoques teóricos de políticas públicas: Desarrollos contemporáneos para América Latina (1a ed.). FLACSO México. - Horowitz, D. L. (1989). "Is there a third-world policy process?" Policy Sciences, 22, 197-212. - Stewart, J. (2006). "Value Conflict and Policy Change." The Review of Policy Research, 23(1), 183-195. - Torgerson, D. (1985). "Contextual Orientation in Policy Analysis: the contribution of Harold D. Lasswell." Policy Sciences(18), 141-161. - Velasco, María: Dossier Cambio de políticas en América Latina: ampliando el debate Journal Íconos. (#54, 2016) Weible, C. M., & Cairney, P. (2020, June 19). Policy change. Paul Cairney: Politics & Public Policy. https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/tag/policy-change/ Journal special issues - Journal Íconos. (#53, 2015) Dossier "Lessons from Latin America on the rational, cognitive and institutional dimensions of policy change". - Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice (Vol. 20, issue 2, 2018) Dossier "Policy change in Latin America: A case for comparative theory-building and theory-testing.”

Creating an environment of trust is essential for successful policy making as the implementation of government policies and programmes depends on behavioural responses from the public. Trust is equally important for organizational contexts as it increases competitiveness by lowering transaction and compliance costs. Trust influences the relationship between citizen, government, and organizations which in turn has an impact on the outcomes of public policy. In many ways socio-economic and administrative policies of different countries are entirely depends on trust. The high level of integrity, openness and fairness of organizations are strong predictors of public trust. Further, the competence in government and its reliability and responsiveness to deliver the public services and anticipating new needs are important for boosting trust in institutions. The trust among citizen on government and different public institutions have plummeted in both developed and developing countries. Hence, the research question arises - How trust can be enhanced among citizens towards government and public institutions through robust, resilient and effective public policy for upliftment of marginalized and downtrodden sections from poverty and inequality? This panel defines the level of trustworthiness of the public policymaker towards citizen as a major factor in the policy making process. Trustworthy behaviour of citizens are important element in determining the level of trust that public policymakers possess towards them. The ability, benevolence, and integrity of citizens comprises the indicator of their trustworthiness. At the same time, perceptions and judgments about the trustworthiness of citizens are affected by diverse interactions and role played by the public policymakers. The interaction between public policy makers with the citizens needs to be carefully analyzed through the institutional mechanisms of interaction and the group characteristics of citizens. The panel aims to discuss various roles of trust in countries policy making process and to collect both theoretical and empirical papers which will explore different expression of citizens and employees trust and distrust to their government and organizations and its impact on policy outcome. The objective of the panel is to analyze the linkage between trust among citizens towards governance institutions in policy making process. This panel will explore as how the trust in institution is defined, measured and influenced people’s attitudes and responses to public policies.

This panel is to discuss new developments in research applying the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to policy processes. Developed in the USA within the last 15 years, the NPF has started to gain traction also in research from other world regions, investigating a plethora of policy fields with a diverse set of methodologies (e.g. Huda, 2019; McBeth & Lybecker, 2018; Weible, Olofsson, Costie, Katz, & Heikkila, 2016; Merry 2016; Jones 2014; Shanahan et al. 2013). Neuroscience has long acknowledged the central role of narratives for human cognition. The NPF takes up this finding by explicitly conceptualizing the human being as a homo narrans, i.e. as individual that uses narratives both to make sense and memorize information and to relate it to others. The NPF enables researchers to understand the dynamics of policy making by investigating narrative structure and narrative content (Jones and McBeth 2010). The framework defines narrative structure consisting of setting, characters, plot, and moral of the story that can be studied and compared systematically and empirically (Shanahan et al., 2017; Shanahan, Jones, & McBeth, 2011). Recurring character types are the victim suffering from a policy problem, the villain causing the problem, and the hero solving it (Shanahan et al., 2017). According to the NPF, policy actors use narrative content in a strategic way to reach their policy goals. Based on various hypotheses, such as the devil-angel-shift or the scope of conflict, the framework claims that these content-related narrative elements can also be studied using systematic empirical approaches (Jones and McBeth 2010; for studies of the NPF hypotheses cf. for instance Brewer, 2019; Shanahan et al., 2017; Shanahan, Jones, McBeth, & Lane, 2013). The goal of this panel is to enable discussions on new developments around the NPF. With the NPF still being a relatively young theory of the policy process, many research gaps remain to be filled (cf. also Shanahan et al. in C. M. Weible & P. A. Sabatier (Eds.), Theories of the policy process, pp. 173–213). Research topics may include (but are not restricted to): · Comparative analyses applying the NPF · Transferability of the NPF to new contexts · Investigating macro-level narratives · Exploring the role of institutions in the NPF · Extension of NPF applications to post decision-making processes, e.g. policy implementation or evaluation

Policy process research provides different theoretical perspectives on the link between individual or collective policy actors and policy output. Thereby, the existing frameworks base on divergent assumptions, ranging from psychological roots of belief systems (Jenkins-Smith et al. 2017), ambiguity and time constraints (Herweg, Zahariadis, and Zohlnhöfer 2017), and social identities (Hornung, Bandelow, and Vogeler 2019) to theoretical propositions of how policy actors’ preferences and motivation impact collective action and coalition formation and of the specific link between actors and policy-making. In doing so, each framework presents a unique view on actors and their role in policy processes. The proposed panel seeks to refine and elaborate on these actor-centered foundations, with the aim of theoretically and empirically advancing insights into the preferences, motivations, and perceptions of individual and collective actors in policy processes. What are the drivers of their preferences and motivations? How do these influence their behavior? Which challenges and opportunities do group dynamics and cognitive constraints provide for changing policies? In what way are processes on the individual and group level of actor constellations linked to policy processes and policy change? Answers to such questions can be given with reference to individual actors as policy entrepreneurs (Petridou and Mintrom 2020), boundary spanners (Brandenberger et al. 2020), or members of policy networks subject to policy learning (Howlett, Mukherjee, and Koppenjan 2017; Heikkila, Weible, and Gerlak 2020). They can likewise focus on collective actors, such as advocacy coalitions (Weible et al. 2019) or programmatic groups (Hassenteufel and Genieys 2020; Bandelow, Hornung, and Smyrl 2020). Both theoretical and empirical contributions with an explicit actor focus are welcome. Bandelow, N.C., Hornung, J., and Smyrl, M. (2020) Theoretical Foundations of the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF). European Policy Analysis.Brandenberger, L., Ingold, K., Fischer, M., Schläpfer, I., and Leifeld, P. (2020) Boundary Spanning Through Engagement of Policy Actors in Multiple Issues. Policy Studies Journal.Hassenteufel, P. and Genieys, W. (2020) The Programmatic Action Framework: An Empirical Assessment.European Policy Analysis.Heikkila, T., Weible, C., and Gerlak, A.K. (2020) When Does Science Persuade (or Not Persuade) in High Conflict Policy Contexts?. Public Administration.Herweg, N., Zahariadis, N., and Zohlnhöfer, R. (2017) The Multiple Streams Framework: Foundations, Refinements, and Empirical Applications, in C.M. Weible and P.A. Sabatier (eds.), Theories of the Policy Process.Hornung, J., Bandelow, N.C., and Vogeler, C.S. (2019) 'Social Identities in the Policy Process'. Policy Sciences.Howlett, M., Mukherjee, I., and Koppenjan, J. (2017) Policy Learning and Policy Networks in Theory and Practice: the Role of Policy Brokers in the Indonesian Biodiesel Policy Network. Policy and Society.Jenkins-Smith, H.C., Nohrstedt, D., Weible, C.M., and Ingold, K. (2017) The Advocacy Coalition Framework: An Overview of the Research Program, in C.M. Weible and P.A. Sabatier (eds.), Theories of the Policy Process.Petridou, E. and Mintrom, M. (2020) A Research Agenda for the Study of Policy Entrepreneurs. Policy Studies Journal.Weible, C.M., Ingold, K., Nohrstedt, D., Henry, A.D., and Jenkins-Smith, H.C. (2019) Sharpening Advocacy Coalitions. Policy Studies Journal.

The Multiple Streams Framework: Theoretical refinements and empirical applications Since John W. Kingdon published his seminal book Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies in 1984, researchers applied the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) extensively and at an increasing rate over time. However, since the mid-2010s, the way researchers use the framework has started to change. Whereas earlier MSF applications were only cursory or just referred to single key elements, an increasing share of the academic debate now focuses on how to refine the framework theoretically and how to apply it fully in different settings, covering various stages of the policy process and using different methods. The panel aims at promoting this more recent research practice by focusing on papers that contribute to any or a combination of the following aspects: (1) Furthering the framework‘s theoretical and definitional refinement Researchers must define and operationalize precisely the framework’s key elements and hypotheses (e.g., how do we capture empirically whether the political stream is ready for coupling?). But there are still aspects that have not yet received proper scholarly attention, such as how particular institutional configurations alter, confirm, or refute the elements, logic, or hypotheses of the MSF, especially in applications that go beyond agenda-setting. (2) Conducting systematic empirical analyses MSF research has produced several hypotheses. However, systematic tests of these hypotheses are still pending. Therefore, the panel seeks to stimulate the testing of existing or newly derived MSF hypotheses. (3) Complementing qualitative with quantitative techniques The overwhelming majority of MSF applications are case studies. Only a few contributions have addressed the question of how to test the framework quantitatively. We welcome quantitative applications that move forward the academic debate on medium-to-large N research. (4) Adapting and applying the MSF beyond traditional applications in developed country environments Because Kingdon derived the MSF from agenda-setting processes at the federal level in the United States, transferring it to developing countries or nondemocratic regimes requires theoretical adaptations and possible modifications. We welcome proposals that apply the framework to policymaking in developing countries or go beyond the nation-state level, such as the European Union or international organizations.

If the constructivist and the pragmatist approaches play, for a long time, a major role in different social sciences, especially in sociology, they continue to be poorly taken into account in most of the public policy literature. Paradoxically, the pragmatist approach has largely influenced the origin of the discipline (Dunn, 2019): for example Lasswell quotes frequently Dewey. In our view the pragmatist core idea that the best way to understand concepts is not to define them but to observe them "in action" can be largely applied to the public policy field, which started with studies on "Governement and State "in action". The influence of constructivism is also obvious in the problem framing and agenda-setting literature. We consider that, in a constructivist perspective policy, scholars need to observe the definitional work of actors to understand the formulation of a public problem and to grasp its contentious diffusion in the mediatic and governmental agendas. If there is are a lot of declinaison, Our general objective is not to not to reduce the diversity of constructivist and/or pragmatist approaches in social sciences but to see how they can be helpful in reconsidering the empirical observation and the understanding of the policy process. Aiming to join researchers who work on constructivist and/or pragmatist approaches, the workshop wants to develop fruitful discussions and debates in order to trigger the emergence of a new international dynamic. If the positivist approaches, which are largely dominant the US literature, are more focused on "explaining" the policy process through variation of external "variables", the main idea of the constructivist and pragmatist approaches is to understand the process in action by taking seriously into account the reflexivity of the actors involved in the definition of the world they want to act on and of the public policy they want to change. We focus on the role of specific actors in the building of collective action to support a problem definition or a policy proposal, and on struggles between them to impose a specific problem on the public agenda or one proposal in the governmental one. Mobilizing different traditions coming from other disciplines, like the pragmatist philosophy of Dewey, James and Pierce, the constructivist approaches in the sociology of Berger and Luckman, Becker, Goffman, and the pragmatist one of Boltanski or Latour, the workshop proposes to elaborate a large contribution for the policy field. This workshop has for ambition to combine this diversity in the building of a new approach on the policy process. It proposes to highlight some fundamental questions about the theoretical, conceptual and methodological foundations of this approach. We specifically want to shed the light on some main questions like how to grasp together the definitional work, the multiple configuration of collective action and the multiple constraints imposed by the configuration of the arenas where public debates takes place. Finally we also try to reconsider the questions of power and domination in this approach.

This workshop calls for research into the past, present, and future of policy entrepreneurship. Research in policy entrepreneurship can be traced back to preeminent political scientists such as Ostrom (1965), William Riker (1982, 1986), the multiple streams framework of Kingdon (1984/2003) and Zahariadis (see, for example, 2007 and 2014). Recent efforts have adapted classical theories to entrepreneurship in public affairs (Mintrom and Vergari 1996, Shockley 2008, Sheingate 2003). Many policy process theories rely on some conception of policy entrepreneurship (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, Carpenter 2001, Ingram and Ullery 1980). Mintrom and Norman (2009) outlined a set of directions for the scholarship of policy entrepreneurship, noting that “[f]urther work to integrate policy entrepreneurship into mainstream theorizations of policy change holds the potential of changing our notions of the mainstream itself” (p. 663). This workshop seeks to clarify, deepen, extend, or update its use from a theoretical and practical perspective. One theme of this workshop is that policy entrepreneurship can be seen as ubiquitous in all human political endeavors. Another theme is that policy entrepreneurship emphasizes not only the descriptive power of identifying individual policy entrepreneurs (Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Young 1971, Doig and Hargrove 1987, e.g., Carpenter 2001) but also the explanatory power of entrepreneurship in public policy (Sheingate 2003). For this workshop we would seek papers to amplify both of these themes. Specifying the function of policy entrepreneurship in the policy process – and the different models of the policy process – is a key objective of the workshop. Another theme of policy change is identified by Petridou (2014). She concluded that policy entrepreneurship is a stand-alone lens which can be used to understand policy change. It has been used in multiple sectors (see for example, David, 2015; Olsson and Hysing, 2012; Petridou and Sparf, 2018) in non-Western environments (Hammond, 2013; Meydani, 2015) and in conjunction with social network analysis (Christopoulos, 2006; Christopoulos and Ingold, 2015). Exploring policy change is a third theme of the workshop. A fourth theme is that of the relationship between, on the one hand, policy entrepreneurship and, on the other, power and legitimacy. In conjunction with research at the micro level in the motives of policy entrepreneurs and their goals we stand to gain normative insights the role of entrepreneurial agency as an instrument of political power. The future of policy entrepreneurship necessitates taking stock and setting an updated research agenda for the future. First, perhaps more attention to policy entrepreneurship as a theoretical framework rather vis-à-vis the policy entrepreneur is needed. Additionally, the conceptual interrelations of entrepreneurship and leadership are not yet exhaustively theorized. Addressing the past, present, and future of policy entrepreneurship, this workshop seeks to explore these themes at a minimum.

Like much of the rest of the world, the coronavirus pandemic has already seriously impacted society, economies, and politics across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region already struggling with the effects of a decade of uprisings, failed or difficult political transitions, state collapses, civil war and international conflict. Most MENA countries have struggled to provide adequate health services and income support to their most vulnerable populations. MENA countries in conflict (Libya, Syria, and Yemen) are in a particularly precarious situation, as are fragile states such as Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and Palestine. Other MENA countries, such as Lebanon, Iran, and Algeria, are experiencing political crises or financial constraints that limit their ability to provide needed public services. Many states also have refugee populations who suffer from gaps in coverage. Even stable countries, such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia, are struggling to meet public needs. The pandemic has exposed and magnified these institutional weaknesses across the region. Indeed, the pandemic presents a unique “stress test” of MENA countries’ various institutional conditions and governance constraints. It presents an opportunity to explore institutional responses and coping mechanisms that might allow policymakers to improve service delivery. It also presents an opportunity for policymakers and the international community to examine which capacity deficits are truly structural and which might be overcome through a combination of technical assistance and political will. This workshop will provide a space for dialogue and discussion on current knowledge about the origins, development, and challenges of social problems in the MENA region; discuss state policies that attempt to address the challenges that face societies in the region, as well as the implications of the pandemic and government responses to COVID19.

The Political Economy of Public Policy: Bringing New Models and Methods in At its start, the study of public policy lacked unity, reflecting on the nature of the topic itself (John 2003). One major strand focused on the differences across policies: different instruments, different constraints and opportunities etc. The result was a descriptive study of public policy (e.g., policy taxonomies). The other strand was more concerned with the support of specific policies and their evaluation. The goal in this case was more normative, than analytical (Birkland 2015). In the 1970s, public policy students became more concerned with explaining public policy, instead of categorising or evaluating it. Public policy theories started to emerge. Some theories focused on how ideas spread across countries and enter the political agenda (Hall 1993). Others were more concerned with the role of societal actors and their interaction with the public sector (Maass 1951). Others again studied the role of socio-economic change. Despite their focus on explaining public policy, these strands focused on single factors. In the 1990s, the so called ‘synthetic approaches’ emerged, emphasising that ideas, socio-economic factors and policy networks interact with each other and affect policy dynamics: the multiple stream approach (Kingdon 1995), the advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993) and the punctuated equilibrium theory (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). These approaches have dominated the discipline ever since, despite calls for an institutionalist/comparative turn. In order to move the discipline forward, this panel seeks to capitalise on a recent trend in public policy: the use of economic models and methods that have already been applied to the study of international relations (IR) and comparative politics (John 2018). In the last decades, comparative politics and IR have embraced the use of advanced data gathering methods and statistical models. The use of text data has expanded rapidly in recent years (Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson 2011; Lucas et al. 2015), with major examples including the detection of legislative agendas or topics and estimating the ideological positions of parties or single legislators. Attention in this area has recently moved from supervised approaches to unsupervised approaches, most notably machine learning. Also, the use of quasi-experimental research designs, such as natural experiments, instrumental variable approaches, difference-in-difference approaches etc., structural equations and spatial regression models has become common practice in comparative politics and IR. Finally, we have witnessed an increasing use of game theoretic models to drive the study of parties, voting behaviour, conflict and so on. In the past years, some work has started to use these models and methods to study public policy topics. For instance, Bertelli and John (2012) use an economic theory of investment and Monte Carlo simulation to study uncertainty in policy prioritization in the UK. Kreppel and Oztas (2017) use a veto player model to study agenda setting in the EU. König and Mäder (2014) look at policy implementation in the EU with a strategic game between a central monitoring agency and multiple implementers. Vannoni et al. (2020) apply Natural Language Process (NLP) techniques to study the degree of control legislators leave to bureaucrats and executives in policy implementation.

Recent developments of smart cities around the world and in China have heightened both scholarly and public attention to the issues of trust and transparency. A smart city (sometimes known as the digital city) describes a city that incorporates information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance the quality and performance of public services (Courtant & Le Galès, 2019). The smart city also links with processes of co-creation, a concept often coupled with the use of new technologies (Carayannis and Campbell, 2009; Leydesdorff and Zawdie, 2010; Bovaird, 2007). Meanwhile, trust (and its corollary mistrust), which lies at the heart of debates regarding contemporary governance, has long been identified as an essential component of social, economic and political life. The general context in the vast literature is one of decline in trust, which affects the main domains of trust identified by Zmerli and Newton (2011), namely the inter-personal, social and institutional dimensions. Trust in the equity, transparency and neutrality of a public policy lies at its foundation as a public good. The panel is centred around one central and two complementary research questions: · Is Trust a precondition for effective public policy? The OECD (2017, p.3), notably, has argued that ‘governments cannot function effectively without the trust of citizens, nor can they successfully carry out public policies, notably more ambitious reform agendas.’ Our first hypothesis is that a broad-based thin trust is a condition for effective public policy · Is trust enhanced as a result of more open forms of urban government in the Smart City? Our second hypothesis is the optimistic one that technology is the hand maiden of more participatory forms of urban governance. · Do Smart City dynamics undermine trust, on account of intrusive transparency? Our third hypothesis it the dystopian one that the Smart city undermines rights to confidentiality by commodifying data and introduces a new form of technological fracture amongst citizens. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this panel is dedicated to showcasing various dimensions of the Smart City from diverse perspectives and contributes to theoretical elaboration and empirical enrichment for smart governance. The panel title links multi-disciplinary debates that have particular purchase at the level of urban politics to the question of the Smart City. Rather than primarily involving a narrow set of technical issues, debates over the digital city get to the heart of the public sphere, as they involve public-private interactions, trans-national learning, public debates and ethical dilemmas: in sum, all matters of interdisciplinary social scientific inquiry.

In the classical understanding of Public Policy, policies are the solution and not the problem. Public policies are developed in an attempt to respond to political problems – irrespective of how these problems are perceived and defined. Policies are designed to make our lives better. They reflect societal progress and modernization. Most citizens are happy not to live in a country that still trusts in the social policies of the 1870s, or the environmental policies of the 1950s. Although this does not exclude that policies might be ill-designed or badly implemented, it does not challenge the implicit baseline assumption that adopting new policies in a context of conflicting interests and institutional constraints on decision-making is per se is a virtue rather than a vice. Put simply, as already stated by Lindblom, a good policy is one that is agreed upon. Yet, this view overlooks that, at least in the long run, policies might make things worse rather than better. Policies may indeed be the problem rather than the solution and have the potential to undermine the legitimacy of modern democracies. One important source of such effects emerges from phenomena like policy accumulation, policy layering, rule growth, or policy complexity. Because the dismantling and termination of existing policies is highly unattractive from the perspective of vote-seeking politicians, policies pile up in modern democracies. Governments constantly produce more policies and rules than they abolish, leading to ever-growing and increasingly complex policy stocks. This is in turn has profound implications: constrained implementation capacities might be overburdened, a rational discourse on the pros and cons of certain policies is increasingly difficult in view of multiple policy interactions within complex policy stocks, and, as a result of these interactions, clear cause-effect attributions and hence policy evaluation is more and more difficult. These developments hence might undermine both the output and input legitimacy of modern democracies.Against this backdrop, this panel seeks to address these policy-induced challenges more generally. We welcome papers that study the unintended consequences of policy production (emerging, for example, from policy growth, policy complexity or other sources) and analyze how these effects challenge the legitimacy of modern democracies. We look for contributions that adopt a more long-term and aggregate perspective in order to systematically assess the above questions.

The nature of agri-food policy making has changed over the last three decades. An increasing variety of links and spillovers between agricultural and food policies with other policy domains poses new issues on the agri-food policy agenda. A defining characteristic of current food and agricultural policies are cross-sectoral arrangements that constitute new policy inter-linkages between agri-food issues and other policy domains like environment, climate change, energy, water, health, bio-technology, development, trade, security, international politics, and migration. Policy inter-linkages have created various challenges for policy integration. They are situated either within an already existing landscape of sectoral institutions in which the policy agenda expands, or certain policy aspects become internationalized. New domestic and global policy actors have been mobilized and now become more important players. This has led to new policy alliances being formed and new ideas being brought into cross-sectoral governance. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis reinforces these trends, facilitating issue politicization and de-politicization dynamics and different types and degrees of agri-food policy change. In the process, the agricultural sector has lost its privileged position as an exceptional sector. In the past, agriculture was considered a special economic domain in need of special care. Public policies were aimed to provide affordable food for all while farmers could obtain a steady and sufficient income. Since the mid-1980s the exceptional position has increasingly come under scrutiny. The externality effects of the farm policies, such as environmental damage, carbon emissions from farm production and trade distortions, led some to suggest that agriculture should instead be considered an industry operating in a fashion similar to those of other industries. Over the recent two or three decades the nature of policy making in the agricultural and food sector has gradually changed and challenged the compartmentalized style of policy making and its sector-specific, exceptionalist legitimation, ushering in new, post-exceptionalist policy constellations (Daugbjerg/Feindt 2017). The puzzle we explore in this panel is how post-exceptionalism, or new types of exceptionalism in agriculture and food policy and politics take shape and how such phenomena can be approached theoretically, analytically and methodologically. The ways in which cross-sectoral food and agricultural governance unfolds are not well understood. Decompartmentalization, inter-linkages with other policy domains, politicization, internationalization and reframing of policy issues associated with post-exceptionalism challenge established analytical and theoretical approaches to studying food and agricultural policy and politics. There is an increasing demand for (comparative) policy research on the relationships among the components of cross-sectoral governance arrangements and their potential for policy integration resulting in coordinated and coherent sets of policies. This panel invites papers that study the nature, extent and effects of recent trends in food and agricultural policies and politics. It especially welcomes papers that develop innovative analytical approaches that reflect the more complex and fluid nature of the policy field and contribute to explaining how and why the new food and agricultural policies are shaped and interlinked with other policy domains. KEY WORDS: Agri-Food Policy, Environmental Policy, Globalization, Nexus Governance, Policy Analysis, Policy Inter-linkages

This panel focuses on the political dynamics underlying higher education, research and innovation policies. Today, an increasing number of countries are characterized by or attempting to become what has been described as knowledge economies or knowledge societies. As a part of this process, the societal relevance as well as political salience of policies focusing on higher education, research or innovation is increasing. Moreover, as policy problems in other policy areas are becoming more complex, higher education, research and innovation policies are increasingly expected to deliver policy solutions to challenges such as battling climate change, finding vaccines for pandemic viruses or creating more inclusive societies. This process not only increases the importance of universities as the main organizations responsible for fulfilling these tasks, but also creates the possibility for other actors to enter the policy arena. These developments have led some scholars to characterize policy-making in higher education, research and innovation policies to be increasingly complex as it takes place in a multi-level, multi-actor and multi-issue environment (Chou et al. 2017). These new conditions for policy-making pose questions regarding the way in which policy is made in this area and what kind of policy-making dynamics can be observed. In discussing recent dynamics in higher education, research and innovation policies, the panel focuses on three key aspects of policy-making. First, a focus on actors in the policy field is based on the observation that there has been an increasing diversity in the group of relevant actors especially as higher education, research and innovation policies become more important also for debates in other policy sectors. Second, these actors interact in different national policy-making structures, which themselves are objects to change due to governance reforms as well as shifting arenas in which higher education, research and innovation policies are debated. Finally, these developments also open up for changes on policy-making processes as actors have to navigate these structures to come to a desired policy outcome. In this context, this panel focuses on actors, structures and processes in higher education, research and innovation policy-making treated either separately or in combination. Moreover, contributions use an international comparative perspective that allows highlighting both context-sensitive as well as more general aspects of policy-making dynamics in this policy field. Papers should be based on empirical analyses using either quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approaches, and reflect also on the relevance of their specific results in a global perspective. Contributions can use different conceptual lenses form political science, public policy, public administration or related disciplines.

Within most countries, there is substantial diversity in children’s family experiences. A growing number of children have experienced their parents’ separation and an increasing number of these children are splitting time between both parental homes, while others live primarily with one parent. Many children whose parents separate then experience their parents’ re-partnering, bringing new potential earners and/or caregivers and perhaps new children into their lives. Another dimension of diversity is that many children around the world live in extended-family households for either short or longer periods of time. Moreover, these family changes are not uniformly experienced, but many are especially important for those with lower socioeconomic status. Many social policies intended to help families were initiated during a period in which stable nuclear families with a breadwinning husband and caregiving wife were seen to be the norm. Have these policies been adapted to fit contemporary family patterns? What are a country’s family patterns, and are their current family policies working well in light of these patterns? It is important for parents and children living in non-traditional family settings to have access to social protections that suit their family arrangements. Research across various countries does describe patterns of fertility, partnership dissolution, and children’s living arrangements after parental separation. There is also an evaluation literature that describes general family policies across countries and provides overviews of how they are working. But there is substantially less work that examines how policies work for those with different family patterns. How do income support programs work when children split time across families? Who is responsible for providing for children when a parent has had children with multiple partners? If a parent’s new partner is acting as a parent even though they are not the biological parent, should they be able to take some parental leave? Do the resources and needs of co-residing kin factor into benefits? The overarching research questions for this panel are whether countries adapt their family policies in light of contemporary family patterns and how their policies are working for diverse family forms. Paper proposals could explore the following hypotheses (or related ones): (a) the extent to which a country has adapted or instituted policy that reflects diverse families is related to the degree of family change within that country, the level of gender equality, and ideologies about family; (b) policies that focus on individuals rather than families as the unit of analysis are more effective at supporting a broad array of family forms; (c) policies are less effective when they do not match what a country’s family patterns actually are (i.e., countries whose policies do not provide cohabiting couples with equal rights to married couples may experience more difficulties if they have high rates of cohabitation.

Recent decades have seen a series of contributions from political science and sociology on the subject of “policy change”. In the current context of economic, institutional and cultural crisis, the public policy analysis need - more than before - "multivariable" approaches to consider the different perspectives and to better understand the reality studied. On the one hand, the cognitive approach of public policies proposes a model based on a radical paradigm change to explain how the policy changes over time (Hall,1993). An analysis based only on the cognitive criteria, however, has shown its limits. Hall’s paradigm model could not explain entirely the gradual changes in the cognitive perspectives of public policies. Hogan and Howlett (2015) argue that this model structures and limits how policies are developed and wonder if this happens as a discursive process of trial and error, something similar to the Carstensen’s concept of “policy bricolage” (2011). Therefore, this approach should be integrated with theories and approaches that explain how public policy evolves in a more incremental way. On the other hand, the neo-institutionalism approaches have proposed a much more refined model to explain the policy change by transcending the notion of critical junctures and proposing a model based on incremental changes (Streeck, Thelen, 2005; Mahoney, Thelen, 2010, 2015). A gradual institutional change (GIC) approach connected with historical institutionalism offer correctives to dualist views that separate periods of institutional stability and change (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010; Palier, 2005; Streeck and Thelen, 2005). Nevertheless, Van der Heijden and Kuhlmann (2017) outline three main critiques to Mahoney et Thelen’s Model: the concepts it builds on lack precision, the model of agency it uses is too static, and the theory needs analytical and explanatory power overall. They outline that an expansion in the set of explanatory variables is needed to include, for example, ideas or spatial change to the notion of temporal change (p. 545). For Capano (2019) one way to “bridge the different theoretical perspectives on institutional and policy dynamics”(591) is considering “layering” as a mode of institutional design. This panel addresses the integration of theories that highlight not only the importance of institutional approaches which determine the behavior of the actors and explain how institutions change or evolve; but also theories revealing “the power of ideas" associated with progressive and/or incremental changes that end up generating outcomes of interest. References Capano, G. 2019, Reconceptualizing layering—From mode of institutional change to mode of institutional design: Types and outputs. Public Administration, 97, 590-604.Carstensen, M. 2011, Ideas are not Stable as Political Scientists want them to be: A theory of Incremental Ideational Change. Political Studies, 59, 596-615.Hall, P. 1993, Policy Paradigm; Social Learning and the state, Comparative Politics, 25(3), p. 275-296.Hogan, J, Howlett M, 2015, Policy Paradigms in Theory and Practice: Discourses, Ideas and Anomalies in Public Policy Dynamics. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).Mahoney, J; Thelen, Kathleen (eds.). 2015, Advances in Comparative Historical Analysis (New York: Cambridge).Mahoney, J, Thelen, Kathleen (eds.) 2010, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Palier, B. 2005, Ambiguous Agreement, Cumulative Change: French Social Policy in France. In Institutional Changes in Advanced Political Economies, edited by Wolfgang Streeck and Katheen Thelen, 127–44. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Streeck, W; Thelen, K, 2005. Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Van der Heijden, J., & Kuhlmann, J. 2017. Studying incremental institutional change: A systematic and critical meta‐review of the literature from 2005 to 2015. Policy Studies Journal, 45, 535–554.

Research on policy change and especially dismantling has been fundamentally inspired by Pierson’s (1994) seminal work on welfare retrenchment. During the last decade, policy cutbacks gained attention again and a growing number of studies have investigated policy dismantling, most of them concentrating on the European Union. Against the backdrop of the 2009 economic crisis, many researchers follow the assumption that economic hard times and political turbulences trigger policy change and favour processes of dismantling, especially in costly regulatory policy fields such as environmental policy. However, although evidence points to reduced policy ambition, this rarely manifests in large-scale and visible cutbacks, but rather in reduced activity (e.g. Steinebach and Knill 2017, Gravey and Jordan 2019). Scholars also note that dismantling takes place in rather hidden and omitted forms, e.g. in comitology procedures (Burns and Tobin 2020, Pollex and Lenschow 2020). While this growing body of research has developed valuable insights into processes of policy dismantling there are several aspects in need of further research. This panel aims to push the frontier with regard to three main topics. First, while there is evidence of visible and far-reaching dismantling, e.g. in the U.S. since the Trump administration assumed office (Hejny 2018), hidden forms of policy cutbacks seem to be a feature of the EU’s multi-level and multi-actor governance system. Research has yet to develop theoretical expectations on when, where and under which circumstances dismantling takes place. We aim to elaborate on research that investigates the particular role of European institutions and intra- and inter-institutional dynamics (e.g. Bürgin 2020; Knill et al. 2020). Second, following earlier literature on welfare state retrenchment (e.g. Pierson 1994; Jensen et al. 2019), most recent studies concentrate on environmental and climate policy. Comparative policy analyses are still missing, both within the regulatory policy domains (e.g. environment, consumer, health) and across regulatory and (re)distributive policy fields. Third, existing research has developed clearly defined conceptual features of dismantling, i.e. reduction in instrument or policy density (Bauer and Knill 2014). Yet, considering recent insights developed by research on policy customization (Thomann 2017), differentiated policy implementation, or notions of experimentalist governance (Sabel and Zeitlin 2010), dismantling may occur on the supranational level while flexible governance arrangements allow EU member states to expand policy – or vice-versa. Thus, in order to refine the concept of dismantling the panel seeks to discuss the unique multi-level features of the European governance structure. Overall, considering these questions the panel aims to further our understanding of policy dismantling in three areas. First, we intend to develop expectations on when, where and under which circumstances dismantling might occur. Second, we pursue to develop insights based on comparative approaches. While there is a considerable body of research on environmental policy and earlier work on social policy, less is known about other areas, such as consumer or agricultural policy. Third, in order to put dismantling into wider analytical perspective we seek to integrate concepts and cross-fertilise analyses of dismantling with differentiated integration, other flexible governance arrangements or customization.

This panel proposes to comparatively investigate and explain the way public policies are designed and enforced for governing societal problems associated with digital technologies. We seek to develop a comparative understanding on the extent to which traditional public policy theories can explain the policy gaps and failures witnessed in this space. We are also interested in understanding whether digital risks require new forms of governance or should we acknowledge that empirical observations point to the same-old public policy challenges. The exponential creation, flow, storage, and use of digital information is rapidly affecting individuals, nations, and societies. They face increased risks to cybersecurity, privacy, discrimination, bias, and manipulation aspects, that undermine individual rights, risk our infrastructures, alter democratic principles, and can sway social order. These pressing issues, however, have been mostly studied by sociologists, law scholars, computer scientists, business researchers, and media experts. These problems have received only little attention from public policy & administration scholars, or from political scientists interested in public policy. Consequently, we are curious if this attention deficit allows for a lack in theoretical models that can explain some of the alarming public policy failures of our time. Puzzles include, but are not limited to, questions such as: Why do very few corporations control most of the digital space (Hill, 2020)? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Why do cyber threats and data breaches keep expanding without an effective public policy response (Siboni and Sivan-Sevilla, 2018)? How can we explain the narrow framing of privacy vis-à-vis other policy objectives in the policy process (Regan, 1995; Sivan-Sevilla, 2018)? How come platforms have nearly no liabilities for the content they facilitate (Lee, 2020)? Why have the blunt violations of European data protection laws by the digital advertising industry are not leading to significant enforcement (ICO, 2019; Sivan-Sevilla, 2020b)? On one hand, creating public policies for digital risks may seem like a unique governance challenge. The fact that data is an increasingly important commodity (e.g. Cohen, 2016), the argument goes, changes the way traditional policymaking should work in this space. For instance, digital policy issues can cut across various institutional policy settings, with a wide variety of regulatory ideologies, in ways that are threatening traditional administrative boundaries (Sivan-Sevilla, 2018; Zanfir-Fortuna & Ianc, 2018). Expertise is almost exclusively in the hands of the regulated instead of the bureaucracy and political institutions. Regulated entities hold intimate knowledge about their networks and services, with certain private intermediaries (e.g. cloud services, vendor-controlled platforms) becoming increasingly important governance actors. This requires government officials to find the delicate balance between relying on market forces and intervening for the public interest. Jurisdictional boundaries are also barriers to national policymaking. Governing problems that arise from technologies that are global in nature requires a response that is sometimes beyond the reach of the regulator. This creates tension and introduces friction in governance efforts (e.g. EU-US data transfers, GDPR implementation in the EU, the inability to address global cyber threats). On the other hand, empirical observations on the creation of public policies for digital risks show that traditional mechanisms are in fact in play, such as the politics of harmonization in the EU (Sivan-Sevilla, 2020a), path-dependency in policymaking (Sivan-Sevilla, 2018), significant private lobbying impact (Atikcan and Chalmers, 2019), or ideational institutionalism (Seidl, 2020). So perhaps the same old traditional drivers for public policy can still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space?

This panel will explore theoretical and empirical developments of urban policy analysis. We suggest that to understand contemporary societal transformation, and political and policy processes more generally, the policies that cities create and implement are essential objects of study. That is, an urban policy analysis is not relevant simply because of the high rate of policy activity happening in cities, but also because it highlights dimensions of political life that are more visible within cities but that also operate at other scales. Contemporary confrontations between public and private property, between power and justice, between participation and exclusion, wealth and poverty, and emerging technology and existing economic, social, and political structures take physical form in cities (Kaufmann and Sidney 2020). Such confrontations occur in the midst of the pandemic: “Essential workers” risk their lives to provide services to other workers who are able to stay at home; multiracial protests, led by Black and other racialized community members, rally against police brutality in U.S. cities and also around the world. Clarence Stone (2015, 117) reminds us that “cities are not the nation state writ small”. Thus, urban political processes and the policies that emerge are likely to differ from processes and policies at other scales – international, national or subnational. Yet, the dominant policy theories and concepts mostly stem from analyses of national political processes (e.g. Advocacy Coalition Framework or Multiple Streams) and may not be automatically applicable to cities. We wonder whether and how these theories can be adapted to explicitly consider scale and dimensions of urban politics, including cross-level perspectives. And we wonder, in contrast, what ground-up urban policy analysis can take shape from empirical studies of urban policy processes. Finally, and perhaps most pressing and speaking directly to our current moment: What can urban policy analysis reveal about strategies for resisting oppressive structures and institutions, and rebuilding or transforming urban life to reduce marginalization and increase justice. What are justice-producing urban policies? We would therefore like to explore dimensions and frameworks for urban policy analysis, and empirical applications that contribute to theory development. We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives the build on theoretical developments in public policy, urban politics, urban studies, and social sciences. - Kaufmann, David and Mara Sidney. 2020. Toward an Urban Policy Analysis: Incorporating Participation, Multilevel Governance, and ‘Seeing like a City, PS: Political Science & Politics 53(1): 1-5. - Stone, Clarence. 2015. Reflections on Regime Politics: From Governing Coalition to Urban Political Order. Urban Affairs Review 51 (1): 101–137. Page 117.

Scholars of public policy and political science have pointed out that policy integration is increasingly used as a response to complex problems. From initial discussions about integrating climate and environmental protection policies, the academic literature on policy integration has evolved into new policy fields, such as health policy, social policy, as well as digitalization. Recent contributions to the literature have analyzed policy integration in relation to other concepts, such as policy coordination and coherence (Cejudo and Michel 2017). Empirical accounts have pointed out that there are differences between policy fields regarding the scope of policy integration reform use (Trein and Maggetti 2020; Trein, Maggetti, and Meyer 2020). Others have worked on causal mechanisms regarding policy integration, or pointed to the differences between horizontal and vertical policy integration (Biesbroek and Candel 2020). This panel contributes to the literature by analyzing how the process of policymaking and the politics of policy integration differ among policy fields. We are interested in exploring how do the attributes of a policy field, for example its technical complexity, salience, or distributive conflicts are linked to dynamics of policymaking as well as the political conflicts related to policy change and to the capacity to integrate policies (Hoppe 2011). We are open to a variety of research questions related to these themes. Papers can either be case studies or take a comparative approach or pursue different theoretical approaches. Nevertheless, contributions must clarify their contribution to our understanding of the ways in which the characteristics of a policy problem shape policy integration. Biesbroek, Robbert, and Jeroen J. L. Candel. 2020. “Mechanisms for Policy (Dis)Integration: Explaining Food Policy and Climate Change Adaptation Policy in the Netherlands.” Policy Sciences 53(1): 61–84. Cejudo, Guillermo M., and Cynthia L. Michel. 2017. “Addressing Fragmented Government Action: Coordination, Coherence, and Integration.” Policy Sciences 50(4): 745–67. Hoppe, Robert. 2011. The Governance of Problems: Puzzling, Powering, Participation. Bristol: Policy Press. Trein, Philipp, and Martino Maggetti. 2020. “Patterns of Policy Integration and Administrative Coordination Reforms: A Comparative Empirical Analysis.” Public Administration Review 80(2): 198–208. Trein, Philipp, Martino Maggetti, and Iris Meyer. 2020. “Necessary Conditions for Policy Integration and Administrative Coordination Reforms: An Exploratory Analysis.” Journal of European Public Policy forthcoming.

Public Administration Paradigms (PAP) refer to the body of doctrines and justifications that support the exercise of public management and the relationship between State and Society, including bureaucratic, new public management, and new public governance models. The objective of the panel is to study PAP and the models of public policy analysis, which apply to the decision of how PAP is practiced in Southern European and Latin American countries. Over the last years, administrative reforms in national / federal public administrations and changes in policy making styles have been marked by international pressure to promote institutional isomorphism and mimicry. On the other hand, evidence has shown that not always countries choose to follow the same international tendencies in their administrative reform styles. Formal (i.e. Statutes, rules, formal organizational structures) and informal attributes (organizational culture, values, political-administrative conventions) in each political-administrative system seem to act as a barrier to the diffusion of public administration paradigms. In this panel, the adopted theoretical reference is the new historical and sociological institutionalism (Di Maggio & Powell, 1991; March & Olsen, 1992; Pierson, 2000; Thelen, 1999), as well as policy diffusion and policy transfer theories (Benson & Jordan, 2011; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000, 2012; Marsh & Sharman, 2009). In this vein, it is assumed that the adoption of Public Administration Paradigms and Policy Analysis Models are reflections of pressures imposed by normative force, imitation / isomorphism, with great risk of deadlock by the predominant organizational culture and the existence of a gap between organizational culture and organizational structure (Kuhlmann & Wollmann, 2014). Comparatively, considering that Southern European and Latin-American countries share several cultural attributes and Ibero-American have the same historical heritage, the problem acquire new meaning and relevance, especially considering the scarcity of empirical studies on these countries. Adopting a comparative perspective on public administration and public policymaking (Geva-May et al., 2018; Walle & Brans, 2018), the panel proposes the following research question: how have formal and informal institutions facilitated or hindered the adoption of public administration paradigms in Southern European and Latin American countries? What are the prevalent public policy analysis models exercised? The two underlying hypotheses are: 1) Among the Latin American countries there is a discursive convergence of Reform / Modernization of Public Administration Paradigms and Policy Analysis Models guided by external factors (funding agencies and International Organisations such as World Bank, OECD, and the European Union); 2) Among Latin American countries there is stronger administrative persistence (resistance to change) because of institutional reasons (cultural, legal, path dependence), while in Southern Europe there is larger adoption of new administrative and policymaking paradigms by induction, coercion, imitation and normative force by the European Union.

Notwithstanding path-breaking research that situated policy development with political economy approaches that examine how the organization of markets and politics affect one another (e.g., Hall, Thelen, Blyth), policy studies too often fail to integrate theory and approaches from political economy (John 2018). This disconnect is surprising because policy studies and political economy seek to explain the same outcomes: who benefits and who doesn’t from public policies, and why do policies vary across space and time. The purpose of this panel is to join up policy studies and political economy by examining how the organization of market relations and politics affect policy choices, including their design and pattern of establishment, entrenchment, and expansion over time. It addresses these research questions through the lens of any of the three approaches to comparative political economy: a material/structuralist approach that emphasizes the role of interest-based coalitions; an institutionalist approach that prioritizes the role of institutions in determining political actors’ choices and/or solving collective action problems; or a constructivist approach that theorizes the causal role of ideas and policy frames in giving traction during conditions of policy uncertainty (Blyth 2009). A major theme of the panel pertains to the extent of complementarity between the aforementioned perspectives. For instance, is it possible to consolidate the manifold theories of policymaking into a single canon? Is it desirable? The panel is expected to elicit paper submissions from practitioners of both comparative and positive political economy. Papers should explore theoretical, substantive, and methodological issues at the nexus of public policy and political economy, with a focus on articulating and justifying social scientific best practices given the research question.

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the fragility of the state health response to a pandemic. Some European countries have already seen the death toll going way above what governments considered would be a failure back in March 2020. COVID-19 has also shed light on the diversity in the health responses across Europe. Most of the new EU members states shut down late March or early April. Italy and to a lesser extent Germany imposed a far-reaching lockdown on activities while Sweden opted a mix of softer measures. The United Kingdom first decided for a strategy not dissimilar to the Swedish strategy but eventually did a radical U-turn in favor of a lockdown that remained nevertheless more modest than the Italian one. This diversity has largely remained since. Governments design their own quarantine list of countries, issue different requirements for safe interactions and self-isolation and go back into a second lockdown in a different pace and scope. COVID-19 has highlighted more than just a diversity in the health responses. It has shown the vulnerability of EU countries in competing against global powers to purchase PPE. It is likely to show weakness in the future to purchase vaccine and more importantly to distribute it. COVID-19 rapid spread and the mortality certainly explain the increasing attention toward the capacity of multilevel governance to coordinate response to pandemics and infectious diseases. The EU has received sharp criticisms for its incapacity to coordinate the health responses across the member states. Other multi-level systems have shown vulnerability to a crisis that seems to hinder their capacity for coordinating an efficient response. The question arises to understand whether, how and under what conditions can multilevel governance enhance or hinder the policy response to the COVID-19 crisis. This panel welcomes qualitative, in-depth studies, but also comparative large-n studies as well as theoretical work that focus at thoroughly investigating the multilevel policy response to crisis. The panel encourages contributions on the COVID-19 crisis and other crisis across time. The panel intends to attract empirical studies (single case study, small-n or large-n) investigating the dynamics and interplay in multilevel response to crisis within one country over time, across countries or levels, or across one or a range of crises. The panel welcomes contributions about Europe and outside Europe alike.

General Objectives, This panel objective is to comparatively discuss payment for performance (PBF) and performance-based financing (PBF) programmes, as well as other forms of financial incentives, from an international comparative and cross-sectorial perspective. Discussions will be focused on health care, social care and education, in High-income countries (HIC) and Low- and Middle-income countries (LMICs), not only from diverse comparative perspectives in each sector, but also from cross-sectorial perspectives. Research Questions How can the design and/or policymaking process of one country or groups of countries (or sectors) shed light on how to foster a more effective policymaking process and/or re-design of P4P/PBF? How do actors/stakeholders with distinct interests and actions, as well as types of learning and analytical/political capacities engaged in the policymaking and/or design process of P4P/PBF, influence the policy appraisals and design of policy tools? Can those processes be characterised as collaborative processes? What are the levels of effectiveness of those policies? From a methodologic perspective, how could we employ multiple theories and, for instance, the policy tools theories, the advocacy coalition and multiple streams frameworks to answer the same question in a comparative way? From the viewpoint of implementation, how specific public policy themes/theories and frameworks, or combination of policy themes/concepts - such as policy feedback, learning, adhesion, street level bureaucracy - relates to distinct capacities, contexts? For example: How policy drivers/or mechanisms (coming from diverse policy theories and frameworks) takes place in countries/policies holding distinct/similar combinations of capacities (analytical, operational and/or organizational capacity) - and as a way to categorise types of pathways/patterns of implementation that could better inform implementation challenges. For instance: How do policy feedback and learning take place in the implementation of payment for performance programmes in health in Brazil and Germany, and from the perspective of both operational and organizational capacity? Do we see more diverse forms of learning, with positive feedback in the German context, with higher levels of capacity? How could Germany learn from the Brazilian pattern, vice-versa? Scientific Relevance There is still a knowledge gap regarding how Low- and Middle-income countries (LMICs) can learn from High income countries (HIC) and, reversely, how HIC have/can learn from LMICs as far as the policymaking and/or design and implementation processes of payment for performance (P4P) and performance-based financing (PBF) programmes are concerned. This gap is also relevant not only across countries with similar and distinct levels of income, but also across similar and distinct public policy sectors, such as health, social care, education. There is a need to better understand if/how the design and/or policymaking process of one country or group(s) of countries can shed light on how to improve the policymaking process and/or re-design of a more effective P4P/PBF which is in accordance with the government/sector capabilities and competencies or with the reality of implementation. We also need to advance our knowledge on how public policy theories/concepts take place in distinct contexts, cross-sectorial and comparatively.

Can research on inequality and public policy processes be brought into dialogue? In recent decades, there have been growing concerns about inequality as a global phenomenon. Income and wealth inequalities are on the rise, universal access to basic goods and services has not been achieved, and the precarization of the labour force is permeating most societies. Moreover, the gap between men and women is widening and different types of inequalities reflecting class, gender, sex, race and ethnicity seem to be pervasive. Existing studies on inequality draw mainly on economic and sociological perspectives. To date, public policy scholarship has not systematically addressed inequality, even though policy processes can produce, reproduce, worsen and/or ameliorate socio-economic inequalities. While we have some evidence of the effects of specific policy initiatives on inequality, there is very little literature on how the policy making process itself is shaped by and shapes patterns of inequality. As Thomas Piketty notes in his seminal work Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the history of inequality is shaped by the joint collective choices of economic, social, and political actors in societies. In this sense, public policy perspectives should provide analytical tools to broaden our understanding of the causes and consequences of this global phenomenon. We suggest that policy concepts such as frames, agendas, discourses, coalitions and streams can inform and be informed by research into socio-economic inequalities. To generate dialogue between policy and inequality research, this workshop brings together scholars working at the interface between policy making and inequality and addresses two questions: How do policy processes shape inequality, and how do inequalities shape policy processes? The outcome will be a clearer understanding of the factors that shape policy making in an unequal world, and the institutional drivers of contemporary inequality.

The general objectives of this open panel proposal are as follows: 1) To identify and engage with researchers outside of known networks who are interested in and conducting research into the key questions this panel is concerned with; 2) provide a forum in which ongoing work aligned to the themes of this panel can be presented and identify possibilities for collaboration; 3) based on the foregoing assess possibilities for research collaboration through grants applications, edited book, and/or a special issue of a journal. The key research questions posed are: What do the historical activities of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in economic development teach us about the public purpose and public capacities? To what extent have SOEs supported local and municipal level public programs and services (transit etc.)? How can (new or existing) SOEs best support Canadian competitiveness and innovation (SOEs as entrepreneurs, risk takers, and innovators)? What is the appropriate scope for enhanced SOE involvement in advancing the public interest?Which sectors are ripe for enhanced SOE involvement (innovation, manufacturing, high tech, clean energy, etc.)? To what extent have municipalities recaptured/ remunicipalised previously privatized services and amenities? What factors drove such initiatives?What can be learned from historical and contemporary case studies where there has been an agenda to democratize the state whether sub-national or national?In practical terms, how have the ideas associated with participatory democracy be applied to the policy work and program implementation functions of the administrative state? How have citizens as end-users, public sector unions, and civil society organizations (stakeholders) contribute to co-creation and co-production of public services and public goods? What knowledge/expertise is valued in policy work and program delivery? Is there an opportunity to pursue a democratization of expertise? What strategies allow civil society organizations to participate in concertation/partnership/co-construction without losing their democratic or representative functions? What ways of articulating the public interest are related to the success and/or failure of contemporary campaigns to expand the public sphere? The scientific relevance of the proposed panel and the broad array of research questions are intended to interrogate how state capacities can be designed and employed toward de-commodification in the economic sphere and democratization in the political sphere.

In the 1960s, Theodore J. Lowi put forward to the scientific community clientelism as a prospective feature of public policies. He elaborated a typology of public policies according to the criteria of the coercion spread by the state actors. In his classification, he identified the distributive policies in particular, which are based on the individual allocation of resources. According to T. J. Lowi, processes of patronage can organise these distributive policies, when policies are governed by hierarchical relationships of dependence between the policy-makers and the policy-clients (Lowi, 1964: 690). Thus, T. J. Lowi advocated that distributive policies could sometimes produce personal and asymmetrical relations between the policy-makers and the policy-clients because of the unequal resources and political interests. From this result, we suggest linking T. J. Lowi’s proposition with the theoretical concept of political clientelism. Clientelism is a relationship of personal dependence, which is based on a reciprocal exchange of favours between a patron and a client who control unequal resources (Médard, 1976; Briquet, Sawicki, 1998). Clientelism is mainly appreciated as a political strategy characterized by giving material goods in return for electoral support. But it is above all a political network and organizational structure which involve intermediaries and brokers, whose roles are to mobilize and strengthen the political network in exchange for material and non-material goods. The original focus of this panel is to analyse how, sometimes, the process of public policy can be confused with political clientelism. We suggest that the policy analysis has to consider seriously the relations between policies and clientelism. The scientific literature is yet crossed by a scientific division, which does not allow studying how the policies could strengthen clientelism on the one hand, and how clientelism could participate in the policy process on the other. The scientific division between analyses on public policy and clientelism is shared among several areas of research: in France and Europe (for instance, Andersen, Eliassen, 1993; Hassenteufel, 2011), in North-America (Araral et al., 2015), in Africa (Darbon, Provini, 2018) or even in Latin America (Barrault-Stella et al., 2019). However, some recent analyses focus on political clientelism (Mattina, 2016) or policy reform (Roinsard 2007; Vommaro, 2017) and prove the present confusions between public policy and political clientelism but this confusion is not a fundamental issue of their research. These results of the scientific literature question and redesign the scientific discussion between the analyses on public policy and political clientelism. This panel proposal is part of the research program “Public Policies in La Reunion”, backed by the research laboratory Centre for Legal Research at the University of La Reunion. However, the panel aims at exceeding the initial frame of the project (La Réunion and France) in order to establish new scientific collaborations and to internationalize the exchange on this research question.

The diffusion of liberal market-based systems since the end of the cold war transformed national economic governance. Worldwide, policy reforms in favour of liberalization have been adopted in a wide range of sectors, such as finance, trade, utilities, etc. The adoption of liberalization policies is typically accompanied with institutional reforms promoting technocratic and de-politicized regulatory governance, in particular through the creation of regulatory agencies operating at arm’s length from the executives (Jordana et al. 2011). While much of the work on market governance through regulatory agencies has focused on democratic or democratizing settings in building new theoretical frameworks, these developments in non-democratic settings have received much less attention. Yet, in autocratic settings too, liberal policies have been adopted and the institutions in charge of economic governance are often not strictly controlled by the executive and enjoy varying degrees of autonomy in managerial, organizational and administrative domains (Apaydin 2018, Koop 2020). The goal of this panel is to unpack the transformation of economic governance in authoritarian contexts, by bringing together scholars to initiate a discussion for conceptualizing and theorizing these processes. At first sight, the diffusion of liberal policies and de-politicized market governance seems ill-suited to autocratic regimes where the rent-seeking behaviour of the ruling elite shall require keeping the economy under control. Yet, recent work suggests that the global diffusion of economic liberal policies and the corresponding institutions for market regulatory have also pervaded autocratic settings. This raises many questions. What does market governance in autocratic contexts look like? To what extent do authoritarian regimes download vs adapt (or divert) the institutional blueprints promoted by international investors and actors? What are the factors pushing autocratic regimes to adopt market governance institutions? What kind of relationships between ruling elites and regulatory agencies can we observe? To what extent do the former try and manage to control the latter? What are the consequences of the transformation of economic governance on autocratic regimes themselves? Do these economic institutions have feedback effects on the elite’s capacity to extract the rent and consolidating their power? These issues are obviously subject to empirical variation and we are particularly interested in exploring their different manifestations. The transformation of economic governance in the face of liberalization processes in autocratic settings has remained largely overlooked, by both scholars working on market regulation and governance and specialists of economic policies in autocratic settings. On the one hand, the knowledge that we have accumulated on regulatory governance has been built based on an empirical field constituted almost exclusively of democratic countries. Investigating these issues in non-democratic contexts promises to deliver new insights on the diffusion, the manifestation, explanatory factors and impacts of regulatory governance. On the other hand, specialists of economic policies in authoritarian settings have rather focused on direct government interventions in the marketplace (Ross 2001, Bellin 2004, Posusney 2004). Turning the spotlight on economic governance will provide new insights on the functioning of autocratic regimes and improve in particular our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning autocratic survival. Apaydin, F. (2018). Regulating Islamic banks in authoritarian settings: Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates in comparative perspective. Regulation & Governance, 12(4), 466-485. Bellin, E. (2004). The robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in comparative perspective. Comparative politics, 139-157. Jordana, J., Levi-Faur, D., & i Marín, X. F. (2011). The global diffusion of regulatory agencies: Channels of transfer and stages of diffusion. Comparative political studies, 44(10), 1343-1369. Koop, C., & Kessler, P. (2020). Keeping control of regulation? Domestic constraints on the creation of independent authorities in emerging and developing economies. Governance. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12523 Posusney, M. P. (2004). Enduring authoritarianism: Middle East lessons for comparative theory. Comparative Politics, 127-138. Ross, M. L. (2001). Does oil hinder democracy?. World politics, 325-361.

Contrary to popular media representations, the conflicts, rights, and entitlements of most people in democratic systems are settled by administrative or quasi-judicial adjudication, not by a full-blown judicial process (Halliday & Scott, 2012; MacIvor, 2018). Traditionally, a public and state delivered service; adjudication is now widely used by universities, municipalities, hospitals, self-regulating professions, and in the private sector, such as construction. With few exceptions (Amsler & Sherrod, 2017; Rudder, Fritschler, & Choi, 2016), policy and public administration scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to the diversity of non-judicial mechanisms of justice, leaving this question to be examined from purely legal or instrumental approaches (Anderson, 2016; McGregor, 2015; Szmania, Johnson, & Mulligan, 2008). The absence of policy and public administration scholars’ voices from discussions on the proliferation of these settings is most obvious at the normative level, in determining not only the possibility and contours of delivering justice outside of the state but the suitability of doing so. Amsler, L. B., & Sherrod, J. (2017). Accountability Forums and Dispute System Design. Public Performance & Management Review, 40(3), 529-550. doi:10.1080/15309576.2016.1277111 Anderson, M. J. (2016). Campus Sexual Assault Adjudication and Resistance to Reform. Yale Law Journal, 125(7), 1940-2005. Halliday, S., & Scott, C. (2012). Administrative Justice. In P. Cane & H. M. Kritzer (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research (pp. 469-491). Oxford Handbooks Online Oxford University Press. MacIvor, H. (2018). An Introduction to Administrative Law. In C. Dunn (Ed.), The Handbook of Canadian Public Administration (pp. 75-96). Don Mills: Oxford University Press. McGregor, L. (2015). Alternative Dispute Resolution and Human Rights: Developing a Rights-Based Approach through the ECHR. European Journal of International Law, 26(3), 607-634. doi:10.1093/ejil/chv039 Rudder, C. E., Fritschler, A. L., & Choi, Y. J. (2016). Public Policymaking by Private Organizations: Challenges to Democratic Governance: Brookings Institution Press. Szmania, S. J., Johnson, A. M., & Mulligan, M. (2008). Alternative Dispute Resolution in Medical Malpractice: A Survey of Emerging Trends and Practices. Conflict resolution Quarterly, 26(1), 71-96.

Both social movements and political parties play a crucial role in the social and political life of contemporary democracies. While they do not pretend to take part in the decision-making processes directly, they tend to influence the political processes by changing the society on a grassroots level via direct action, the transformation of discursive structures, creating new values, etc. The existence of social movements, struggling for their own interests is widely considered as an indicator of a strong civil society and healthy democracy. They also remain the main driving force behind changing public policy agenda, putting forward democratic values and principles of more effective public administration in authoritarian regimes. Understandably, the latter treat social movements as an existential threat, and try to repress and co-opt them: for example, the recent response of the regimes in Russian and Belarus to the actions of peaceful movements remain to show that the authoritarian leaders are very much aware of the potential dangers brought about social movements. The conventional response to this threat has been to suppress self-organization in the society by blocking communication channels, cracking down on independent organizations and networks, and promoting loyalist movements. However, advances in technology, including the proliferation of social media and other online communication platforms, and modern social and demographic trends diminish the efficacy of such ‘traditional’ strategies. Economic development, education, and urbanization raise awareness of public issues and accumulate the capacity for collective action, which is increasingly difficult to keep under the lid. We hypothesize, that in such new realities, instead of suppressing collective action per se, authoritarian regimes opt to manage and control it, trying to re-direct the energy of a fledgling civil society away from political activities towards more innocuous apolitical undertakings. Those, while absorbing and defusing the collective action potential, are not politically destabilizing and in fact, could be playing into the regime’s hands. This approach is gaining popularity among autocracies and hybrid regimes, but its efficacy has limits, as demonstrated by the cases of some modern states, such as mentioned before. At the same time, such countries witnessed a boom of apolitical civil society activities dealing with various issues, including social welfare; community development; environmental protection; preservation and promotion of the culture, language, and heritage; and, more recently, mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Acceptance depended on whether collective actions were “constructive” and “apolitical,” addressing specific problems, instead of demanding systemic change. This panel provides a platform for discussing various approaches to the analysis of the phenomenon of social movements as the driving force for political change. The main objectives of the panel are as follows: - to study the narratives of social movements in different countries and regions; - to analyze the processes of institutionalization of social movements in authoritarianisms and democracies; - to compare approaches and existing models of social movements’ analysis; - to share different visions on strategies and instruments of putting forward democratic changes in authoritarian and democratic states; - to provide policy advice for the decision-makers cooperating with social movements.

Populism is on the rise and populist leaders and parties have come to power in several countries all around the globe, while studies on their governance and policy making is in short supply. The reason is that populism has been mostly considered and analysed as a phenomenon stemming from politics with little or no relevance for policy making. For instance, Mudde (2004) argues that as a ‘thin ideology’ populism can be compatible with either left-wing or right-wing ideas thus it does not imply any specific policy content. Populism may be thin in terms of classical, left or right political ideologies, but it still represents a distinct approach to politics and policy. The substantive emptiness and the chameleonic nature of populism also means an ideational flexibility. In addition, apart from the content of policies, populism may have an effect on the policy process, policy discourses, as well as on actors, venues and institutions of policy making. Constitutive features of populism are anti-elitism, radical majoritarianism, glorification of popular will, anti-pluralism, anti-institutionalism, personalistic and charismatic leadership, direct, unmediated communication with the people, extensive use of crisis frames and adversarial narratives targeting unpopular minorities. These features crystallize a populist policy making ideal type (Bartha et al., 2020) opposed to the ideal type of policy making in liberal democracies that is usually, though often implicitly assumed in policy studies scholarship. From a political regime perspective this has an important implication: while populism is a historically democratic phenomenon, it has an ambiguous relationship with liberal democracies and often leans towards illiberalism. This complex conceptual relation between populism ad policy making opens various research avenues. How compatible are populist policies with liberal democracies? What are procedural and discursive peculiarities of populist policies under left-wing and right-wing political leadership? Are there common policy features of left-wing and right-wing populism? What are the specific policy features of governing populist parties? What is the long-run survival potential of populist policies? Recent studies have addressed some of the policy aspects of populism, see Rovira Kaltwasser and Taggart (2016), Batory (2016), Peters and Pierre (2019) and Bartha et al. (2020). However, these papers either provide theoretical insights, or use single case studies in their analysis. Accordingly, more research is needed and comparative case studies and quantitative cross-country analyses are particularly missing. Still, as there is no scholarly consensus yet on the basic constitutive features of populist policy making, explorative studies and papers providing theoretical insights are also welcomed in this panel. References Bartha, A., Boda, Zs. & Szikra, D. (2020). When Populist Leaders Govern: Conceptualizing Populism in Policy Making. Politics and Governance, 8(3), 71-81. Batory, A. (2016). Populists in Government? Hungary's “System of National Cooperation”. Democratization, 23(2), 283-303. Mudde, C. (2004). The Populist Zeitgeist, Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541-563. Peters, B. G. & Pierre, J. (2019). Populism and Public Administration: Confronting the Administrative State. Administration & Society, 51(10), 1521-1545. Rovira Kaltwasser, C., & Taggart, P. (2016). Dealing with populists in government: a framework for analysis. Democratization, 23(2), 201-220.

Governing societal activities, institutions and work has always been ubiquitous but never self-explanatory. With respect to addressing global problems and pursuing important societal aims, such as combating climate change, easing up urban congestion, advancing welfare or providing education, it is difficult to disentangle public policies and agencies from private interests, economic institutions and civic activities (Johanson and Vakkuri 2017; Pekkola et al. 2020). Recent developments in the domains of commissioning public services, welfare mixes, corporate social responsibility and the global rise in social enterprises signify the fluidity of institutional boundaries. Societies have learnt that both evolutionary adaptation and institutional design occur at multiple levels, which produces impacts that remain largely undetected by our current policy instruments and conceptual/analytical frameworks. This panel “Policies for hybrid governance”, investigates the relationship, potential rationales and tensions among public, private and civic domains contributing to policy outcomes. While all these domains have a role in how intended aims of public policies ultimately transpire, governments have fundamental problems with understanding why, how and with what policy instruments this occurs. The problem is even more pronounced given the interplay between these domains, conceptualized in the form of hybridity as a policy issue. By hybridity we refer to the interaction among public, private and civil society via distinct modes of ownership, parallel but often competing institutional logics, diverse funding bases and various forms of social and institutional control (Skelcher and Smith 2015; Grossi et al. 2017). We propose three main research questions: 1) How are public policies influenced by hybridity and hybrid forms of governance? 2) How do governments influence (e.g. foster or mitigate) hybridity through their policies? 3) How does hybridity shape the agenda-setting of public policies? The policies of the nation states are often labeled as “public” primarily due to the dominant role of governments in instigating political agendas and social change in their territories. Therefore, it is also commonplace to understand the multiplicity of policy rationalities that affect people and societies via “public sector” outputs as well as outcomes. However, policies often include several aspects of public-private linkages and collaboration between governments and business corporations, as well as public-private-civil societal relationships (Erkkilä 2012). Hence, there is a need for shedding light on how hybridity shapes the agenda-setting of public policies There is no definite theory of rationality regarding how the necessary activities of societies should be governed and what the roles of governments, business firms or non-profits should entail (Williamson 1999; Kooiman 2003). Nevertheless, it has been assumed that mixing “public” and “private” creates contaminated institutions, moral abyss and dysfunctional modes of organizations (Jacobs 1992; Ménard 2004). The side effects of specialization of scientific disciplines have contributed to the assumption of “monstrous hybridity”, which is assumed to both compromise the neutrality of government and distort the efficiency of business operations (Vakkuri and Johanson, 2020). Accordingly, the governance solutions of societies have been based on a narrow understanding of institutional mixtures. In our view a more balanced approach is needed, where hybridity appears equally as deliberate design of institutions and policies, and as an intended or unintended outcome of an emergent, evolutionary social process. Hybridity over time may have evolved both “by design” and “by default” (Johanson and Vakkuri 2017). The panel chairs include: Tero Erkkilä, jan-Erik Johanson, Romulo Pinheiro, Jarmo Vakkuri

The goal of this panel is to discuss the conditions under which policymakers issue priorities vary across parties, institutional settings, and time, and the consequences this may have in terms of political representation. Agenda setting scholars emphasize policy-makers decision to prioritize some issues, instead of others is motivated by a combination of factors. On some occasions issue prioritization is the result of strategic considerations oriented to maximize votes and reelection; in others, it is more the result of policy-makers socio-economic features and ideological bias, while in others it is more the result of institutional factors and/or changing economic and social conditions. This panel is aimed to analyze issue prioritization from different theoretical lenses. In particular, the panel will prioritize comparative papers analyzing (1) to what extend policy-makers personal backgrounds affect the issues they pay attention to – eg. are there significant differences on the issues female and male MPs pay more attention to in the parliamentary arena, or/and the social media—, and (2) under which conditions formal and informal institutions affect policymakers capacity to prioritize issues in the governmental arena and the social media –eg. can MPs overcome party discipline and other institutional constraints regarding issue prioritization through the social media?—. Also, the panel welcomes papers oriented (3) to discuss the consequences of issue prioritization in terms of political representation. The panel welcomes papers using a comparative and/or quantitative research strategy.

This Panel’s main objective is to present and discuss agenda-setting and policy change in the Latin American context. Inserted in the debate on the role of attention in pre-decision processes, this panel asks the questions: Why do policies change? And if they really change, in what ways do they change? How can we analyze and explain this process? Who are the actors, the institutions, and the information we should look at when studying Latin American systems and policies? What are the theoretical and methodological tools to understand policy change and policy dynamics in LA context? How the policy change process occurs in Latin American systems and how can we explain it? The international literature on policy agenda setting has rapidly advanced since the first theoretical models emerged in the mid-1980s and 1990s in the United States (Kingdon, 1984; Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993). Over the last thirty years, frameworks, theories, and models used to analyze policy attention, policy change, and policy dynamics have been reviewed and updated. One of the most relevant aspects of the studies of dynamics and policy change considers the diffusion that occurred in the 2000’s with the application of its theoretical and methodological approaches to different societies and political systems beyond the United States (John, 2006). Consequently, another important achievement in the studies of agenda-setting and policy change must be highlighted: studies of public policies from a comparative perspective. The methodological transformations involving the mapping and analysis of governmental attention allowed not only the application of models and theories to explain processes in different countries, but also has forwarded the conduct of comparative studies across political systems. Although agenda-setting, policy change, and policy dynamics studies have grown significantly in the international academic community, there are still some important points to be better explored when considering Latin American cases. The intention of this Panel is to open space on the international field so that researchers can discuss in greater depth this rich scope of knowledge applied to the Latin American context. In this way, we intend to build a plural space that overcomes geographic issues and that can contribute to the growing studies of agenda-setting, highlighting the processes of changes and policy dynamics in Latin America.

Ageing societies call for public policy response in (re)shaping national systems of long-term care (LTC) for older persons. Most of the care for older people was and still is provided informally, via family networks (Wittenberg, 2016). However, changing family structures, life styles and the worsening ratio of older people to working age population in many societies call for revision of available structures and networks to provide services for older members of society. Policy revisions are needed not only in countries with reliance on the care via informal networks but also in countries where LTC is formalized and relying on institutional provision: increasing demand for the care restricts possibilities of social security systems to respond to it adequately. Furthermore, as people live longer and are healthier, the demand not only for institutional care but also for care and services at home is rapidly increasing (Costa-Font et al., 2017). Growing interest from the private sector to provide LTC services provides a possibility to satisfy part of the increased demand (Marczak et al., 2015). However, the majority of the population might be restricted in possibility to use them due to financial constrains as income at retirement often is quite limited. Collaboration of public and private sectors in response to increasing demand of LTC services for older people might be efficient if special public policy measures are implemented enabling older people to buy services from the private market (Greve, 2017). COVID-19 exposed the shortcomings of long-term care systems in many countries even more: even less home help was available via informal and formal networks to older people during the pandemic than before in most countries. Public confidence in institutional care (mostly nursing homes) was undermined also because of their inability to control the spread of the virus and increased morbidity and mortality rates in some of the institutions in comparison with that of same-aged residents at home. COVID-19 calls for a new look to the often overlooked and underfunded sector of LTC, shedding light to topics that the governments’ agendas have been reluctant to tackle: staff shortages, limited implementation of person-centred care models, poor integration of social care and healthcare responses, poor managerial skills at the top of many nursing homes. Some research attempts to explore the situation and provide recommendations have already been published (e.g. Boucher et al., 2020; D'Adamo et al., 2020; Gardner et al., 2020); however, further research is needed to inform policy making, especially on major emergent risks and challenges and success stories of measures taken to manage them from different national settings. The main research question of this panel will be: what are the challenges of current LTC systems and what are the ways forward to respond to the increasing demand for long-term care for older people while securing quality of care and dignity of life. Several hypothesis could be explored in relation to possible public policy directions: increasing scope of long-term care insurance, satisfaction of increasing demand for services and care at home via public-private partnerships, public policy measures aiming to support informal LTC care providers, etc.

In this panel we aim to analyze the relationship between public sector reform and corruption. We aim to call works that attempt to explore how public administration reform efforts correlate (or not) with anti-corruption strategies. A recent work from a group of Latin-American authors shows that usually reform efforts, in different countries, are not necessarily oriented towards tackling corruption or seen as an actual strategy to prevent/overcome it. Thus, this panel opens the door for a new discussion regarding the effectiveness of administrative reform as anti-corruption strategy. Usually efforts in different countries appear to concentrate most of the anticorruption resources and strategies on criminal justice, far-reaching anticorruption schemes, and stringent penalties, as a way to deter corruption. However, it has been less explored how effective are public management reforms in dealing with political corruption, our panel aims to focus on such topic.

Robust politics and governance in turbulent times Eva Sørensen, Jacob Torfing and Christopher Ansell We live in turbulent times trying to cope with challenges such as pandemics, global warming, financial crises, race conflicts, opioid crisis, global migration, and international terrorism. Such turbulent problems—characterized by being complex, changing, inconsistent, uncertain and unpredictable—call for forms of politics and governance capable of responding effectively and legitimately to an unclear and moving target (Newland, 2008; Asselt and Renn, 2011; Ansell and Trondal, 2018; Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing, 2020). When dealing with turbulent problems, elected politicians and civil servants cannot rely on predefined policy programs and emergency procedures alone, but depend on their capacity to adapt and innovate public policies and governance to fit the emerging challenges in volatile contexts. Traditional models of party government and public bureaucracy tend to assume that politicians and civil servants know where they want to go and how to get there, and that they can reduce uncertainty through the deployment of standard operational procedures and incremental decisionmaking (Schattschneider, 1960; Tullock, 1965; Downs, 1967). Criticisms of this assumption from theories of policymaking and policy implementation, over the organizational economics supporting the New Public Management, to theories of collaborative governance tend to stress the complexity and irreducible uncertainty of public governance (Rittel and Webber 1973; Kingdon, 1984; Head 2008; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2017; Peters 2017). These strands of research aims to show how public authorities can promote legitimate and effective governance in the face of complex and uncertain problems, but they have only paid scant attention to the pressing issue of turbulence and the impact of turbulent problems on democratic politics and public governance. However, a promising attempt to address the role and impact of turbulence is found in the new and emerging research on robust politics and governance that emphasizes the need for flexible adaptation, agile modification, and pragmatic redirection of policy and governance solutions (Ferraro et al, 2015; Capano and Woo, 2017; Howlett, Capano, and Ramesh 2018). This panel aims to explore what the concept of robust politics and governance has to offer when attempting to tackle turbulent problems and what robust politics and governance looks like in practice. Robust politics and governance refers to a systemic capacity to realize key agendas, functions, and values in the face of particular challenges, stressors, and threats, some of which are surprising or unexpected (Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing, 2020). Robustness is a property of political and administrative institutions, regulatory processes, and policy instruments. The purpose of this panel is to bring together researchers in conceptual and theoretical discussion of issues related to turbulent problems and robust solutions and in practical reflections on the results of empirical analyses of how robust politics and governance contribute to enhancing the effectiveness and legitimacy in turbulent times. References Ansell, C., and Trondal, J. (2018), ‘Governing turbulence’, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance 1(1): 43‒57. Ansell, C., Sørensen, E., and Torfing, J. (2020), ‘Covid19 as a game changer for public administration and leadership’, Public Management Review, Online First. Capano, G., and Woo, J.J. (2017), ‘Resilience and robustness in policy design’, Policy Sciences 50(3): 399‒426. Downs, A. (967), Inside Bureaucracy, Boston: Little. Ferraro, F., Etzioni, D., and Gehman, J. (2015), ‘Tackling Grand Challenges Pragmatically’, Organization Studies 36(3): 363‒90. Head, B.W., (2008), ‘Wicked Problems in Public Policy’, Public Policy 3(2): 101­‒118. Howlett, M., Capano, G., and Ramesh, M. (2018), ‘Designing for Robustness’, Policy and Society 37(4): 405‒21. Kingdon, J. W. (1984), Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, Boston: Little. Newland, C. (2008), ‘Public Administration Amid Turbulence’, International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior 11(3): 326-353. Peters, B.G. (2017), ‘What Is So Wicked about Wicked Problems? Policy & Society 36(3): 385‒96. Pollitt, C., and Bouckaert, G. (2017). Public Management Reform, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rittel, H.W., and Webber, M.M. (1973), ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, Policy Sciences 4(2): 155‒69. Schattschneider, E. E. (1960), Party Government, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. Tullock, G. (1965), The Politics of Bureaucracy, Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press.

Accountability systems have become central in the governance of multiple public sectors and domains (health, education, social care, security and so on) for a while now. Contemporary accountability systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated and adaptable to a complex and fluid world. They rely on a new wave of policy instruments that are data intensive in order to monitor performance; further, they provide incentives for those who comply with their logic and effects. Nonetheless, research that looks at the instrumentation and evolution of accountability systems from a policy instruments perspective is still scarce, and has been primarily confined to the particularities and boundaries of specific policy sectors. Policy instruments research can be organized in three independent, but interconnected, lines of inquiry, namely instrumentation, autonomization and constituency generation, all of which are highly relevant in the accountability debate. Instrumentation is grounded on the premise that instruments’ choice does not respond to rationalistic or pragmatic reasons, but rather to the complex interaction between institutions, interests and ideas operating at multiple scales (Peters, 2002). Accordingly, the instrumentation moment needs to be properly problematized (Capano and Lippi 2017) and approached from a multi-scalar perspective (Grek, Maroy and Verger 2020). Relevant questions in the accountability debate from the instrumentation perspective are: What are the set of problems posed by the choice and use of accountability instruments? What are the representations, interpretations and problematizations of the social world that are involved in the choice of accountability measures in different settings? And, how are the data infrastructures and metrics that constitute accountability systems constructed and by whom? Autonomization refers to the fact that “policy instruments have an existence independent of the decisions that created them” (cf Kassim & Le Galès, 2010, p. 11) and evolve in ways that were unforeseen when first adopted. In many contexts, accountability systems expand their mission beyond their initial goals (i.e. ‘mission creep’ effect) or generate performative pressures that were not initially intended by design. The reputational or symbolic dimension that comes with any accountability system, or the emergence of unpredicted account-holders (the media, local governments, groups of users, among other intermediary organizations) can contribute to accelerate the performative pressure that accountability systems exert on public sector workers ( Busuioc and Loge, 2015). For this and other reasons, it is difficult to predict the form that any instrument will end up assuming, as well as their effects. (Bezes, 2007). Here, we encourage the identification of empirical cases of accountability instruments, metrics and techniques acquiring a 'life of their own', as well as analyses of the drivers behind and the transformative effects of the autonomization of accountability instruments in different areas of governance. Finally, policy instruments create their own structures of opportunity, and privilege certain actors and their interests over others. Policy instruments incentivize thus the generation of new constituencies, which are comprised of actors “oriented towards developing, maintaining and expanding a specific instrumental model of governing” (Simons & Voß, 2018. p. 31). Thus, how are accountability instruments restructuring governance and altering power relations in different domains? What political and economic actors emerge around or are reinforced by accountability systems? Is the generation of a measurement industry a common feature of performance-based and data-intensive accountability in multiple sectors?

Centres of government are responsible for steering the state, and central agencies play vital roles in governance alongside political executives. The role of the centre has expanded, its influence has increased, and its character has changed greatly. There are five external and internal sources of change: the reduced authority of centres as a product of decentering; reform agendas for redefining central agency relationships; external pressures, notably crises; unstable and ineffectual government; and aggrandising political executives. The understanding of the condition of the key institutions (e.g. prime ministers/president’s department and treasury) is at best patchy with a shortage of recent studies that range beyond issues of the day or one country. The key research question is what is the current state of central agencies policymaking abilities given long-term trends and political and environmental turbulence? The panel hopes to cover:To what extent has the increasing intensity of political influence on agencies that serve the prime minister/president and cabinet, or peak economic roles affected policy making?How effective have been different forms of policy vertical and horizontal coordination on public policy? What strategies and capacities are used by central agencies and governments to secure policy coherence? What central capacity is there to influence and work with decentralised units of government given the propensity towards centralisation within both federations and unitary systems?

The importance of ‘narratives’ in the policy process is increasingly being stressed among policy actors and policy process scholars alike (see e.g. Radaelli, 1999; Stone, 2012; McBeth et al., 2014; Schlaufer, 2018; Blum & Kuhlmann, 2019). Narrative stories are important to understand – amongst others – how policy problems are defined, policies are formulated, and reforms are communicated (Blum & Kuhlmann, 2019). According to Stone (2012), narratives are – often highly-simplified – stories of how good or bad things happen, thereby employing different storylines (e.g. stories of decline, helplessness and control). To qualify as a ‘policy narrative’, the stories must at least contain a public policy referent and a ‘morale’ – often in the sense of a constructed policy solution (see McBeth et al., 2014). Yet while narratives receive growing attention in public policy research, crucial open questions remain – including how policy narratives link to politics, issues of power, and different policy actors involved in the policy process. The objective of this panel is to explore this linkage of policy narratives and different types of policy actors. The choice of certain narratives may impact on policy change (or non-change) by framing problems and solutions. Therefore, we may expect government communication to show particular ‘narrative density’, but also that all policy actors – e.g. also scientific experts –will use narratives, reflecting their efforts to make sense of the world, especially when arguing for certain policy choices. At the same time, we may expect that the different actors adapt their narratives and strategies according to the functions played in the policy process, such as policy entrepreneurship, brokerage, leadership, or learning. The panel thus seeks to bring together papers addressing, amongst others, the following issues: - How are different narratives used by different policy actors – individual or collective ones, as well as actors playing different roles in the policy process (e.g. policy entrepreneurs, policy brokers, epistemic communities, instrument constituencies)? - How do those policy actors use narrative stories to link specific policies and problems? What narrative strategies can be identified (e.g. issue expansion/issue containment), and to what extent can we identify different narrative strategies among different types of actors? How do narratives of different policy actors relate to each other in the policy process? - In what ways are policy actors themselves becoming characters (e.g. hero, victim, or villain) in their own policy narratives, and in the narratives of other policy actors? References Blum, S. & Kuhlmann, J. (2019) Stories of how to give or take – towards a typology of social policy reform narratives, Policy and Society, 38(3): 339-355. McBeth, M. K., Jones, M. D., & Shanahan, E. A. (2014) The Narrative Policy Framework. In P. A. Sabatier & C. M. Weible (Eds.) Theories of the policy process (3rd ed., pp. 225–266). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Radaelli, C. (1999) Harmful tax competition in the EU: Policy narratives and advocacy coalitions, Journal of Common Market Studies, 37(4): 661-682. Schlaufer, C. (2018) The narrative uses of evidence, Policy Studies Journal, 46(1): 90-118. Stone, D. (2012) Policy paradox: The art of political decision making (3rd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

In the last decade or so, government authorities have encouraged varied approaches to policy implementation in an attempt to reinvigorate both their democratic legitimacy and ability to solve public policy problems. One such method is co-creation, which is defined here as a collaborative process through which government and public sector organisations solve problems and seek solutions by working together with citizens and stakeholders in the private, public and voluntary sector (Torfing et al., 2019). This definition is purposefully broad to allow the study of different arenas of co-creation, such as policy networks, partnerships, policy labs, citizen assemblies or e-government at different levels of government, across policy domains, and policy-cycle stages. With declining trust in government, exasperated by the (mis)management of COVID-19, public service managers and professionals must seek alternative ways of connecting with citizens and societal groups (e.g. voluntary and private sector) other than through the traditional practices associated with governmental paternalism or consumer orientated choice under New Public Management. Co-creation has been argued as part of the solution to austerity (Bovaird et al., 2017) and the trust deficit (Fledderus et al., 2014) and could potentially speed up economic and societal recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, while co-creation is widely promoted by initiatives at the international level (e.g. OECD, 2017; UN, 2019) relatively little knowledge exists on the managerial efforts needed to make co-creation successful (Ansell et al., 2020) though some exceptions include Regal & Ferlie (2020), Hendrikx et al., (2020) and Pegan (2020). This is despite the fact that scholars have long recognised the importance of professionals and managers in the implementation of policies and initiatives (e.g. Matland 1995; Moore 1995). In order to harness the benefits of co-creation, it is relevant to understand how strategic actions are applied; which actions are chosen; why actions are chosen; barriers and ways to overcome them; and finally, their impact. Such knowledge is of paramount importance if we think co-creation can “build back better” systems of governance after the Covid-19 pandemic (Ansell et al., 2020). Thus, the main objective of the panel is: 1) To investigate the strategic management features of co-creation in cases where it has been implemented, and 2) To build the necessary knowledge if we are to rely on co-creation as an enabler of societal and economic recovery from the pandemic. While an organisation might adopt procedures and documents that are “strategic” in their title, these might not necessarily lead to the adoption and (successful) implementation of co-creation as a way to solve public policy problems. Therefore, the panel’s premise is that co-creation is strategized when organisations invests resources as well as take decisions and actions to implement collaborations. These can include issues of planning, stakeholder engagement, outreach and/or communication (Bryson et al. 2009; Joyce 2015; Ferlie and Ongaro, 2015). Finally, in order to explore the relevance of strategic management in co-creation, we are also interested in the counterfactual, namely what happens when organisations attempt to implement co-creation without or with minimal strategic efforts or following an incremental “muddle through” path of change (Lindblom, 1959). Literature Ansell, C., E. Sørensen & J. Torfing (2020): The COVID-19 pandemic as a game changer for public administration and leadership? The need for robust governance responses to turbulent problems, Public Management Review, DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2020.1820272 Bovaird, T., Flemig, S., Loeffler, E. & Osborne, S. P. (2017). Debate: Co-production of public services and outcomes. Public Money & Management, 37(5), 363–364. Bryson, J. M., Crosby, B. C. & Bryson, J. K. (2009). Understanding strategic planning and the formulation and implementation of strategic plans as a way of knowing: The contributions of actor-network theory. International Public Management Journal, 12(2), 172–207. Ferlie, E., & Ongaro, E. (2015). Strategic management in public services organizations: Concepts, schools and contemporary issues. Routledge. Fledderus, J., Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2014). Restoring trust through the co-production of public services: A theoretical elaboration. Public Management Review, 16(3), 424-443. Hendrikx, W., M. Kuiper, N. van Gestel (2020) Scientific Report on the Conditions for Involvement of Professionals in the Strategic Renewal of Local Governments and Public Agencies, possible Impediments and Counteracting Mechanisms. COGOV Deliverable 6.1. Available at: http://cogov.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/D61.pdf (24 Oct 2020) Joyce, P. (2015). Strategic management in the public sector. Routledge. Lindblom, C. E. (1959). The science of" muddling through". Public administration review, 79-88. Matland, R. E. (1995). Synthesizing the implementation literature: The ambiguity-conflict model of policy implementation. Journal of public administration research and theory, 5(2), 145-174. Moore, M. H. (1995 ). Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. OECD. (2017). Recommendation of the Council on Open Government. Adopted on 14 December 2017. Pegan, A. (2020). The Diffusion of Co-Creation in Local Government: Evidence from European Countries. Conference paper presented at the ECPR Virtual Conference 2020. https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/55741 (24 Oct 2020) Regal, B. & E. Ferlie (2020) Patterns of strategic renewals. COGOV Deliverable 2.3 Sector Report. Available at: http://cogov.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/D2-3.pdf (24 Oct 2020) Torfing, J., Sørensen, E., & Røiseland, A. (2019). Transforming the public sector into an arena for co-creation: Barriers, drivers, benefits, and ways forward. Administration & Society, 51(5), 795-825. UN. (2019). Sustainable Development Goal 16: Focus on public institutions. World Public Sector Report 2019. Available at: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/democracy-and-governance/world-public-sector-report-2019_9f6b5dc4-en (22 Oct 2020).

This panel focuses on "experts", i.e. actors mandated to participate in the design of public policies in the name of their specialized knowledge (Robert 2010). These groups of policymakers are often approached by addressing the links between the professions or intellectual traditions they represent and the institutions in charge of public policies. These approaches discuss fundamental divisions such as expert/ laymen, science/politics, risk assessment/risk management. By contrast, this panel aims to shift the perspective. It grasps the expert's stance by questioning their political socializations, which has so far been insufficiently examined, especially by political scientists specialized in public policies studies. When they take on their role, experts confront themselves with objects identified as political, i.e. State, markets, political parties, public problems, instruments of public policies, etc. (Brint, 1996, Lebaron, 2008). It is therefore relevant to pay more attention to the ways in which they learnt to 1) perceive and interact with these political objects ; 2) to establish a boundary between political and non-political issues. In short, the aim of the panel is to take the experts out of the specificity of their technical activities in order to approach them as ordinary and politicized actors who contribute to produce and legitimize the social and political order. It is as depositories of knowledge legitimized by a specific background - typically a professional experience - that experts are mandated by political actors. Traditionally, work in political science devoted to expertise thus addresses the groups of experts through this mandate. On the one hand, it highlights the way in which expert knowledge is produced, selected, and affects the governance of public problems (Stampnitzky 2013; Demortain 2020). On the other hand, it sheds light on the socio-professional identity of the actors involved in public decision-making. Some researchers have questioned the professional trajectories of experts, as those working in think tanks (Medvetz 2014). Other work examines the legitimization of public decision making. It highlights the growing role of the government-dedicated sciences in the production of public action (Ihl, Déloye, and Joignant 2013). More recently, scholars have also questioned the loss of legitimacy of the specialized knowledge on which the authority of experts is based (Eyal 2019) to emphasize the importance of their networks and their alliances. All in all, this work tends to reduce experts to their "technical" skills or to the specialized knowledge for which their assessment is required. This panel, instead, explores how experts learn and update the cognitive frames with which they "organize the political world" (Conover and Feldman 1984; Sigel 1989) and how they assimilate and activate certain visions of the social and political order available at a given time (Duchesne and Haegel 2004). For example, some researches addressed this question regarding senior officials in the French administration who designed immigration policies (Laurens 2009). Other researchers have studied the primary and secondary political socializations of people in the engineering profession, retracing the process which leads these professionals to perceive themself as having a "scientific", "objective" and “neutral” way of seeing political issues (Sainsaulieu, Surdez, and Zufferey 2019). The panel’s ambition is to open this research perspective to the different groups of experts appointed in the construction of public policies. -Brint, Steven. 1996. In the Age of Experts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. - Conover, Pamela Johnston, and Stanley Feldman. 1984. ‘How People Organize the Political World: A Schematic Model’. American Journal of Political Science 28 (1): 95–126. - Demortain, David. 2020. The Science of Bureaucracy: Risk Decision-Making and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. - Duchesne, Sophie, and Florence Haegel. 2004. ‘La politisation des discussions, au croisement des logiques de spécialisation et de conflictualisation’. Revue francaise de science politique Vol. 54 (6): 877–909. - Eyal, Gil. 2019. The Crisis of Expertise. 1st Edition. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity. - Ihl, Olivier, Yves Déloye, and Alfredo Joignant, eds. 2013. Gouverner par la science: perspectives comparées. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble. - Laurens, Sylvain. 2009. Une politisation feutrée. Paris: Belin. - Lebaron, Frédéric. 2008. Central Bankers in the contemporary global field of power: a “social space” approach. The Sociological Review, 56(1)121-144. - Lefébure, Pierre. 2009. ‘Les rapports ordinaires à la politique’. In Nouveau manuel de science politique, by Bernard Lacroix, Antonin Cohen, and Philippe Riutort, 9–20. La Découverte. - Medvetz, Thomas. 2014. Think Tanks in America. Illustrated Edition. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. - Michel, Hélène (dir.). 2006. Lobbyistes et lobbying de l’Union européenne : Trajectoires, formations et pratiques des représentants d’intérêts. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg. - Robert, Cécile. 2010. Chapitre 11 : Expertise et action publique. Presses de Sciences Po (P.F.N.S.P.). - Sainsaulieu, Ivan, Muriel Surdez, and Éric Zufferey. 2019. ‘Parcours de socialisation politique d’ingénieurs au travail’. Revue francaise de science politique Vol. 69 (3): 439–59. - Sigel, Roberta S., ed. 1989. Political Learning in Adulthood: A Sourcebook of Theory and Research. 1st Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - Stampnitzky, Lisa. 2013. Disciplining Terror. How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism’. New York: Campbridge University Press.

The multidimensional aspects of the COVID crisis demanded a call for action from many societal and policy sectors. To respond to the urgencies that have extrapolated the health sector, new ties have been bonded and new governance forums have been instaured, presenting practices and senses still waiting for academic interpretation. Putting in place, among other initiatives, safe education, and basic need for homeless, have called for stronger connections between front line workers and managers. At the same time, the voice of the population calling for more equity and doubting the efficiency of governmental measures became louder. This Panel recognizes contemporary changes in our societies that are reframing the State. We are interested to address how the citizens needs are captured to adjust and improve complex intersectorial policies (Smits et al, 2016; Smits 2018) in time of crisis. Methodologies to foster a direct involvement of citizens into public decisions have changed or mitigated during the COVID pandemic. Participatory-deliberatory institutional arrangements, such as the Brazilian councils and conferences (Cruz 2020), have given place to online meeting platforms, many times deepening the gap on digital disparities. Initiatives multiplies, with disappointments and complexities regarding how to keep mechanisms time efficient for the population and for managers and policy makers (Cunill-Grau, 2014). Challenges to keep both voices in balance, policy makers and the population, are numerous. Methodology-wise, one needs to capture precise information from the population. Also, the question of best instruments to enable authentic participation is relevant (Halpern, Lascoumes, Le Galès, 2014). Value-wise, one has to combine potentially divergent set of opinions . Ethically-wise, great care has to be taken to prevent the population cooptation by interest groups. Time-wise, the covid pandemic demonstrated that States can navigate narrow windows of opportunities to propose new policies before the population runs into crisis fatigue and lack of confidence in institutions. We intend to generate debate around empirical and/or theoretical advances with respect to structural/cognitive/ethical aspects of governing intersectoral policies with the population, sharing arguments on new axis for research. We will prioritize papers on review, multiple cases and comparatives cases, intriguing or disturbing single case studies are also welcome. Therefore, the panel questions are: In time of crisis, 1. What has changed in the production of sociostate and multisectoral relations? 2. Which are the structures, practices and values to enable governance of intersectorial policies with the population? 3. Who is able to participate? Why? How? 4. In which settings are complex policies proposals being designed with or for the population? 5. How does digital technologies enables and/or constrain deliberative practices in the pandemic context? 6. Which instruments are being mobilized to link actors and projects from multiple sectors, institutions and branches? 7. Which relations are produced among the actors involved in intersectoral management policies? How? 8. Which results have risen up from the mobilization of the population in intersectoral initiatives? 9. What has changed in the research agenda on intersectoral policy governance with the population? 10. What theories are informative to understand the governance of intersectoral policies with the population?

Research question: How international educational public policies have been affected by local situations? Hypotheses to explore: Local situations that affect the input of educational public policy. Adaptation of educational policies. Impact of not adapting educational policies to the social situation. Scientific Relevance: Contemporary societies face a globalized world by adjusting to public policies that are adopted from other parts of the world and often adapted. This process of adaptation may include both policies and the parameters from where the idea originated. There are instances where these parameters are not adapted according to the plethora of social-economic realities and policies of the State. When adaptations are not made, it gives way to a possible aperture from where emerging issues may arise. For instance, clashes between cultural and economic realities which affect the fulfilment of the objectives of the policy. This can be observed especially in educational policies, where countries adopt policies and parameters that are foreign to the community. This may lead to the application of policies that at the end do not achieve the final objectives, as the policies are not correspondingly to the varying realities of each community, society, or territory. Moreover, how this can affect the expected result or even the application of public policies. In recent years, some studies have focused on educational policies and their implementation within multi-ethnical or at-risk societies. It is since these settings do not have as much data collection when compared to other studies concerning policies. For example, in the case of Colombia, the Ministry of Education has decided that the country necessitated a transition into globalization. The nation started this process with adopting the CEFR as the main source of reference as the answer to learning, teaching and assessment processes. Elaboration of syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, question papers, textbooks, and so forth is what CEFR provides as a common ground on language acquisition and learning. (Council of Europe, 2001). In essence, such constructs unify the criteria amongst any given country to generate well outlined learning programs and certifications. Despite these functions, CEFR is alien to Colombia’s reality.

Objectives: This panel aims at bringing together scholars from different regions that study policy implementation and frontline workers in contexts of low trust, social inequality and limited state capacity. The objective is to generate new insights about the way systemic conditions shape the nature of frontline work, develop a clearer focus on the coping mechanisms frontline workers and citizens develop in contested contexts, and open up research in low-trust contexts to the mainstream academic debate. Research Context and Questions: Most of the theory about policy implementation has been developed in USA and Western European countries, under ideal conditions related to liberal democracies, strong institutions and, in some cases, welfare states with low inequalities (Lipsky 1980, Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003, Hupe and Hill, 2007, Hupe, 2019, Hill, Hupe and Buffat, 2015). However, it is problematic to extrapolate some of the findings from this literature into contexts where conditions are strikingly different, such as countries characterized by weak democratic institutions and low state capacity, scarcity of resources, conservative societies and high socio-economic inequality. This panel invites scholars to reflect and test whether the findings and insights from implementation studies and literature about frontline workers can apply to these different contexts. We invite papers that aim to address the following questions: • What happens to policy implementation in countries with weak institutions and low trust? How do these characteristics (i.e. corruption, clientelism, neopatrimonialism and patronage) affect policy implementation? • Which factors influence frontline workers’ work and motivation in contexts of high inequalities, scarcity of resources and weak institutions? • How is the interaction between frontline workers and citizens affected by these characteristics? What coping strategies are developed by frontline workers and citizens? We invite papers that analyze different types of policies (social, economic, fiscal, environmental, infrastructure and so on); using different methods (qualitative, quantitative or mixed) and different approaches either about implementation, frontline workers or administrative burdens. We also invite comparative studies. Expected impact on public policy research: We expect the panel to contribute to implementation studies and frontline worker theory through evidence from contexts and countries different than those already studied by the literature. We expect that these studies contribute to fill the gap of understanding policy implementation in different contexts and testing some of the theories already proposed by mainstream literature. Discussions may also contribute to the literature about development and developing countries, improving the knowledge about policy implementation challenges in these contexts. Tentative output suggestions: The panel aims to impact the debate on frontline work, street-level bureaucracy, policy implementation and administrative burdens in Latin America and the broader international academic community. The ambition is to become an international reference for studies on street-level bureaucracy and citizen-state interactions. More specifically, the panel will pursue various publication outlets, including the possibility of an international book project and a special issue in a prominent international journal on public administration. The panel will also seek to be a platform for researchers to participate in the broader international academic community, such as academic conferences on street-level bureaucracy or policy implementation. Finally, the panel aims to foster exchange of researchers among universities and institutes.

Implementation is a crucial stage in the policy cycle due to the impacts it has on achieving effective policy outputs. This relevance led to the development of a specific branch of public policy called ‘implementation studies’ and to the publication of the seminal book by Pressmann and Wildavsky (1973), and the following works of Bardach (1977), Lipsky (1980), Hjern and Porter (1981), O’Toole (1986), Nutt (1986), Matland (1991) and Hupe and Hill (2002). Since then, several studies have been investigating the processes of adoption of policies across different policy domains and along with different institutional levels. A policy area where implementation studies have particularly flourished is welfare. In the social policy domain, in fact, implementation gaps frequently emerge. The reason has to be traced back to the multi-level nature of the governance systems characterizing social policies and/or it is due to the nature of the services provided. Here competences and powers are allocated to actors from different institutional levels (local, regional, national) and with different legal status (public, profit, non-profit). Several scholars tried, therefore, to explain complex implementation processes in welfare regimes drawing on existing literature. For example, these studies focused on 'micro' explanations such as the impact of street-level bureaucrats’ discretion on service provision (Riccucci, 2002; Keiser 2010; Rice, 2012; Tummers and Bekkers, 2014; Buffat, 2015; Evans, 2015; Hupe, Hill, and Buffat, 2015; Leibetseder et al. 2015; Musheno and Maynard-Moody, 2015; Nothdurfter 2016; Nothdurfter and Herman, 2018; Thomann et al., 2018; Van Berkel 2019), on street-level bureaucrats’ influence on implementation (May and Winter, 2007), on street-level bureaucrats’ accountability (Hupe and Hill, 2007), on the effects of inconsistent policy design behind policy failures (Vancoppenolle et al. 2015; Hudson et al., 2019; Samnakay 2020), or finally on coordination and integration capacities of public officials (Lundin, 2007; Champion and Bonoli, 2011). Together these studies provide important insights into the problem of implementation gaps and demonstrate how the debate is relevant and lively – especially in the area of welfare policies. At the same time, however, implementation studies appear as highly fragmented and still characterized by weak theoretical foundations and by an approach largely descriptive (Howlett, 2019; for an exception see Pires 2010, and Hupe and Buffat, 2014). The panel is therefore aimed at advancing the academic debate on implementation by discussing whether is it possible to develop more coherent and general interpretative frameworks for welfare-related policies especially in the context of multi-level governance. Namely, the panel aims to contribute to the field of policy implementation by discussing contributions that present, also with the support of empirical data, multidimensional models of policy implementation.

Comparing policy implementation has been a fruitful venture for scholars of public policy. Scientific journals and research articles that apply a comparative perspective -across country, sectors and/or policies- are burgeoning (Engeli et al., 2018). This panel seeks to contribute to this wide debate by shedding light on a specific topic, which is the role of qualitative approaches to comparing street-level policy implementation. State and non-state actors and organizations on the ground are our focus of comparative analysis. This panel follows the lines of the comparative research on the implementation that goes beyond slippery normative concepts like implementation “success” and “failure” (Hupe & Sætren 2015) and the compliance towards supranational organizations such as the EU (Infantino 2019). While less prominent than comparing policies in their own right, comparing implementation offers important insights into differing trajectories and the institutional, political and other factors that shape them. This is particularly true where policy-making is centralised but implementation is not, for example the implementation of national law by substate actors in multiple localities or the implementation of international or supranational treaties by its member states. What do we learn from qualitative and comparative research designs at the level of the implementation? What are the challenges, empirical and theoretical, that such research designs might imply? How do they contribute to the fields of policy implementation and the study of policymaking? Comparative perspectives on policy implementation have been successfully adopted in policy fields like migration, environmental protection, health care, housing or unemployment. However, given the ideosyncracies of each policy field, there is little debate over the conditions for good comparison accross them. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that 90 per cent of implementation research even as late as in the 2000s studied and compared policies within a given country (Sætren 2014). This panel seeks to change this. This panel aims at privileging case-oriented rather than variable-oriented comparative research, which is small-N comparisons based on cases that are studied through qualitative research. According to Della Porta (2008, 198), a case-oriented approach “aims at rich descriptions of a few instances of a certain phenomenon. (...) Variable-oriented studies mainly aim at establishing generalized relationships between variables, while case-oriented research seeks to understand complex units.” This methodology is premised on the assumption that the comparison presumes the researcher’s familiarity with the cases he or she analyzes, as not every political phenomenon can be dissociated from the culture in which it is inscribed (Hassenteufel 2005). The researcher needs to understand contexts and the underlying lines of reasoning, which implies a certain level of contact and personal engagement with the cases. This panel aims at bringing this perspectives to comparative and qualitative analysis of policy implementation and the actors and the organizations involved in it, with a particular emphasis on cross-national comparisons. Comparing policy implementation often poses challenges to researchers, as functionally similar institutions do not always generate the same data or operate the same way. This panel seeks to investigate conditions for successful qualitative comparison - conceptual, methodological and theoretical - by inviting scholars from all policy fields to present and identify indicators for good comparisons of policy implementation.

This workshop aims to provide space to discuss how best to ensure that complex evaluations respond to the needs of diverse stakeholders, including policymakers, implementers, community members and end users. The workshop will respond to the following questions: 1. What are the ethical considerations present when conducting complex evaluations in health? Who has the obligation to respond to these (evaluators, implementers, evaluation commissioners etc)? 2. How can effective stakeholder management be undertaken to facilitate the use of evidence in public health policy? 3. What guidance exists for the use of innovative methods in evaluation? How can these be applied to complex evaluations?

Agenda 2030 is not a blueprint for policy implementation that guides countries on their way forwards the Sustainable Development Goals. Rather it acts as an umbrella for policy formation and implementation that must be adjusted to local conditions across overlapping levels of governance. Therefore, the capacity of policy actors to produce the required changes will largely depend on the characteristics of existing institutions and the political, economic, and cultural conditions that surround national, regional, and international initiatives for reform. The current political scenario in many countries of the Global South is highly complex, and institutional reforms are likely to show both convergence and divergence across countries. This diversity becomes a rich context to produce comparative studies of the influence of political instability on institutional development.

Policy design has gained renewed interest among policy scholars in recent years(Howlett and Lejano 2013; Howlett 2014). The new policy design orientation has abandoned the rationalistic perspective of the old orientation and is more interested in the dynamics through which policy design is generated but still retains many elements of older approaches and orientations (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo 2015). Many of these elements remain as pre-suppositions within the new orientation although often without empirical proof or due attention having been paid to their conceptual origins. This is true of several pillars of the field, including the concepts of design modes, the empirics of design spaces, and the general subject of policy calibrations (Capano and Howlett 2020).This panel is constructed to help fill these gaps in the literature and understanding of the subject. This panel will examine three ongoing issues in the contemporary policy design thinking, that are also three fundamental elements of policy design: Design Modes, Design Spaces, and Calibrations. Policy design can be defined as an activity – based on deliberate attempts to pursue policy goals through gathering and applying knowledge – that occurs in specific spaces, depends on contextual conditions, and is constrained by the previous design, which structurally limits the possibility of a radically new designs and often limits changes to alterations in the calibrations of existing tool components (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo 2015; Capano and Mukherjee 2020). From this point of view, the new orientation of policy design studies opens the door to an interesting perspective from which to analyse the efforts of governments inn terms of their actual governance mode. These Design Modes range from the classic expert-driven technocratic paradigm espoused by early students of the policy process (Dryzek 1983) to Foucault-inspired pawns to citizen-driven participatory efforts (Ganuza, and Francés 2012); from co-design (Blomkamp 2018; Bason 2014) to “authoritative instrumentalism” Colebatch (2018). Furthermore very often, despite the specific adopted mode, policy design looks to be restricted to an ongoing “layering” (Capano 2019). Simply classifying these different modes, however, tells us very little about which is appropriate for which circumstances, a subject which it is urged policy design thinkers now take up, rather than simply pushing forward their preferred, normative, type. Design Spaces describe the contexts affecting the process through which eligible solution are searched. They include the “sets of the locations where a series of choices are taken” with the expectation that the configuration of such spaces affect the designs which emerge from them (Linder and Peters 1989). To date, however, here have been few attempts to conceptualizing these spaces, however. Various criteria of conceptual treatment have been adopted in the literature and compete there, including the government’s ability to alter the status quo (or its “capacity”) and that government’s intention to design (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo 2015); government’s political capacity/government’s technical capacity (Capano 2018); government’s capacities/accumulation of anomalies (Capano and Mukherjee 2020). These typological efforts delimit specific design spaces that allow to different ways to design policies (labelled in different ways like optimal, adaptive, neutral layering, tense layering, patching, packaging, stretching). Furthermore these spaces could be also conceptualized as specific arenas of power where the characteristics of policy design determines whose actors are prominent and what kind of instruments should be preferred. More and better research, however, is needed on this subject. Calibrations are those contextual actions and decisions through which policymakers adjust the actual setting of policy instruments with respect to the target of interest. These calibrations involve key actions in policy delivery such as increasing the number of policemen if there is a risk of a riot, increasing the number of beds in hospitals if there is an unexpected disease in the population, or altering some rules of subsidy distributions against poverty when earlier ones fail. Calibrations thus represent a huge set of instrument-based decisions that are put into place when policy-makers consider precisely how a policy will be implemented. We know these kind of calibrations are the order of the day in policymaking, especially in the implementation stage when policies need to be delivered in an effective way (Hall 1993, Ostrom 2003) but exactly how they should be understood and what is their relationship to policy tools, governance modes and policy change, is poorly understood. There is a wealth of empirical evidence about various kinds of calibrations, some of which involve routine adjustments of ongoing policies, but little of it helps us understand what kinds of regularities or patterns exists when policymakers calibrate policies. References Bason, Christian. Design for Policy. New edition edition. Farnham, Surrey ; Burlington, VT: Gower Pub Co, 2014. Blomkamp, Emma. “The Promise of Co-Design for Public Policy.” Australian Journal of Public Administration 77, no. 4 (2018): 729–43. Capano, Giliberto and Mukherjee, Ishani. “Policy design and non-design: discerning the content of policy packaging, patching, stretching and layering”. In G.Capano and M. Howlett (eds), Modern Guide to Public Policy (pp. 203-220), Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2020 Capano, Giliberto, and Michael Howlett. “The Knowns and Unknowns of Policy Instrument Analysis: Policy Tools and the Current Research Agenda on Policy Mixes.” SAGE Open 10, no. 1 (January 2020) Capano, Giliberto. “Reconceptualizing Layering—From Mode of Institutional Change to Mode of Institutional Design: Types and Outputs.” Public Administration 97, no. 3 (September 2019): 590–604. Colebatch, Hk. “The Idea of Policy Design: Intention, Process, Outcome, Meaning and Validity.” Public Policy and Administration 33, no. 4 (October 2018): 365–83. Dryzek, John. “Don’t Toss Coins in Garbage Cans: A Prologue to Policy Design.” Journal Of Public Policy 3, no. 4 (1983): 345–67. Ganuza, Ernesto, and Francisco Francés. “The Deliberative Turn in Participation: The Problem of Inclusion and Deliberative Opportunities in Participatory Budgeting.” European Political Science Review 4, no. 02 (2012): 283–302. Hall, P. A. “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning and the State: The Case of Economic Policy Making in Britain.” Comparative Politics 25, no. 3 (1993): 275–96. Howlett, Michael, and Raul Lejano. “Tales from the Crypt: The Rise and Fall (and Re-Birth?) Of Policy Design Studies.” Administration & Society 45, no. 3 (2013): 356–80. Howlett, Michael, Ishani Mukherjee, and Jun Jie Woo. “From Tools to Toolkits in Policy Design Studies: The New Design Orientation towards Policy Formulation Research.” Policy & Politics 43, no. 2 (2015): 292–311. Howlett, Michael. “From the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ Policy Design: Design Thinking beyond Markets and Collaborative Governance.” Policy Sciences 47, no. 3 (September 1, 2014): 187–207. Linder, S. H., and B. G. Peters. “Instruments of Government: Perceptions and Contexts.” Journal of Public Policy 9, no. 1 (1989): 35–58. Ostrom, E. “How Types of Goods and Property Rights Jointly Affect Collective Action.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 15, no. 3 (2003): 239–70.

Policy design is one of the most commonly discussed approaches to public policy. Despite its common use, existing studies of policy design have several weaknesses. One of the more important of these weaknesses is that the terms that are commonly used to describe the components of designs many not be operationalized thoroughly. Further, those various components of design may not be integrated well but are analyzed and discussed individually. In particular, here has been an emphasis on policy instruments are constituting virtually the entirety of design, while our conception of design is substantially more encompassing. Thus, this panel will attempt to develop a more operational and integrated conception of policy design. Such a conception is useful not only for academic purposes but also for the practice of design. This proposed panel will build on the Handbook of Policy Design edited by the two proposers, and attempt to advance thinking about dynamic approaches to policy design. The Handbook is based on a model of design that includes four components: problems, instruments, evaluation and intervention. The main objective of this panel is to bridge the gap between theory and practice in policy design, while operationalizing this fourfold model. We wish to address three different questions: What is the actual contribution of a policy design framework to policy studies in theory and practice? How can we improve policy design in practice? And what can understanding practice do to improve theory? Why is institutionalization the cornerstone of policy design?

Policy is traditionally understood as a rational process; i.e., crafting rules and authorities to attain formal objectives. In this panel, we view policy from a different perspective: the working and reworking of relationships among interdependent policy actors engaged in complex, dynamic and emergent networks. Recent scholarship has begun to systematically explore what relationality means in policy and public administration (e.g., Bartels and Turnbull, 2019; Lejano, 2020; Stout and Love, 2015; Taufen and Olsen, 2020). However, more needs to be done to clearly articulate the nature, value and identity of a relational approach for studying public policy and administration. Therefore, this panel seeks to further explore how a relational approach provides new ways of understanding policy process and new modes of analyzing policy. Given the great diversity of relational approaches, we take a broad, inclusive view of what constitutes a relational approach at a conceptual and methodological level. At the same time, viewing policy situations from a relational point of view should afford new insights into how and why policies are and could be changed. Hence, we aim to further conceptualize relationality and see how the relational ethic/analytic is realized in different policy situations (e.g., addressing disparities, sustainable governance). Questions to be taken up: i. What is relationality, particularly in the realm of public policy, and how do we describe it? ii. What modes of analysis can uncover the relational dimension in policy situations and processes? iii. What changes in policy systems and practices evolve from taking a relational view?

Public policy problems are increasingly described along with structural characteristics as a starting point for further theory building and empirical analysis (Peters, 2005; Hoppe, 2011; Peters & Pierre 2015). One particularly prominent example is the wickedness of problems (e.g., Rittel & Webber, 1973; Head, 2019), which likely influences the solvability of problems and the choice of relevant instruments and tools in policy design. Related approaches are the uncertainty (e.g., Dewulf & Biesbroek, 2018) or the complexity of problems (e.g., Pahl-Wostl et al., 2012; Kirschke and Newig, 2017), highlighting specific aspects of wicked problems as a starting point for discussing participatory and legal instruments for their solution. In sum, these studies have contributed to a systematic analytical understanding of public policy problems beyond traditional policy field distinctions; they have also strongly stimulated the discussion of new design approaches in public policy analysis. But while structural approaches have advanced debates in public policy analysis, recent analyses correctly ask for better aligning structural approaches with public policy literature throughout the policy process (e.g., Roberts, 2018; Head, 2019). This includes a better understanding of how different characteristics of policy problems influence the agenda-setting processes, policy design, implementation, and also the possibility for evaluating public policies (ex-ante). This panel aims at a more advanced understanding of the role of problem structures throughout the policy process. Key questions are 1) What are the potential structural characteristics of public policy problems, and how do policy problems differ along with these structures? 2) Which potential impact have these problem structures on the policy process from different theoretical angles? How could, for instance, different structural characteristics of problems influence policy design and implementation? 3) What are the actual effects of problem structures on policy processes across specific policy fields, such as environmental, health, and agricultural studies? Addressing these questions shall advance our understanding of the role of structures in the analysis of public policy analysis, and therefore also support the generation of lessons learned across policy fields. References Dewulf, A., & Biesbroek, R. (2018). Nine lives of uncertainty in decision-making: strategies for dealing with uncertainty in environmental governance. Policy and Society, 37(4), 441-458. Head, B. W. (2019). Forty years of wicked problems literature: Forging closer links to policy studies. Policy and Society, 38(2), 180-197. Hoppe, R. (2011). The governance of problems: Puzzling, powering, participation. Policy Press. Kirschke, S., & Newig, J. (2017). Addressing complexity in environmental management and governance. Sustainability, 9(6), 983. Pahl-Wostl C., Lebel L., Knieper C., Nikitina E. (2012). From applying panaceas to mastering complexity: towards adaptive water governance in river basins. Environmental Science and Policy, 23, 24-34. Peters, G. B. (2005). The problem of policy problems. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, 7(4), 349-370. Peters, B. G., Pierre, J. (2015). Governance and policy problems: instruments as unitary and mixed modes of policy intervention. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 37(4), 224-235. Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences, 4(2), 155-169. Roberts, N. (2018). Wicked Problem Territory and the Design Strategy. https://www.ippapublicpolicy.org/file/paper/5b0f3d2a167fe.pdf

Policy design denotes a conscious effort to marshal governing resources and direct them towards the attainment of government goals. A design typically involves the creation of a mix or bundle of policy tools which can reasonably be expected to work together to attain a government goal or goals. Although a relatively old area of interest in the policy sciences, policy design remains in the nascent stage with respect to paedagogy in the academy. The purpose of the panel, Teaching Policy Design: Topics & Techniques, is to examine aspects of how the subject is currently taught in policy schools and programmes and draw on those experiences to improve instruction and outcomes. Papers in the panel will set out the topics which existing courses typically cover, explain their importance to the field, and how they are typically addressed in coursework. These will include topics such as what is policy design and how it has evolved; policy tools and portfolios; persuasive design, targeting and compliance; who are the policy designers and how do they think and operate; what is meant by policy effectiveness; what are design best practices; how designs and designers deal with uncertainty, conflict and controversy; and also what are the future directions in which the field is heading, why and what this means for future design paedagogy and practice. The panel will examine paedagogical techniques deployed in these courses across the globe, dealing with differences between undergraduate and graduate level instruction, case-based instruction and on-line and distance learning, as well as investigate efforts to integrate co-design and innovative pedagogies including new methods and techniques such as Big Data methodologies and policy labs and experiments.

This panel focuses on the advisory roles of political scientists (including public policy and public administration) based at universities across Europe, inside as well as outside the European Union. Do academics in this field engage in advising and opinionating roles, what drives or hinders them, and how do they conceive of their position as scholars in broader political and social environment? These questions are addressed in a large scale comparative project on the Professionalization and Social Impact of European Political Science, for which the most complete pan-European survey ever was conducted to map views and roles of political scientists in the political and social environment of their university home basis. This empirical mapping across a large number of countries allows a closer investigation of the various roles that exist for the provision of policy advice. The aim of this panel is to present and discuss findings and their possible impact on the political science community. How do advisory activities of political scientists vary across countries, or according to age, gender or location of the university in the national system? How do political and institutional regime characteristics and properties of the domestic policy advisory system affect the roles taken by political scientists? The panel gives room for presenting conceptual underpinnings, cases from countries and comparative analyses of the roles that political scientists play (or decide not to play) in the external environment of their universities across countries. To set the stage for panel presentations and discussion, the typology of roles is useful for mapping viewpoints and behaviour of political scientists. Political scientists can be pure academics, assume an expert role, engage in opinionating, or profile as true public intellectuals. Building on the literature on boundary work between experts and policy makers and on knowledge utilization, empirically mapping scholars in this field may distinguish types of knowledge transferred, frequency of advice provided, level of governance of engagement, the formal or informal nature of advising, types of recipients of knowledge and advice, and specific channels used. Moreover, the substantive topics of advising and outreach activities may be analyzed using a topic classification system such as developed in the international Comparative Agendas Project. The normative point of departure in this panel is a neutral stance with regard to any of the roles. Presentations may show how roles are developed, help understanding why this happens to a large or smaller extent, and discuss the meaning and impact for political science scholars in a scientific domain that faces increasing social and political turbulence, uncertainty and politicization.

This panel is oriented to increase our understanding regarding the role of parliaments in the design and analysis of public policies. In parliamentary systems, and especially among public policy scholars, parliaments are perceived as institutions tasked with approving policies designed and negotiated elsewhere (e.g. Kreppel 2014). Governments play a major legislative role: they draft and propose legislation, and build the necessary coalition to ensure that bills will become laws. Opposition groups are depicted as inactive and permissive, responsible for buttressing pre-set policy options. Yet, conclusions on executive predominance have relied disproportionately on the study of visible influence, with a focus on early or late stages of the policy-making process: the success rate of bills or the final vote on legislation (Russell and Cowley, 2016). The capacity of legislatures for designing and evaluating policies along the legislative process is a question largely ignored by existing research. Recent developments, such as the rise of new radical parties across Europe (De Giorgi and Ilonszki 2018); or the coronavirus outbreak, where parliaments have accommodated a number of conflicting policy interests improving in a number of cases government proposals (Murphy 2020), make the analysis of these questions especially interesting. Many stages of the parliamentary process allow legislators to participate in the design and analysis of public policies. The amendatory process is one where research is in its infancy. Defined as the “black hole” of the legislative process (Capano and Vignati 2008:35) we know very little regarding legislators’ incentives for introducing amendments, and also regarding their capacity for having these amendments passed (see Damgaard and Jensen 2006; Shepard and Carney 2005; Griffith 1994; Russel and Cowley 2016; Russel et al. 2016). Amendments are examined and discussed in parliamentary committees oriented, among other aspects, to provide expert evaluation of the pros and cons associated to different policy-making alternatives. But committees have also crucial roles regarding oversight functions, policy implementation and evaluation of policies. The interest on the functioning of parliamentary committees has increased (e.g. Matson and Strom 1995; Whiteman 1996; Chaqués-Bonafont and Muñoz 2016) but we still have little empirical information regarding their actual role as policymaking institutions. Do committees provide independent policy analysis separable from politics driven by systematic and objective evidence? Do variations in the Chamber’ human and economic resources or in legislators’ specialization influence their policy effectiveness? To what extent the participation of interest groups and/or public officials contributes to a more efficient policy-making? More research is also required to explore under what circumstances legislators, in parallel or alternatively to their activities in the parliamentary arena, rely on judicial procedures to prevent public policies they oppose from being implemented (Garoupa and Magalhaes, 2020). Due to data and methodological limitations, large-N and systematic studies on all these questions are extremely rare (see Gava et al. 2020; Sebok et al. 2019 for an exception), leaving crucial questions about who and why has power for influencing policies unanswered.

Despite the well-known advances in the public policy field of study in the last decade, it is still an embryonic analysis of policy mixes and capacities. In this sense, the panel's primary goal is to discuss policy instruments' combination in terms of setting, interaction, and effects. The secondary focus is on how policy capacity, including skills, competencies and capabilities (Wu, Howlett & Ramesh 2018), is being built and evolving to understand performance in different policy sectors better. This research agenda seems even more relevant in the context of governance, meaning a set of relational dynamics involving multiple actors interconnected by formal and informal institutions to produce state policy capacities (Capano, Howlett & Ramesh 2015). Thus, it is essential to investigate policy mixes and the interactions between their inherent governance mechanisms (hierarchy, market and networks). Besides, how they impact the public issues and the effects of the interactions themselves, which can be complementary or supplementary, generate synergies, but counterproductive as well. This avenue for research is quite broad, from the emphasis on the instruments' choice, whether coordinated or not, to the types and dimensions in which these interactions occur, including time and geographic spaces in specific policy areas. Therefore, the panel addresses the following research questions: how are governments formulating and implementing policy mix to deal with current and dynamic governance challenges? How do policies interact and affect the outcomes in different sectors, such as social, infrastructure, environmental and economic? What skills and competencies are required to build the capacity to improve the policy mix? How to foster an innovative culture and capacity in public organizations by designing effective policies? To deepen in these issues is crucial for advancing the understanding of how the public sector currently operates and deals with complex and constant changes in a period of scarce resources and increasing demand for better and innovative government deliveries and solutions.

The general objectives of the panel are to discuss the relations between policy evaluation and policy analysis, with the aim to re-bridging the gap between the two sub-disciplines (Geva-May and Pal 1999; Trochim 2009; Vedung 1997; Weiss 1999). Policy and program evaluation scholars devoted, during the last decades, strong efforts in the development and use of research methodologies (both quantitative and qualitative), following the wave of evidence-based policy making debate; and this has got an influence even on the field of policy studies, if we think of the papers and books using experiment methods, causal mechanisms approach, etc. On the other side, policy analysis studies pushed forward researches and theoretical proposals regarding many elements of interest for policy evaluation; for example, models to analyze policy success, policy learning, phases of the policy process (policy design, policy implementation), etc. The policy/program evaluation literature, even recent – both oriented to policy making and to knowledge development (Mark and Henry 2006) – seems to lack systematic connections and exchanges with the researches of the different policy analysis fields. Scientific Relevance The question that regards the policy evaluation and policy analysis perspectives has got now a really new relevance in connection with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In fact, the policies designed and implemented to deal with the pandemic need a multifaceted evaluation; some main elements of this complexity can be underlined: · in relation to the ‘policy success’, the analyses need not only to study the level of effectiveness, but even for whom the intervention reached a positive influence and the side effects produced; · the analysis of the implementation phases emerges as relevant considering a) the debate regarding the defense of ethical and democratic principles, as transparency, accountability, privacy, etc. b) the policy and politics role of measures and indicators; c) the increasing role of digital devices, with the parallel problem of the digital divide cleavages; d) the implementation of policies in multi-level governance contexts; · the design processes that are characterizing the anti-pandemic programs are showing the emerging role of scientists as policy advisers and the struggle among scientists themselves; · the learning opportunities to adopt/change policies on the basis of new evidences or/and from the effective experiences of others. With the aim to develop a fruitful exchange between these two sides, the panel aims at deepening the forementioned themes that can be eventually discussed in different sessions.

After the latest health events that have had an impact on a global level, the evaluation of public policies requires a critical analysis of the relationship between evaluative research, the role of evaluators, and relevant methodological innovations in the context of a pandemic. The current debate regarding the follow-up and monitoring of COVID cases, the need for quick and reliable information for decision-making, restrictions on the movement of people and social distancing measures, among other factors, have limitations that have put stress on evaluative research. These new restrictions imposed by the so-called “new normal” require evaluative research to consider innovation, flexibility, and / or methodological adaptability. For decades, public policy evaluation has been considered a relevant contribution to public policy (Bustelo, 2004). To analyze these policies Dunn (1994) proposes a methodology oriented towards searching and finding solutions to public problems. As indicated, this methodology incorporates five methods: problem structuring, forecasting, recommendation, monitoring and evaluation. From his perspective, evaluation is an integral part of the public policy analysis process. The literature on evaluative research has historically debated and proposed various methodological approaches (qualitative, quantitative, and mixed) that offer multiple alternatives for evaluating policies and programs. However, the evaluative practice of the public sector, focused on providing feedback on policies and programs, traditionally prioritizes econometric methodologies, based on complex indicator systems, which make the role of relevant actors, such as evaluators, invisible. Within the evaluative research field there is growing interest in improving the methods for evaluating programs and public policies with special emphasis on generating applied knowledge about their progress, stagnation and/or setbacks in solving public problems. Thus it is essential to shed light on the performance of programs and policies in regards to the completion of proposed goals and objectives, the identification of strengths and weaknesses, as well as both expected and unexpected results and impacts. In the current health, economic, and social crisis we are facing due to the pandemic, and with the idea of ​​strengthening debates on how to improve evaluative work, we ask ourselves: Is it pertinent to continue with the sole application of only traditional methodologies? What is the role of evaluators? How do we safeguard quality evaluations that contribute to the improvement of policies and consider the many new factors that interfere in these processes? The objective of the panel is to investigate how evaluative research has innovated in relation to methods and techniques applied in the current pandemic context, to improve and provide timely information to decision makers and citizens, and what role evaluators play or could play in this context. Therefore, it is interesting to detect innovations in the field of evaluative research, in relation to the methods and techniques applied or required in the current pandemic context. The panel seeks to learn about innovations (theoretical and practical) that synergistically articulate the role of evaluators, evaluation methods, and critical analysis of policies in the context of a pandemic. The panel considers the organization of different sessions focused on providing answers to the following questions: a) What is the connection between evaluative research, evaluators, and decision-makers of public policies and programs? b) What theoretical-methodological frameworks are utilized develop public policy evaluations in contexts of pandemic or exceptionality? c) What methodological innovations that have been incorporated into evaluation research in the context of a pandemic? d) How has the quality of evaluations been protected in the context of a pandemic?

Public policy is a main lever for addressing sustainability challenges such as climate change or biodiversity loss (Geels et al. 2017; Möhring et al. 2020). Yet, the level of ambition of current policies is not in line with the urgency and scale of these challenges (IPCC 2018). The reason for this gap can primarily be located in the underlying politics of policy change: Because it often imposes costs on incumbent actors, effective policy change is contested by both elite and mass politics with stakes in the status quo (Jordan and Moore 2020; Mildenberger 2020; Schmid et al. 2019; Stokes 2020). Recent scholarship has turned to these aspects related to the political feasibility of policy change (Jewell and Cherp 2020). A particularly promising and vibrant subset of this literature takes a dynamic perspective and examines whether and how policies can be intentionally designed to enable a positive ratcheting-up process (Levin et al. 2012; Rosenbloom et al. 2019; Sewerin et al. 2020). Such anticipatory policy design may increase the feasibility of ambitious policy in the future, for instance by inducing technological or behavioral change (Fesenfeld et al. 2020; Schmidt and Sewerin 2019) and thus creating and strengthening supportive Green coalitions (Meckling et al. 2015; Pahle et al. 2018). An important theoretical reference point for this emerging literature are concepts from policy feedback theory (Béland and Schlager 2019; Pierson 1993) and policy design literature (Haelg et al. 2020; Capano and Woo 2017). Research in this vein often looks at past political processes to propose lessons for future policy design (Schmid et al. 2019; Yona et al. 2019). It also stretches across different sub-disciplines, such as public policy (Capano and Woo 2017; Cashore and Howlett 2007), the transitions community (Rosenbloom et al. 2019), or governance scholarship (Muiderman et al. 2020). However, three main questions remain open in this emerging literature: (1) how to identify and empirically assess anticipatory policy design, (2) what are the underlying logics and concrete mechanism behind induced policy changes, (3) whether this research should engage in prescriptive work or focus on analytical approaches. The objective of this panel is to gather scholars from different sub-disciplines working on these questions of politics and policy design in addressing sustainability challenges.

The growing embrace of evidence informed policymaking has begun to collide with the recent growth in so-called 'post-truth politics' in a number of countries. Post-truth politics can be seen to be typified by situations where science and evidence are ignored and manipulated by those in positions of political authority- and truth itself is of secondary concern to achieving political victory. Beyond the rejection of individual inconvenient facts, however, there can also be strategic attacks on public administrative institutional bodies that serve to provide data, evidence, or independent review of evidence to inform policy debates.This is particularly a problem when societies are increasingly polarised, leading to greater rejection of inconvenient facts and evidence by the citizenry – either though unconscious cognitive biases, or conscious acceptance – or even embrace - of untruths as part of a view that such efforts reflect a greater intelligence than ones opponents - a clever ways to beat an opponent who should be defeated at all costs.While the reasons for strategic misuse of evidence may seem apparent - political victory or financial gain for politicians and those who support them - the implications of widespread abuse of evidence, and of attacks on evidence providing systems, is profound. The premise of the policy sciences – as efforts to improve the lives of the public - rests on the ability to undertake rational evidence-informed analyses and have some common acceptance or norms of truth. Yet the effect of post-truth politics can be to undermine the ability for evidence to serve this role in promoting the public good.The current environment thus raises a number of important questions around both why and how policy-relevant evidence may be strategically misused in particular political environments, but also about the factors that can enable, or oppose the misuse of evidence in policy spaces. This panel will call for papers that either conceptually or empirically explore aspects of evidence use, in relation to political manipulation or resistance.Example questions of interest to this panel could be:- How do political environments relate to the public's acceptance or rejection of attacks on evidence/truth?- How does polarisation specifically shape individual's acceptance of the misuse of evidence?- How do features of the political system - such as institutional arrangements, party structures, etc. - relate to evidence use and the ease of which evidence might be misused?- When are norms and institutions of evidence attacked or ignored? (And/or) What are the implications of this for future evidence use?- What factors or structures may buttress systems of evidence use against political manipulation or assault?- How does polarisation affect citizens' trust in evidence or evidence providing institutions?

The attention to evidence-informed policy making has reached peak levels in recent decades (Davies et al. 2000). From a rational perspective, evidence informed policy making is commonly assumed to improve government effectiveness and efficiency (Sanderson 2000): knowing whether policies work can avoid improper spending of public money, can improve the implementation of policy measures, and can make governments more accountable. Ample empirical evidence has shown, however, that this rational perspective does not always hold true. The production and use of evidence are often very ad hoc, and strongly politicized. Despite the large body of literature on the role of evidence in policy making, relatively little knowledge exists as to the rational and political dynamics underpinning the production and use of evidence in a multilevel governance context in particular. Multilevel governance poses substantial questions for scholars interested in evidence informed policy making. Consider federal states, for instance, where political power is divided between autonomous governments on different state levels. Or take international or supranational settings, as the European Union, where many competences and responsibilities are shared between various levels of government. A first series of challenges relates to how evidence is created in such settings, with policy theories (logic models) often spanning across different government levels, policy indicators being potentially differently interpreted at different levels, and data on the functioning of policies being spread across different levels. How then coordinating the evidence production process in such configurations, also knowing that there can exist a different epistemology about what is ‘good’ evidence across different levels (Jasanoff, 2011; Nutley et al., 2013). Secondly, there is the very political dimension of evidence use in this ‘two-level game’ (Putnam 1988). One can expect that the typical power play often characterizing evidence informed policy-making manifests itself more clearly in a multilevel context. Evidence can likely be used to reach political compromises between different state levels, or can help to overcome the tensions that regularly differentiate multilevel settings. Yet, in the same vein, it is possible that actors in multilevel settings strategically resort to evidence to prevent policy decisions, or jeopardize policy implementation. The question is whether we can indeed discern specific political dynamics that are characteristic to how evidence is used in a multi-level governance setting. This panel gathers theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contributions that enhance our understanding of how evidence is produced and used for decision-making in multilevel governance settings. We conceive the panel as a forum to exchange comparative research experience and case studies about this issue, and welcome contributions relating to different institutional settings, policy domains, and countries. To clarify, we approach ‘evidence’ in a comprehensive way: papers can focus on any kind of evidence, such as policy evaluations, think tank reports, scientific studies, etc. We also take a broad stance to multilevel governance, which we define as “negotiated, non-hierarchical exchanges between institutions at the transnational, national, regional, and local levels” (Peters and Pierre 2001: 131). References: Jasanoff, S. (2011). Designs on nature: Science and democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton University Press. Nutley, S.M., Powell , A.E. & Davies , H.T.O. (2013). What counts as good evidence. Alliance for Useful Evidence, London. Peters, B. G. and J. Pierre (2001). Developments in Intergovernmental Relations: Towards Multilevel Governance, Policy & Politics, 29(2), 131-135. Putnam, R. D. (1988). Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games. International organization, 427-460. Sanderson, I. (2002). Evaluation, policy learning and evidence‐based policy making. Public administration, 80(1), 1-22.

Many industries are likely to be transformed due to new and emerging digital technologies. The recent challenge brought about by the unprecedented pandemic has only aggravated the situation in terms of job competitiveness, job transitions and employment in general. Continually upgrading skillsets through skills training programmes and supporting policies is thus of value to deal with disruptions to the future of work and mandates a closer investigation in terms of the design and effectiveness of these programmes. The central question guiding this panel discussion is: What are some new and emerging models for training, skills building and employment support by policymakers and how can their effectiveness be evaluated? The panel seeks to bring policy and industry perspectives from different countries to discuss the policy implications of job disruptions in key economic sectors. It will also deliberate over existing and alternative models for training and skills building. With massive investments by governments in existing and alternative models of training, skills building, employment and re-employment, there is an urgent need to gather empirical evidence around evaluation of these schemes’ design and effectiveness.

Currently a generalized international recognition exists on evaluation as a central and strategic tool in the public policies processes. In the literatura on this subject, there are two main traditions which are in permanent debate. On one side, focuses which meet a “decisionist” tradition, centered on the needs of actors conducting policies and programs, from a technical and economical improvement perspective, which often resorts to positivist base methods and econometric tools which contribute to efficiency and effectiveness (Schumann, 1967; Nioche, 1982). On the other side, focuses genuine of the “politicizing tradition”, centered on the political processes which evaluation implies, integrate social actors aiming at their incidence on decisions, through constructivist and interpretativist based methods and participative tools which contribute to democratization (Weiss, 1972; MacDonald, 1974). In this field, diverse assessment methods have appeared such as the “Democratic” (MacDonald 1993), “Collaborative” (Cousins ​​y Whitmore 1998) or “Deliberative Democratic” (House & Howe 1999), which involve participative and deliberative spaces, beyond consulting. Despite of the fact that this focus has contributed to new forms of relationship between governors and governees through assessment, it often focuses on epistemologic and methodologic issues, without specifically approaching how it relates to the political processes which imply the assessed policies and programas. Public policies represent the personification of the diverse actors’ ideas and cannot be understood if pulled apart off their interests, beliefs or values, carried by political coalitions from the most conservative to the most democratic, by administrators, administrative workers, technicians, and the citizenship itself (Muller and Surel, 1998). Within this context, assessment relates in a multiple, complex and controverted form to all those actors, having to play not only a technical-economical role but also a polítical one, specially facing persons, groups and linked communities (Chelimsky, 2009). After this and within the context of the eastern democracies weakening, plus global crises such as the current pandemic, it is indispensable today that the assessment politicizing debate widens its horizons and directly dialogues with the policies processes, which is scarcely developed within the literature. Trying to meet this need, we ask ourselves, how can the assessing and politicizing debate find points connecting policies processes, to help their improvement and democratization? How can assessment theories and methodologies feed innovative alternatives which, saving the participation of the diverse actors, facilitate their incidence on policies and programs, beyond assessments? The objective of this panel is, therefore, to debate theoretical, methodologic and empiric contributions, which approach this more complex and deep vision of the policies assessment, from a politicizing-critical perspective, which questions the assumptions of this paradigm, by offering strengthening ways, although directly connected to the evaluated policies and programs, aiming at their democratic strengthening.

Food safety, food security, environmental sustainability and health are the main challenges for food policy; a field of study at the crossroad of social, environmental and health programmes. In the last years, these topics have become progressively more relevant, punctuated by spikes of attention due to repeated crises. The mad cow disease in the late 1990s made food safety a EU priority. Soon after, the 2005-2008 food-price crisis gave rise to major protests and social unrest in multiple cities, revealing the lack of resilience of production and consumption systems. Finally, the present covid-19 emergency is creating new social fragilities and an ensuing food security crisis. More ordinary and long-term problems are not missing either, such as non-communicable diseases related to bad dietary habits and the environmental damages from food production and consumption. Shortly put, food problems abound and new solutions are in order. From the early productivist paradigm aimed at supporting production to lower prices through public subsidies, governments are now experimenting across the whole range of government tools: economic incentives, regulations, new services, education, communication and nudges. This effort at policy design happens at multiple scales, from the local to the international level, in a political arena characterised by conflicting interests, a major role for private business in shaping consumers’ preferences, issues related to scientific decision-making, and the rise of new forms of participation and mobilisation by citizens. The growing centrality of food as a policy problem and the recent acceleration in experimenting with food programmes by governments invite policy analysts to engage in a deeper investigation of food policy. The goal of the panel is to discuss social, environmental and health programmes related to food with a specific interest to their design, implementation and evaluation. Regarding social food policies, we are interested in food security programmes, with a special attention to the recent pandemic crisis: the consequences of covid-19 for food security and the design and implementation of emergency food programmes. Concerning environmental food policy, the panel will deal with the circular economy of food – preventing food surplus, encouraging food redistribution, recycling and reuse – and with public programs and private initiatives that deal with the overall environmental impact of food production and consumption. The discussion of health-related food programmes will be the final focus of the panel, with special regard to those programmes reorienting consumers’ nutritional habits – from the more typical education and awareness campaigns to more recent behavioural interventions.

The quality and public accountability of expert advice is important for effective government response to complex problems, as was already shown in recent pandemics. Smart institutional designs of producing and utilizing expert advice that can balance the public needs for transparent, inclusive and professionally independent advice are called for. The rhetoric of ‘evidence-based policymaking’ shall first and foremost be grounded on the understanding that ‘evidence’ is not norm-free nor politics-free. Instead, the scientific evidence itself has underlying beliefs and paradigms, which are shaped by the slowly evolving political, social and economic institutions. Similarly, policy learning of different actors in different contexts is also affected by institutional settings for evidence and expert advice, which may range from hierarchical learning to epidemic learning, from political learning to social learning. This panel welcomes papers that investigates the following questions theoretically and/or empirically: 1. How to design the policy advisory institutions that can manage the tensions between scientific knowledge and value/interests? 2. How to design the policy advisory institutions that can cope with the potential clash between scientific knowledge and layperson’s knowledge? 3. How to design the policy advisory institutions that will take into account the different preferences of policymakers, citizens and experts? 4. What are effective political strategies (e.g. inside and outside advocacy) for expert advisors from various organizations (e.g. think tanks, NGOs, government departments) to persuade policymakers to use the evidence? 5. What regime/country contexts account for variation in effective institutional design for producing and utilizing high quality expert advice and evidence? References: Soss, Joe. 1999. Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning and Political Action. American Political Science Review, 93(2):363-380. Li, Wei. 2019. A Comparative Analysis of Expert Advisors’ Role Perceptions in Policymaking: The Case of Hong Kong, China. Li, Wei. 2019. Setting the Stage for Expert Advice? An Analysis of National Expert and Advisory Committees in China. China Policy Journal 1(2): 81-112. Dunlop, Claire A. 2017. The irony of epistemic learning: epistemic communities, policy learning and the case of Europe’s hormones saga. Policy and Society, May: 1-18.

Food systems around the world are experiencing many crises. A transformation has taken place in our food systems that concentrates power and marginalizes local knowledge. This shift from community to corporate control has distanced everyday eaters and growers from critical decision-making processes in food systems (Winson 1993). A recent report by the National Farmers Union of Canada (Qualman and NFU) notes that an overwhelming majority of profits in food are directed to input suppliers, processors, or corporate actors (2019). In addition to narrowing margins, we have also seen the concentration of farms, industrial control in both technology and processing, as well as shifts toward a more technology-driven production approach. Our food system has also created an incredible strain on our environment. Eroding soil health, increasing presence of algae blooms, declining biodiversity and struggling pollinator populations all sound warning bells. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates a global 1.5-degree Celsius temperature rise between 2030 and 2052 with the industrial food system contributing up to 37 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPPC 2019). Further, food systems connect the grower and the eater in an intimate relationship of sustenance and community. Yet, according to the most recent State of the Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, & WHO 2020), a healthy diet is out of reach for an estimated 3 billion individuals worldwide. Exacerbating this challenge, the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE 2020) for the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) noted that COVID-19 is expected to have a negative impact on communities around the world through decreases in food security and nutrition. The magnitude of this impact will depend on how all levels of government, from the local to the global, are prepared to respond. Recent literature has found that through the regionalization of food infrastructure and an adjustment towards the production and access of nutritious food closer to home, coordinated policy can build resilient systems (Blay-Palmer et al. 2020). As such, this panel will explore multi-scalar policy frameworks that support resilient regional food systems, including topics such as farmer-centred knowledge mobilization (e.g. extension), infrastructure, public procurement, nutritional guidelines, trade, and eaters’ access to nutritionally sufficient foods.

In this panel we seek to address the overarching research question: “How are public administrations creating markets, and how are these markets reconfiguring public administrations?” Markets are increasingly becoming one of the more preferred means for re-engineering the public sector, with proponents arguing that they reduce costs while increasing performance. As a result, market-oriented reforms and associated practices are increasingly being deployed throughout public administrations. Whether or not we theorize the contemporary state of public administration as “post-NPM”, markets not only seem to prevail - the ambitions and expectations on them as governmental instruments are higher than ever (Brunsson & Jutterström, 2018). These processes leave no policy area behind, and various policy fields, from social policy to higher education are marketized in in specific yet different ways. To exemplify, these may include the continuous attempt of finding new ways of inserting competition in public service delivery, the search of policy innovations which open up service delivery to new actors and new forms of collaboration, and ongoing legislative processes with the aim of increasing and facilitating competition. This may in turn entail concrete models and policy tools such management by contracts, purchaser-provider split models or similar quasi-market solutions around public services (Hansen & Lindholst, 2016), but also more ideational changes such the re-configuration from citizens to customers, and from professionals into managers (Peetz, 2019). We aim to theorize the ongoing marketization of the public sector in different contexts and from different points of entry. As we do so we follow the influential body of literature that lately have come to pay specific attention to markets as socially produced and arranged through complex entanglements of actors, expertise and material objects (eg. Çalişkan and Callon, 2010). Here, we are interested in how public administrations produce markets through such arrangements, how they mobilize certain forms of expertise and how they setup their organizational formats to act as an interface with private interests. This also includes an elevation of questions related to who the organizing agents are and why these actors choose to intervene, questions that have been described as key to understanding the organization of markets over time and space. Moreover, we are equally interested in how public administrations are themselves recast as market actors in diverse ways as the market arrangements also reaches into them. Not least, we find it important to understand how this form of marketization have effects for established bureaucratic principles and its potential for changing the role and function of civil servants. Finally, we argue that beyond understanding how material objects, expertise and actors are drawn together in market arrangements, it is of vital importance to detail their consequences in terms of power and politics. Brunsson, N. & Jutterström, M. (Eds.) (2018). Organizing and reorganizing markets. Oxford Oxford University Press. Çalışkan, K. & Callon, M. (2010) ‘Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets’, Economy and Society, 39(1), 1–32. Hansen, M.B. & Lindholst, A.C. (Eds.) (2016). Marketization revisited. International Journal of Public Sector Management.29(5):398–408.Peetz, T. (2019). Neoliberalism or organizational economization? Ephemera Theory & Politics in Organization, 19(3): 591–613.

This panel seeks to discuss – from a theoretical and empirical points of view – the phenomenon of democratic experimentalism (Bohman 2012, Ansell 2011 and 2012, Sabel and Zeitlin, 2012, Frega 2016) in Latin American countries, from a critical perspective in public policy research. In Latin American countries, there is a research tradition in public policy analyses that encompasses several experiences in terms of public governance based on "bottom-up" processes and on democratic participation, focusing on the influence of various actors on the design and implementation of public policies. After the re-democratization wave in Latin America countries, many of the constitutional and regulatory frameworks encourage the promotion of the design, formulation and implementation of public policies with civil society agents, thereby strengthening systems of deliberative democracy (Midlej e Silva 2019). However, we have recently seen the resurgence of governments that are utilizing antidemocratic practices and that are refractory to participation. This situation of democratic deficit became more critical in face of Covid-19 pandemic, which requires a more robustness in terms of governance (Ansell, Sorensen and Torfing 2020). Thereby, emerges the need and urgency to discuss and reconsider the processes of democratic experimentalism in Latin America and its relationship with governance of public policies. This panel thus aims to broaden the understanding of the scope and limits of new democratic experimentations to advance and create new agendas in the debate about governance and public policies. In particular, we are interested in exploring new theoretical-analytical perspectives inaugurated by the "argumentative turn" (Fischer and Forester 1992) that rely on post-positivist approaches and develop argumentative, critical, constructivist or pragmatist analyzes of public policies and public governance. This involves better understanding the relationship between public policy and the political system and examining not only the effects of public policies and programs, but also their presuppositions and processes, from a bottom-up logic. The objective of this panel is also to stimulate new approaches aimed at overcoming the dichotomy between policy analysis and policy studies, thereby widening the debate in the field of public policy studies in Latin America and allowing to look at public policies as a result of “public actions” (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007, Cefai, 2017). In this perspective of shared governance (Osborne, 2006) we are interested in discussing more deeply the determinants and effects of the processes of "democratic experimentalism" on public policies and public governance in Latin American countries, in a post-pandemic scenario. It is a question of exploring the scope and limits of public action networks or epistemic communities that mobilize and act around public issues in public arenas in order to reinforce the dynamics of public inquiry and collaborative learning (Ansell, 2011, Frega, 2019), as well as social innovation experimentations to face the turbulent problems (Ansell, Sorensen and Torfing, 2020) imposed by COVID-19 and to reinforce democracy and sustainability (Andion, Alperstedt and Graeff 2020) in Latin America. References: Andion, C; Alperstedt, G. D.; Graeff, J.F. (2020) Social innovation ecosystems, sustainability, and democratic experimentation: a study in Florianopolis, Brazil. Journal of Public Administration. 54 (1), p. 181-200. Ansell, C. (2011). Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship. Ansell, C. (2012) What is democratic experiment? Contemporary Pragmatism, v. 9, n. 2, p. 159-180, 2012. Ansell, C, Sorensen, E. & Torfing, J. (2020) The COVID-19 pandemic as a game changer for public administration and leadership? The need for robust governance response to turbulent problems. Public Management Review. Ahead of Print, 1-12. Bohman, J. (2012) Democratic Experimentalism: From Self Legislation to Self-Determination. Contemporary Pragmatism. 9 (2), December, p.273–285. Cefaï, D. Públicos, problemas públicos, arenas públicas. Novos Estudos CEBRAP, v. 36, n. 1, p. 187-213, 2017. Frega, R. (2019). Pragmatism and the wide view of democracy. Gewerbestrasse: Palgrave Macmillan. Lascoumes, P.; Le Galès, P. Sociologia da ação pública. Maceió: Edufal, 2007. Midlej e Silva, S. (2019) Participation in Public Policy: Brazil. In: Farazmand A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. Osborne, S. (2006). The New Public Governance? Public Management Review 8. p. 377-387. Sabel, C., & Zeitlin, J. (2012). Experimentalist Governance. In D. Levi-Faur (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

That crises give societies and policy makers new opportunities is slowly becoming a cliché. However, these crises – which we could observe in real time through the COVID-19 pandemic – demonstrate how fragile civilization is; how within a few days political rationales change and transform actors, practices and institutions carrying out political decisions. Among other things, emotionally charged language of crises recalls cultural and historical contexts (see Weible et al, 2020), conflicting values spark public controversies (Alexander 2019) and crises call for engagement of both citizens and governments. In that respect, these critical moments can also facilitate a dialogue between public policy and social theory which is why our panel takes the context of crises as a chance to foster such a dialog and to propose new insight to advance policy research.The broad fields of social theory cover concepts such as risk (Adam et al., 2000; Beck, 1992; Douglas, 1992; Luhmann, 2017), crisis (Habermas, 1975; Walby, 2015; Alexander 2019), trust (Luhmann, 1979; Gambetta 1988), legitimacy (Boltanski 2011, Blumenberg 1985) or science and expertise (Collins and Evans 2008, Latour 2005, Jasanoff and Simmet 2017). The various ways in which crises produce and transform policy narratives and practices, mobilize or demobilize actors and institutions, and the process throuch which they create specific types of temporalities all call for a deeper integration of social theory in policy studies scholarship. This panel will thus address potentialities and difficulties of such partnership and discuss lessons which can be drawn from social theory for policy research. We argue that policy analysis of crises might profit from the partnership with social theory. Policy crises in topics such as migration, climate change or health step in new terrains of practices, governance and establish new links between micro and macro structures that can be better understood through the dialog mentioned.Across both empirical case studies on crisis using social theory as an explanatory lens and theoretical discussion this panel advances an understanding of crises as dynamic sites of meanings and practices that are embedded in values and beliefs in a society. The panel aims to develop a deeper understanding of policy practice in critical moments in diverse policy fields while using social theory. At the same time, the panel wants to use these examples to further conceptualize links between recent social theory and policy analysis both in substantive and methodological ways. References: Adam, B., Beck, U., van Loon, J. (2000). The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory. London: Sage.Alexander, J. C. (2019). What Makes a Social Crisis?: The Societalization of Social Problems. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.Blumenberg, H. (1985). The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (R. M. Wallace, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Boltanski, L. (2011). On critique: A sociology of emancipation. Cambridge: Polity Press.Collins, H., & Evans, R. (2008). Rethinking expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Douglas, M. (1992). Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge.Gambetta, D. (1988). Trust. Making and breaking cooperative relations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Habermas, J. (1975). Legitimation Crisis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Jasanoff, S., & Simmet, H. R. (2017). No funeral bells: public reason in a ‘post-truth’age. Social Studies of Science, 47(5), 751-770.Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luhmann, N. (2017). Risk: A Sociological Theory. New York: Routledge.Walby, S. (2015). Crisis. Cambridge: Polity Press.Weible, C. M. et al. (2020). COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives. Policy sciences, 53, 1-17.

With the global Covid recession following quickly on the heels of the global financial crisis the discussion of a new and far reaching transformation of economic and social relations has gained additional momentum. A clearer understanding of multiple and interrelated crisis starts to inform social science debates, requiring poltiical response adequate to deal with the crises. For example, while social, economic and ecological goals clearly are considered equal in new approaches such as the Green New Deal, real life policy conflicts are frequently worked out in constellations where some of these goals are pitted against others. This is partly due to the ongoing dynamic of corporate globalization, financialization and neoliberal imperatives of locational competition and competitiveness on the one hand, the rising status of ecological criteria due to the increasing damages related to climate change and to the increasing urgency to address social and regional inequalities within and across borders. How social forces prepare and respond to meet these challenges thus needs to be moved to the center of attention in order to observe and understand different dynamics and conflict constellations where economic, social and environmental actors and movements compete for attention and conflicting alliances. Social actors pre-configure strategies by way of reasoning. Thus it is necessary to observe both actor constellations and discourse constellations in order to improve understanding of obstacles to transformations and re-positioning necessary to overcome obstacles. At a general level questions need to be asked if and how contradictions between social and environmental objectives are resolved in controversies about energy transformation or the transformation of the transport system or the transformation of agriculture and food production if job losses are inevitable to meet ecological objectives, for example. The panel links up to the transformation debate at large, and seeks to add a political sociology dimension involving both concrete actor studies and discourse coalitions. Beyond the traditional policy network study focus in public policy and governance studies, we suggest a need to pay more attention to the wider civil society dimension of social order and the expanded state as many of the conflicts cannot be resolved in the narrow confines of the political and institutional domain with many relevant social forces remaining outside recognized governance structures.

The purpose of this panel is to: a. Explore how public policy can enhance the operational performance of public sector , b. Establish the extent to which failed public policy systems can jeopardize performance of public sector service delivery c. To establish if the citizenry has a basic right to interrogate policy makers and implementers on service delivery From a pragmatic constructivist perspective, governments have a role to play as far as service provision is concerned to its citizens. The aspirations of a society are of fundamental significance in terms of understanding their needs as well as scope of their destiny. Their needs shape how supply chains can be configured in line with their expectations. Thus resource mobilization and exploitation must reflect the real desire to promote value for money so that all citizens benefit from the national planning processes. Public policy discourse is then viewed as window to debate how best policies can be formulated in line with the needs of the society as enshrined in their constitution and various treaties signed. This is an open panel comprising of any members willing to share the views on how public policy can be a driver of competent practices in public sector supply chains. Resources are scarce, and therefore, there is need to understand that public policy can be used as a vehicle to promote fairness in the distribution of goods and services. The panel is thus to explore the hypotheses: a. Public policy has a positive relationship to operational efficiency of public sector supply chains, b. Public policy can lead to desired level of economic development in society.

Climate change is one of the preeminent environmental and social/political challenges of our time. Many governments, civil society organizations, and even businesses across the globe are addressing climate change by developing a broad range of “transition” policies. Some of these do address issues of justice, others do not. Theories on justice, largely from social movement, put environmental justice on the agenda. The current emerging notions of climate justice or energy justice draw our attention to (1) the disproportionate burden that vulnerable communities, areas, and/or generations will bear for climate change, and (2) to the burden on communities, areas and generations due to the necessary transitions envisioned, for example in energy, food production and consumption, often toward more circularity or renewables. Interesting developments In the US include efforts by the NY Renews Coalition, which won transformative climate legislation in New York that sets aggressive greenhouse gas emissions targets, and requires that 40% of investments in transforming the energy sector go to historically disadvantaged communities, while also establishing the Climate Justice Working Group to give them a seat at the table. This Green New Deal style policy contrasts with more radical reforms proposed in the Red Deal that center indigenous points of view and aim to dismantle capitalism, neo-liberalism, and colonialism and address the injustices of these systems. In Europe debates on the justness of renewable energy policies is receiving attention, often due to increasing societal resistance against policies and measurements to ensure a transition to renewables. Under societal pressure policy makers are urged to better include and take care of the interests of minorities, people with a low income, and others not recognized as potentially disproportionally burdened. Very often the starting point is societal resistance and protest against these policies. We see similar attempts at just transitions globally. An important question in conceptualizing climate justice, energy justice, environmental justice, is: justice according to whom? What are the normative claims of justice and how are those constructed? What are the particular forms of injustice that are articulated in different contexts and what are the historical trajectories of those claims? What role do academic studies play in constructing insights in justice and injustice in the policy practice? What policy solutions have been developed and how are these animating different participants in discourse coalitions, for example for or against climate action and energy transitions? How are societal groups, communities, citizens framing the problems of climate change in relation to climate justice, or other forms of justice? What is the interpretive work that they’re doing to proposal reforms or radical transformations? What types of counter-framing are they confronting as they attempt to make sense of climate as a problem of justice, and how are they addressing these counter-frames, particularly those that lose their connection to agreed up facts about anthropogenic climate change and espouse climate denial?

The world continues to be ravaged by public policy problems of increasing complexity and uncertainty which do not have social consensus or obvious technical solutions. These so-called wicked policy problems include the global pandemic with no end in sight, a climate crisis, species extinction, social, racial and caste injustices, poverty and inequality, violent conflicts, democracy under threat, and the perversity of public policy agenda still driven by GDP growth as its main objective. SDGs progress has been slow or even reversed (UN 2019) declining trust in government, public policy and institutions and even in each other. These challenges are made even more difficult by their inter-linkages through which some apparent solutions in one area result in a worsening situation in others. The panel will discuss insights from recent social science advances with a focus on three rather uncommon areas of research which can help elucidate wicked problems. These areas are - complexity sciences including complexity economics; quantum social science and applied spirituality. The panel will also consider their interconnections and complementary issues. Many of today’s economic problems cannot be treated adequately with equilibrium models or linear reductionist cost-benefit instruments alone because they are far from equilibrium, nonlinear, dynamic and evolutionary, self-organizing, and emergent, hence, the use of complexity economics. In addition, they are almost always characterized by inherent uncertainty, probabilistic features, interdependent linkages and influences, etc. hence our interest in quantum social science. At the core of all these problems is the human feeling of separateness from one another and from nature. This seems to be the source of fear, insecurity, competition more than cooperation, greed, over-consumption, etc. These drivers in turn lead social injustice, economic inequality, environmental degradation, violent conflict, etc. despite the core spiritual teachings of all the major religions. Applied spirituality for public policy is therefore about using the understanding that our notion of separateness and the imaginary ego might not only be illusory but the source of much of our social problems. This has the potential to help us formulate policies and build capacities that go beyond symptoms and address causes of today’s challenges. This panel will therefore discuss major interdisciplinary research concepts and approaches in recent social science and the way in which they affect our analyses and understanding of public policies. The panel will be structured to fit the time allocated but might work best in a 90-minute slot allowing for discussions and interactions with the audience and among panelists.

Thus, adding to the powerful efforts related to epistemological and methodological positionality of critical policy studies, this panel proposes to expand this construction toward the teaching dimension. To be more specific, we are interested in thinking and exploring the critical ways for teaching public policy in a critical perspective. These efforts point to critical pedagogy (Freire, 1973; Simon, 1992; Giroux, 2011)– now, however, within the field of public policy studies (Mandell and Fischer 2012). It puts the subjects into discussion as producers and reproducers of knowledge that can free them from historical oppression in a broad and complex sense (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000). So, dialogues are important, in addition to the seminal work on the pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire (1973; 2011), also the works on decolonial pedagogy (Walsh, 1990; Fijino et al. 2018) and on black feminism (hooks, 1994; 2003; Collins, 2001). Concepts that open up new creative possibilities in educational processes are also very welcome, such as empowerment (Freire, 1973), experience (Dewey, 1934), public experience (Peres, 2020), inquiry (Dewey 1938, Schon Rein, 1994), community (hooks, 2003), transgression (hooks, 1944), intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Akotirene, 2019) decolonial corpus (Quijano, 2007; Mignolo, 2002) and reflexivity (Schon, 1987). Finally, we are interested in works that explore and propose new anchors between democracy and knowledge (Fischer, 2009), because rationality is not neutral (Giroux, 1992), assuming the centrality of the argument and values, the importance of the multi-method, in a context of reinforced democratic values, in favor of a society that embraces differences and overcomes historical oppression in the principles of production and reproduction of knowledge and of doing and teaching science. For this panel, the pedagogical dimension is so transformative and disruptive that the efforts made in it can not only apply critical studies in public policies to teaching, but can also be able to expand the very set of values ​​that underlie studies written in public policies, with new looks that reveal old forms of oppression not yet observed. References: AKOTIRENE, Carla. Interseccionalidade. São Paulo: Sueli Carneiro; Editora Jandaíra, 2020. BOLTANSKI, L., THÉVENOT, L., 2000, "The reality of moral expectations: a sociology of situated judgment", Philosophical Explorations, vol. III, n° 1. BOULLOSA, Rosana de Freitas. Mirando ao Revés as políticas públicas: os desenvolvimentos de uma abordagem crítica e reflexiva para o estudo das políticas públicas. Publicações da Escola da AGU, série especial, 2019, pp. 89-105. BOULLOSA, Rosana de Freitas; PERES, Janaina Lopes Pereira; BESSA, Luiz Fernando Macedo. Por dentro do campo: uma narração reflexiva dos estudos críticos em políticas públicas. Revista Organizações & Sociedade, approved in 2020 [in press]. COLLINS, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2001. CRENSHAW, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–67. DEWEY, John. The theory of inquiry. New York: Henry Holt, 1938. DEWEY, John. Art as experience. New York: Minton, Balch, and Company, 1934. FISCHER, Frank. Beyond empiricism: policy inquiry in post positivist perspective. Policy studies journal, v. 26, n. 1, p. 129-146, 1998. FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia do oprimido. 50. Ed. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2011. FREIRE, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury Press, 1973. GIROUX, Henry. On Critical Pedagogy. London: Continuum. 2011. HAWKESWORTH, Mary. (1994). Policy Studies with a Feminist Frame. Policy Sciences, vol. 27, n. 2 (3), 97-118. HOWARTH, David. (2010, April). Power, discourse, and policy: articulating a hegemony approach to critical policy studies. Critical Policy Studies, 3 (3-4), 309-335. HOOKS, Bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994 HOOKS, Bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Routledge, New York and London, 2003. MIGNOLO, Walter 2002. ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 101.1 (Winter): 56-96. PERES, Janaina Lopes Pereira. Reinterpretando o fluxo de políticas públicas a partir da experiência: do pragmatismo crítico ao Hip Hop da Ceilândia/DF (Tese de doutorado). Programa de Pós-Graduação em Desenvolvimento, Sociedade e Cooperação Internacional - PPGDSCI, Universidade de Brasília - UnB, 215f. SCHÖN, Donald, & REIN, Martin. (1994). Frame Reflection: Towards the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies. NY: Basic Books. SCHÖN, Donald, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action. NY: Basic Books, 1984 YANOW, D & SCHWARTZ-SHEA, P. (2006). Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research and the Interpretative Turn. Armonk, London: M. E. Sharpe. WALSH, Catherine. Pedagogy and the Struggle for Voice: Issues of Language, Power, and Schooling for Puerto Ricans. New York : Bergin & Garvey, 1990. QUIJANO, Aníbal. Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. In: CASTRO-GÓMEZ, S.; GROSFOGUEL, R. (Orgs.). El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana-Instituto Pensar, Universidad Central-IESCO, Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007. p. 93-126

In public management and administration, there is an increasing debate over megaprojects’ policy formulation and implementation (Flyvbjerg 2017). However, the role of discourse and policy narratives in relation to megaprojects has been relatively underexplored (see e.g. Esposito, Terlizzi, and Crutzen 2020; van Wijk and Fischhendler 2017). Megaprojects are long since considered a popular policy measure to stimulate the economy (Aschauer 1990). These are usually defined as large-scale ventures that take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders and have a long-lasting impact on the economy, environment and society. Megaprojects are extremely complex, uncertain and conflictual policy fields marked by the existence of different sociotechnical imaginaries about how megaproject-related changes will contribute to public purposes, collective futures, and the common good (Cousins 2020; Hsu 2018). While the logic upon which many megaprojects are based relies on benefits associated with the provision of network services to citizens in several policy domains (e.g. transport policy, water management), numerous criticisms have been raised against them for a number of reasons, ranging from their top-down planning processes to the negative effects on local communities. In bringing together critical management and policy studies, the aim of the panel is to explore the discursive practices which populate and inform megaprojects’ administration and management. In the literature, increasing attention is paid to narratives and how they affect the policy process and the opinion of the general public (Fischer and Forester 1993; Roe 1994; Shanahan et al. 2018). The legitimation function of narratives is strictly intertwined with the role of ideas and knowledge in shaping policies. Ideas in fact represent cognitive orderings of the material world and posit causal relations that guide policy-makers and affect the behavior of citizens towards the proposed policy path. The panel welcomes papers posing research questions relating to how discourse and narratives – embedded in different institutional contexts – are conveyed by agents to articulate and make sense of megaprojects complexity, uncertainty, and conflictuality, advancing our understanding of actors’ competing views about how the megaproject will contribute to the economy, the environment, and society. References Aschauer, David Alan. 1990. “Why Is Infrastructure Important?” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, New England Economic Review, 21–48. Cousins, Joshua J. 2020. “Malleable Infrastructures: Crisis and the Engineering of Political Ecologies in Southern California.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3 (3): 927–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619893208. Esposito, Giovanni, Andrea Terlizzi, and Nathalie Crutzen. 2020. “Policy Narratives and Megaprojects: The Case of the Lyon-Turin High-Speed Railway.” Public Management Review, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2020.1795230. Fischer, Frank, and John Forester, eds. 1993. The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. London: Duke University Press. Flyvbjerg, Bent, ed. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hsu, Jinn-Yuh. 2018. “Hsinchu Technopolis: A Sociotechnical Imaginary of Modernity in Taiwan?” Critical Sociology 44 (3): 487–501. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920517705440. Roe, Emery. 1994. Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507698291008. Shanahan, Elizabeth A., Michael D. Jones, Mark K. McBeth, and Claudio M. Radaelli. 2018. “The Narrative Policy Framework.” In Theories of the Policy Process, edited by Christopher M. Weible and Paul A. Sabatier. New York: Routledge. Wijk, Josef van, and Itay Fischhendler. 2017. “The Construction of Urgency Discourse around Mega-Projects: The Israeli Case.” Policy Sciences 50 (3): 469–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9262-0.

General objective: The purpose of the panel is to build on recent research on post-truth politics, policy argumentation, and policy narratives to explore more deeply the non-obvious but nonetheless demonstrable dynamics of public policy discourse. Research question: What are the implications of post-truth politics and political relativism for current trends in policy discourse. To what degree are relativism or post-truth politics a danger for the future of democratic governance? What can be done? Scientific relevance: This panel will be of relevance to public policy studies generally and critical policy research in particular. Policy scholars attuned to questions of knowledge, hegemony, dominance, the politics of denial, and democratic pluralism will find narrative, argumentative and post-truth attention to such matters in public policy discourse relevant to their own inquiries.

Book Presentation

The 21st century has witnessed the rise of technology aided and increasingly driven public administration. While often largely technical in nature, efforts that draw upon ICTs, data, and AI, are intended to simultaneously provide citizens with greater opportunities to directly and collaboratively impact community decision-making as well as to put in place more accurate and evidence-based policies. Yet, these transformations also produce quite profound political challenges for conceiving and implementing a fair, inclusive, and impactful 21st century politics and public sector. Indeed, data driven and automated systems of governance involve political choices and ambitions already at the level of design and computational logic (cf. Bucher, 2018; Gillespie, 2014). Thus, regardless of whether such systems help select and curate information for the purpose of providing better public services, or if they are made to act upon data and information in order to make decisions with respect to, for instance, social services or health care, they carry with them a political dimension with implications in terms of power and democracy, not least risking to enhance systems of marginalisation in relation to gender, race and other social categories. A crucial aspect of power and democracy associated with data driven and automating systems in the public sphere, is how different systems of privilege play out in these processes (Eubanks 2018). Earlier research shows how women and racialized groups are in minority in the design processes, how AI systems like face recognition are built of white male faces, and how digital tools replicate and reproduces racial injustices (D’Ignazio & Klein 2020). Although there is an ongoing discussion regarding the ethical challenges and dilemmas of the implementation of AI systems and automation in society at large (c.f. Dignum 2020), and in particular in relation to the practices of the public sector, these discussions to a large extent miss out on the political implications of this development. While researchers and developers are called on to safe-guard democracy, exercise responsibility and make fundamental human values the basis of their design and implementation of AI systems, politicians are often left out of the discussion. The general objective of this panel is to put politics and governing practices in the centre of attention when analysing the effects of implementing data driven and automated systems in the public sector. Hence, in this panel, our aim is to put politics, not the technology, in focus, and address the research question: What are the political implications of the increasing implementation of data driven and automated systems in the public sector?

Executive politicians, senior civil servants and political advisors are the policy protagonists at the top of executive government. Despite their central policy making role, there is a striking lack of systematic and comparative research about their profiles, the organizational settings in which their work takes place, the actual policy work they do and finally the implications of the way they are linked in the organization of executive government. Existing research focusses on single cases, uses a multitude of theories, concepts and methods, all of which stymies significant progress in comparative research. In particular, the interlinkages and relations between the three actors at the top are under-studied and systematic knowledge on their interdependencies is needed to get a more concise understanding of sources of variations of executive organization and the implications thereof for policy-making, accountability and legitimacy of governance arrangements. The workshop welcomes papers that study the interlinkages of the different actors at the top, or that methodologically or theoretically consolidate research on the nature and role of particular actors vis-à-vis other actors, or that explore recent trends and developments, their causes and consequences.

In the past, public authorities would emphasize the importance of managerial models to cope with the challenges of the public provision of services, but they would forget about important dimensions such as financial discipline, customer needs, or more fundamentally in certain economies of the Global South operating principles such as reliability, accessibility and at times affordability of vital utilities. Multiple reasons, that have been examined carefully by a myriad of scholars in recent decades, lead to a progressive phasing out of such model in recent decades. As an alternative, private actors, profit driven, under well-tested regulatory frameworks, could take the role of public managers and be able to expand public services under private initiatives. However, not all models performed according to an ideal-type model, as expected, for all sectors, although they did relatively well in terms of expected outputs for other cases. The general thrust towards regulatory models of public intervention in the 1990s (Majone 1999, Tatcher 2007) contributed to the creation first, then the reinforcement of regulatory agencies as a vital steppingstone of a new management model of public services, pointing to the increasing feedback loop effects derived from such entities. On the one hand, regulatory agencies bore an important promise, to begin with in terms of efficiency and reactivity, in relation to important dimensions of public service provision. By concentrating functions previously loosely defined across ministerial offices, regulatory agencies had a market friendlier approach, participating to the co-production of legal frameworks that would be amiable enough for corporate actors as for them to contribute to the important universalization drive of the 1990s and 2000. Less present but equally relevant to this model were the concerns of final users -or consumers in the jargon of those years- that would be readable and accounted for under the new model. While this model of intervention for the State was instrumental in clearly defining areas of intervention and ultimately deriving into a bureaucratic specialization that developed goals and procedures of its own, it was less successful in legitimizing a transformation of State capacity into a regulatory template. Several explanations accrue to this particular outcome. On the one hand, this model was over time considered to be leaning mostly towards corporate interests and in particular the expansion of services supply rather than on integrating final users concerns- in terms of pricing, service quality and at times innovations hard to read and somehow disconnected from social uses. On the other hand, while this model allowed for certain market-related actors to step in the definition of rules in terms of influence, stabilizing and sometimes even making it more transparent -through tenders, consultative bodies, etc.- it inevitably led to the exclusion of others, that while not entirely disconnected from this process, would evolve on the sidelines, thus rendering their concerns less visible and henceforth more contestable. Another shortcoming of regulatory models, albeit not entirely connected to their direct features, is that they would have benefited from an intensive period of policy transfer and diffusion, fostered by an intense period of globalization that resulted from the end of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s onwards The active promotion by important organizations of the Bretton Woods system, namely the WB and the IMF, but then by lesser entities, was therefore instrumental in accelerating the convergence of national and regional models towards a certain isomorphism. Here specific spaces and formats of interaction with non-state actors bearing an interest in the development of these services tended to replicate across the board, nourishing an intuition rather than a certainty of a one-size fits them all model, were other concerns than those of service and infrastructure-related supply would be dwarfed. While research showed that regulatory models responded to different policy processes anchored in specific national, sometimes regional traditions, similar design and a bulk of common operational principles pointed to policy-transfer dynamics at work, This increasing disconnect of the policy instruments mobilized by regulatory governance driven models and the contestation of the outcomes pursued by this regulatory governance have been reinforced by a set of dynamics at work that this workshop seeks to explore. At a time where internationalization dynamics are increasingly pointing to cooperation templates of a different kind, the idea of policy diffusion of these models is increasingly met with national bureaucratic reforms that seek to mediate this process in order to weight in more the specific concerns of constituencies. Another element of change that this workshop looks into is the territorial dimension brought by cities and metropolis, understood as relevant entities that bring about tensions and contentions in the provision of public services and challenge currently established regulatory governance modes. Cities are increasingly important in this respect as they concentrate the most relevant transitions to sustainability, as proven by the coordination in place by entities such as the C40. They thus participate as active feeders of change in public service regulation, opening to new stakeholders, temporal dimensions and cross-sectoral interdependencies, further contributing to the above mentioned change. Are we therefore looking at the premises of a new regulatory governance model in the making? Can regulation mechanisms be preserved when confronted to upward pressures stemming from increasingly open public-policy making processes? How can regulatory consistency be preserved when we witness growing tensions between a sector-driven governance of public utilities and increasingly present territorial, social and environmental concerns? This workshop expects relevant contributions to the transformation of public action and the increasing interdependence of policy domains previously separated by strong regulatory traditions. The workshop builds on two research streams converging for the purposes of this workshop. One lies on the previous work carried out under public service related research projects (GREENUT, MEGOWAS and MOVIDIG) exploring the increasing territorial and environmental dimension of public service provision. These dimensions have raised important challenges in terms of coordination at the micro territorial to macro-territorial level (i.e., street bureaucracies). This research brought an insight into important reorganizations taking place within regulatory agencies in the way of integrating this territorial challenge We point to two important dynamics at work that have been somehow only marginally addressed in the regulation related literature, but also in public policy analysis related scholarly work. The first one refers to the increasing accumulation of areas that are not governed, or marginally so, when it comes to public services, given encroachments of competences, blame-game dynamics in institutional contexts in flux, that the economic, and public administration literature has denominated policy gaps. We claim that rather than looking into these areas as specific issues, within specific policies, bringing a comparative, encompassing and cross-regional approach to their analysis, can yield significant results in terms of available policy capacity for States in the present day, in particular in areas that were heavily regulated prior (in terms of contracting, ownership and management). The other dynamic, pertains to the increasing necessity to understand coordination mechanisms to be produced as deriving from two fundamental principles, an environmental and a socially inclusive one. This second dynamics is by no means connected to a normative indication, but rather a common theme cutting across policy domains, in the form of sustainability concerns. Therefore, papers are expected to contribute to an understanding of these dynamics in terms of service provision, development and management, exploring how specific related processes (contracting, regulatory agencies transformations, expanding/receding scope of regulatory governance) bring about a transformation of governance dynamics. Papers that deal with the empirical dimension of this change are welcome, but they have to be able to present the case for the transformation of State capacity from a public-policy perspective, addressing how influence strategies, dynamic advocacy coalition frameworks or incremental processes among others have been relevant in bringing about a change in the understanding and governance of public services. Export PDF

One of the most outstanding elements of the territorial transformation in recent years has been the consolidation of the urbanization process. Indeed, it is estimated that by 2050, 68% of the world population will live in urban areas (United Nations, 2018). Moreover, recent types of territorial development dynamics include the process of metropolitanization, which is the concentration of the population in a set of differentiated municipalities from an administrative point of view, but with a social and economic characteristics that go beyond these boundaries and that influence the processes of mobility and daily life of its inhabitants. The gap between institutional and functional areas has forced public administrations to find the most appropriate formulas to govern metropolitan areas and to generate public policies aimed at solving the new emerging problems, such as social inequalities and climate change. The urban politics literature has explored metropolitan governance models, especially from the perspective of their institutionalization (Bish and Ostrom, 1973; Lowery, 1999; Heinelt and Kübler, 2005). From this point of view, it is important to analyze and advance knowledge about metropolitan political processes, which must have the capacity to provide adequate responses to the new urban development model (Medeiros and Der Zwet, 2020). These political processes materialize, among other things, in different governance models for metropolitan areas, both in terms of institutional design that articulates cooperation and collaboration between different public and private actors, as well as in the configuration of different types of management solutions. The purpose of this panel is to present the analysis of the different models of metropolitan governance, answering the following research questions: • Is there a relationship between the configuration of the socio-territorial processes of metropolitan areas and the institutional design of metropolitan governance? • Is there a link between the role of national and regional governments and the development of metropolitan governance processes? • What is the relationship between the different types of public policies that have a metropolitan dimension and the type of institutional design that supports them? • What factors explain the evolution of governance models in a given metropolitan area? • How the models of metropolitan governance are adapting to the new integrated sustainable urban development model? Cited references: Bish, R.L. and Ostrom V. (1973). Understanding urban government. Metropolitan reform considered. Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Heinelt, H. and Kübler, D. (eds.) (2005). Metropolitan governance. Capacity, democracy and the dynamics of place. London: Routledge. Lowery, D. (1999). Answering the Public Choice Challenge: A Neoprogressive Research Agenda. Governance, 12: 29-55. doi:10.1111/0952-1895.0008 Medeiros, E. and Van Der Zwet, A. (2020). Evaluating Integrated Sustainable Urban Development Strategies: a methodological framework applied in Portugal. European Planning Studies, 28(3), 563–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1606898 United Nations (2018). Urban population. https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-PressRelease.pdf

The involvement of interest groups in different stages of public policy processes is a crucial component our governance systems that affects the quality and legitimacy of public policies. While the advocacy function of interest groups is exercised at every stage of the policy life cycle, much research focuses on policy-formulation stages and assesses the extent to which interest groups successfully advance their preferences in legislations. More recent research has paid attention to interest groups' involvement in implementation phases through their interaction with regulatory agencies. However, we miss systematic research exploring the role and involvement of interest groups across the whole policy cycle, from agenda setting processes to the implementation phase. In other words, we lack studies examining the interaction between interest groups and public officials throughout the development of policy issues- from the moment that they get into the policy agenda up until the point when they are being implemented. This panel promotes research at the nexus between public policy, policy science and interest group literature by placing the focus on the (varying) role of interest groups in policy processes. The central question of the panel is: 'How and why are interest groups involved in and across the different stages of the policy life cycle?'. In that regard, the panel addresses the following sub-questions: What type of groups get involved in the different stages of the policy life cycle and what explains variation in that regard? Are some group more successful in certain stages but less in others, and why? Are some stages of the policy cycle more biased (in terms of participation and success) towards business groups than others? How do policy issue characteristics (e.g., complexity, conflict, and salience), affect the ability of group to participate and advance their interests across the policy life cycle? Studying interest group involvement at various policy stages as well as organizational levels – including both political and administrative layers - requires a breadth of methodological approaches to adapt to the varying contexts under examination. This panel therefore seeks to answer these questions through traditional and new approaches to study the relationship between public officials and interest groups. In addition to large-n surveys and in-depth case studies, the panel particularly welcomes new methodological approaches such as machine learning and natural language processing, which can provide new insights into the role of interest groups in public policy processes. In sum, this panel aims at advancing our understanding of the role of interest groups by ‘zooming out’ and considering the whole policy cycle. This approach can give new and relevant insights on the involvement and success of groups beyond particular points in time – a necessary approach to further our understanding of the role of interest groups in public policy processes.

The delegation of regulatory tasks to specialized autonomous administrations has proliferated around the globe and became a governance ‘best practice’ since the 1980s. Yet, the analysis of the relationship between regulatory governance and democracy still requires more scholar attention. It has been acknowledged that regulatory agencies challenge the notion of representative democracy. More specifically, the independence of regulatory agencies and their detachment from political control (especially, from representative politicians) makes the place that regulatory governance holds in democratic settings unclear. As a response, three mechanisms have been suggested by the literature as central qualities to ensure the democratic legitimacy of regulatory agencies: (i) transparency, which focuses on the provision of information about different aspects of the performance of regulatory agencies to the wide public; (ii) accountability, that is focused on the mechanisms of information, justification and sanction of agencies’ performance; and (iii) participation, which is based on the mechanisms provided to different types of societal actors for their inclusion in agencies’ decision-making. The panel will devote special attention to the examination of the role that regulatory governance plays within democracy. This panel, therefore, offers the following research questions: · What are the drivers that lead to the constitution of new democratic practices in regulatory governance, such as participatory procedures and enhancement of transparency? · How does the concept of accountability fit within the concept of democracy in the context of regulatory governance? · Are there other practices, besides transparency, participation, and accountability, that enhance democracy that regulatory administration can do? · Did regulatory institutions change in light of recent trends of democratic backsliding? Although accountability of regulatory governance has gained a vast amount of scholarly attention, the analysis of their interaction has not been sufficiently studied in the face of democratic norms and theory. In addition, a panel on the relationship between regulatory governance and democracy is especially relevant nowadays, since the role of expertise in public and regulatory decision-making process is continuously being questioned in the resolution the covid-19 crisis. We therefore invite scholars working on the relationship of democracy and regulation from theoretical, empirical, or normative perspectives to submit an abstract.

The circulation of urban policies as well as models and concepts of urban governance (e.g. the “Barcelona model” for urban regeneration) has become a new research interest within the broad realm of policy diffusion and transfer literature. Notably, proponents of the concept of “policy mobilities” have suggested shifting the focus of transfer and diffusion studies to what happens at the urban level, investigating the travelling of policies, ideas, models and best practices among cities (McCann and Ward 2011). These developments paralleled studies on “city diplomacy” and the role of “transnational city networks” in propagating best practices and policy ideas, which have also shed light on growing exchanges of knowledge occurring among local governments (Montero 2017, Rashidi and Patt 2018, Bellinson and Chu 2019). Literature has investigated the origins of these models, the processes and forces through which they became mobile, and their local impacts (adoption, rejection, adaptation). A significant part of the literature about urban governance is dedicated to citizen participation. This object has been interestingly captured by the literature dedicated to the development and diffusion of instruments of participation. It shows how international organisations have become important promoters of participatory instruments (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2017, Porto do Oliveira 2017), allowing them to travel in all directions (i.e. South-South, etc). Other works have approached how local contextual factors shape participation (Röcke 2014, Ureta 2016), looking at the way they are conceived by promoters of citizen participation; the way in which they are transformed within the very transfer/diffusion process; the way through which they are implemented by policymakers in a different context; and the way in which local structures and institutional arrangements impact the process of adoption and adaptation. Recent works have also introduced the idea of “decontextualisation” of participatory devices (Amelung and Grabner 2017), to underline the activity of reworking and “theorisation” (Strang and Meyer 1993). Decontextualisation is fundamental to transform some selected local lessons into “universal”, “ready-to-use” solutions and policies, and in this way ensure their transferability within a global quest for “urban solutionism” (Montero 2020). Drawing from these developments, this panel aims at further exploring the aspects of theorisation, branding and local appropriation of travelling models of urban governance. Urban governance models, knowledge and best practices become a trending research topic because they articulate different manifestations of “tacit, culturally embedded beliefs” (Dolowitz 2017). Namely, they combine potential ideological and cultural bias from diverse international organisations (Pétric, 2012), and from other actors involved in the process of theorizing and branding. As such, the production of urban governance models, the way they travel and compete with local approaches and the reception context drive new research perspectives, suggesting a deepening of our understanding of these distinct processes of theorising, branding and appropriating. In particular “work cultures” matter in the process (Müller 2013, Pojani and Stead, 2015, Romano 2021) and could be taken into consideration in the analysis.

Building from the 2019 IPPA panel discussion, “Consultants as Policy Actors,” this panel explores the role and impact of consultants in the policy-making process, with a focus on policy ideas and practices. Over the past three decades, policy consultants have been taken up by governments around the world in addressing a wide array of policy problems in different areas, including big issues -- such as health governance, climate change adaptation, sustainable development, and e-government -- as well as more mundane problems such as snow removal, hospital construction and everyday accounting. Through this time the nature of the policy ideas with which they are associated seems to have evolved, as they have moved from the role of “rational planners” in the 60’s to “cost-cutters” in the 80’s, to legitimate actors in debates on policy problems and solutions today. Moreover, their position in the policy making process has been transformed, as they have become increasingly embedded in policy networks and processes as “co-pilots in the steering of government organizations” (Saint-Martin, 2013; 2017). As consultants have become powerful intermediaries in packaging and circulating policy ideas and practices across jurisdictions, a variety of disciplinary approaches have emerged that set out to understand their power and influence. Research on consultants has considered their role in the diffusion of specific policy instruments and governance arrangements, such as privatization and outsourcing; how their inclusion in policy processes have contributed to a shift to new policy logics; and how their involvement in the policy process serve to depoliticize policy decisions (Beveridge, 2012; Jupe and Funnel, 2015; Keele, 2019; O’Mahoney and Sturdy, 2016). References Beveridge, Ross. 2012. “Consultants, depoliticization, and arena shifting in the policy process: privatizing water in Berlin.” Policy Sciences 45(1): 47-68. Craft, Jonathan. 2013. “Appointed Political Staffs and the Diversification of Policy Advisory Sources: Theory and Evidence from Canada.” Policy and Society 32(3): 211–23. Craft, Jonathan, and Michael Howlett. 2012. “Policy Formulation, Governance Shifts and Policy Influence: Location and Content in Policy Advisory Systems.” Journal of Public Policy 32(2): 79–98. Hodge, Graeme and Diana Bowman. 2006. “The ‘consultocracy’: The business of reforming government.” In Graeme Hodge (Ed.), Privatization and Market Development. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Howlett, M., and A. Migone. 2013. “Policy Advice through the Market: The Role of External Consultants in Contemporary Policy Advisory Systems.” Policy and Society 32(3): 241–54. Howlett, Michael, and Andrea Migone. 2013a. “Searching for Substance: Externalization, Politicization and the Work of Canadian Policy Consultants 2006-2013.” Central European Journal of Public Policy 7(1): 112–33. ———. 2013b. “The Permanence of Temporary Services: The Reliance of Canadian Federal Departments on Policy and Management Consultants.” Canadian Public Administration 56(3): 369–90. ———. 2014. “Assessing Contract Policy Work: Overseeing Canadian Policy Consultants.” Public Money & Management 34(3): 173–80. Howlett, Michael, Andrea Migone, and Seck L. Tan. 2014. “Duplicative or Complementary? The Relationship between Policy Consulting and Internal Policy Analysis in Canadian Government.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 47(1): 113–134. Howlett, Michael, and Adam M. Wellstead. 2011. “Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy Revisited: The Nature of Professional Policy Work in Contemporary Government.” Politics & Policy 39(4): 613–33. Jupe, Robert and Warwick Funnell. 2015. “Neoliberalism, consultants and the privatization of public policy formulation: The case of Britain’s rail industry,” Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 29: 65-85 Keele, S. (2019). Consultants and the business of climate services: implications of shifting from public to private science. Climatic Change, 157(1), 9-26. Kirkpatrick, Ian et al. 2018. “The Impact of Management Consultants on Public Service Efficiency.” Policy & Politics. Leys, Colin. 1999. “Intellectual Mercenaries and the Public Interest: Management Consultants and the NHS.” Policy & Politics, 27(4): 447–65. Martin, J. 1998. Reorienting a Nation: Consultants and Australian Public Policy. Aldershot: Ashgate. Saint-Martin, D. (2017). Management Consultancy and The Varieties of Capitalism. In and M. H. Brans, Marleen, Iris Geva-May (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Comparative Policy Analysis. Taylor & Francis. Saint-Martin, Denis. 2013. “Making Government More ‘Business-Like’: Management Consultants as Agents of Isomorphism in Modern Political Economies.” In John Mikler (Ed.), The Handbook of Global Companies. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Saint-Martin, Denis. 2000. Building the New Managerialist State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Mahoney, J., & Sturdy, A. (2016). Power and the diffusion of management ideas: The case of McKinsey & Co. Management Learning, 47(3), 247–265. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507615591756 Veselý, Arnošt. 2013. “Externalization of Policy Advice: Theory, Methodology and Evidence.” Policy and Society 32(3): 199–209

The current governance systems often need to respond to complex challenges ranging from the use of natural resources through migration management to pandemics mitigation involving diverse actors interacting often across multiple scales. A political networks perspective allows capturing such complexities by focusing on how actors such as organizations or individuals interact beyond formal and traditionally hierarchical political procedures (Knoke et al., 1996), or how they relate to a diversity of institutions or forums (Lubell 2013), or to the multitude of policy-relevant issues (Brandenberger et al. 2020). In contrast to broad macro-level explanations, a network perspective also enables to analyze specific configurations of actors and their relationships that may markedly vary depending on particular contexts (Ylä-Anttila et al., 2018). This can include many different types of political actors (different types of individuals such as members of parliament or public servants, and organizational actors such as public administrations, non-governmental organizations, private firms, political parties), and network ties can consist of exchanges of resources, information, as well as of conflict, collaboration and communication that may occur both on- and offline. A network approach to politics is thus important as it allows political scientists to disentangle how political actors mobilize and exchange resources, how they coordinate actions, and how network structure shapes decision-making and outputs. Comparing political networks over time and space is a powerful strategy to generalize the findings and support causal explanations on the antecedents or consequences of network structures. Comparisons over space can include cross-country comparisons (Broadbent, 2016; Brockhaus et al., 2014) or within-country comparisons (Fischer and Sciarini, 2016) across regions or policy sectors. Comparisons over time can include network observations at several discrete time points or can be based on the dynamic assessment of network evolution (Leifeld, 2017). Despite the potential benefit of such comparisons to our understanding of political networks, such research designs have remained rare. The key research questions to be addressed are: · How network structures influence political decision-making and policy outcomes? · How network positions of specific political actors influence the political decision-making and policy outcomes? · What are the patterns of coevolution of the actor and network level in political processes? References Brandenberger, L., Ingold, K., Fischer, M., Schläpfer, I., & Leifeld, P. (2020). Boundary Spanning Through Engagement of Policy Actors in Multiple Issues. Policy studies journal. Broadbent, J., 2016. Comparative Climate Change Policy Networks, in: Victor, J.N., Montgomery, A.H., Lubell, M. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190228217.013.38 Brockhaus, M., Di Gregorio, M., Carmenta, R., 2014. REDD+ policy networks: Exploring actors and power structures in an emerging policy domain. Ecol. Soc. 19. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07098-190429 Fischer, M., Sciarini, P., 2016. Drivers of Collaboration in Political Decision Making: A Cross-Sector Perspective. J. Polit. 78, 63–74. https://doi.org/10.1086/683061 Knoke, D., Pappi, F.U., Broadbent, J., Tsujinaka, Y., 1996. Comparing Policy Networks, Comparing Policy Networks. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139174497 Leifeld, P., 2017. Discourse Network Analysis: Policy Debates as Dynamic Networks, in: Victor, J.N., Montgomery, A.H., Lubell, M.N. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. pp. 301–325. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190228217.013.25 Lubell, M. (2013). Governing institutional complexity: The ecology of games framework. Policy studies journal, 41(3), 537-559. Ylä-Anttila, T., Gronow, A., Stoddart, M.C.J., Broadbent, J., Schneider, V., Tindall, D.B., 2018. Climate change policy networks: Why and how to compare them across countries. Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 45, 258–265. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ERSS.2018.06.020

The outbreak of coronavirus has become a major disruption for universities and higher education institutions around the world. Lockdowns ordered by governments in early 2020 forced educational authorities and university administrators to brought academic activities from classrooms and labs to an entirely online learning environment. The aim of this panel is to analyze and discuss the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on higher education governance in Latin America. We will focus on (1) how governance regimes cope to deal with inequalities and the digital turn; (2) how the passage from analogue to digital education have reframed the role of public and private actors in steering higher education through the crisis, and (3) possible post-covid scenarios for higher education governance at both systemic and institutional level (challenges, possibilities and risks). The Covid-19 crisis has meant a widening and deepening of inequities within an across Latin America, rising additional concerns about educational exclusion (for gender, race and social condition), quality assurance and financial strategies to face the impact of the pandemic on tertiary education. In the last 20 years access, quality and funding have been the core problems that have shaped what we identified as national governance regimes (González-Ledesma & Álvarez-Mendiola, 2020). Efforts to palliate inequalities on higher education basically relied on increasing the participation of low income students on public universities, and/or allowing the expansion of an unregulated offer of private institutions. And indeed, enrollment went from 20 to 45% between 2000 and 2017 (BM, 2017). However, by neglecting quality and funding the last enrollment expansion has been criticized by some authors as unequal and fragile (Chiroleu, 2013 & 2014). To what extent do the strengths and weaknesses demonstrated by national higher education systems in recent months remain in line with this hypothesis? The passage from analogue to digital education rise questions about the role of public and private actors in steering higher education through the crisis. Among the latter, EdTech giants like Google and Microsoft are taking advantage of the pandemic to promote their platforms and digital resources throughout national educational systems. In doing so they are also gaining a central role in shaping the “hybrid” or blended model of education provision envisaged by the World Health Organization (2020:17) for the near future. The accelerated development of communication and information technologies by EdTech giants has created a gap that cannot be bridged easily by any government. In fact, Latin American governments and universities have no option but to pay for the products and services offered by EdTechs. 1) Does the current preponderance of tech giants launch a completely new stage of privatization of education? How private learning environments will determine how higher education is conceive and provide? Based on these elements, the panel will allow a discussion of possible post-pandemic scenarios for the governance of higher education in Latin America. ReferencesChiroleu Adriana (2013). “¿Ampliación de las Oportunidades en la Educación Superior o Democratización? Cuatro Experiencias en América Latina”, en: Actualidades Investigativas en Educación, vol. 13, núm. 3, pp. 1-24. Chiroleu Adriana (2014), “Desigualdades en Educación Superior y Políticas Públicas. Los Casos de Argentina, Brasil y Venezuela. Universidades, vol. LXV, núm. 59, pp. 9-22.González-Ledesma & Álvarez-Mendiola (2020). “Neoliberals versus Post- Neoliberals in the Formation of Governance Regimes in Latin America’s Higher Education”. In: Jarvis, Darryl; Capano, Giliberto, Convergence and Diversity in the Governance of Higher Education: Comparative Perspectives. UK, Cambridge University Press. World Bank (2017). Momento Decisivo. La Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe, Grupo Banco Mundial. WHO (2020). Education during Covid-19 and beyond, United Nations.

Policy studies and the studies about the policy process have used local governments as their units of observation. A normal tendency among these studies is to focus on the commonalities in order to provide the basis for extrapolation and theoretical external validity. The panel aims to focus on the singularities of the local realm purposefully cognizant of the context that surrounds it to understand how this local supra-local relationship could help to develop a more nuanced understanding of the policy process itself; perhaps even bringing new light to the main and well-established assumptions in the policy literature. The panel aims to convene a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to discuss a diverse array of issues related to the study of the policy process at the subnational and local government levels. The panel welcomes all relevant theoretical and empirical papers that could contribute to the discussion of the local side of the policy process.

The objective of this panel is to provide a forum for debating the past and current assessment of the success or failure of decentralization and the future direction of decentralization in the context of its contribution to the topic T10 / Federalism and Multi-Level Governance of the IPPA conference 2021. This panel is intended or focus on both the WHY and the HOW of decentralization with a debate forum on why decentralization has been the sine qua non of governmental systems reforms and how it should continue to be implemented. The scope of decentralization to be examined by the panel debate encompasses the political, administrative, and fiscal decentralization principles, practices, and implementation methods as they have been applied over the past several decades. The panel is intended to examine all the mantras of decentralization as has been identified in the voluminous scholarly and research literature that has been written about decentralization. The millions of words written about decentralization over the past decades by academics and professionals in the field of federalism and multi-level government is only exceeded by the millions of dollars spent in implementing the advice of these scholars. Very little seems to have been written or spent on assessing the impacts and sustainability of the decentralization practices on governance systems. This panel is intended to initiate the debate about the value of the advice, the impacts of the implementation, and the longer-term sustainability of decentralization as a central focus of governmental system reforms. Therefore, the panel should focus on such issues as the following, among others: 1. Has decentralization succeeded or failed in meeting the expectations of improving governance systems? 2. Did the academic and scholarly research provide the theoretical and practical guidance for taking this policy methodology to the stage of practical implementation? 3. Have there been significant differences in the implementation of decentralization on a global as well as regional basis (Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin American) and within countries in these regions? 4. What were the common challenges and obstacles to implementing decentralization across these regions and the common or unique solutions to overcoming these challenges and obstacles? 5. What were the common or unique implementation approaches to decentralization and did they produce different results? 6. Did decentralization succeed or fail as a critical solution to the transition problems of the post-communist and/or post-conflict states? 7. Is new thinking needed about how to implement decentralization that significantly differs from the present state of the theory, knowledge and practices? 8. What new thinking about the theory and practice of decentralization would alter the future implementation of decentralization?

The growing dissemination of political authority and influence across the supranational, national and subnational levels of government have been the subject of extensive research in the last decades. Such research efforts have noted how the increasingly lower control of national governments over governing tasks has been paralleled with an empowerment of subnational and supranational structures in the governance sphere. Having said that, while a considerable number of pieces have provided valuable theoretical contributions to multi-level governance studies (Hooghe and Marks, 2001; Piattoni, 2009; Enderlein et al., 2010; Tortola, 2017), multi-level governance still remains a “fuzzy and underdeveloped concept” (Bache et al., 2016). For example, few papers have focused on the relational dynamics that underlie multi-level governance systems (exceptions include Börzel and Heard-Lauréote, 2009; Di Gregorio et al., 2019; Bravo-Laguna, 2020). Social network analysis provides an interesting methodological toolkit in this regard, considering its ability to provide empirical evidence regarding formal and de facto interdependencies across governance levels (González and Verhoest, 2020), and its emphasis on the systemic level (Robins, 2015; Scott and Ulibarri, 2019). This panel has been coordinated and is sponsored by the ECPR Political Networks Standing Group. Bibliography Bache, I., Bartle, I., & Flinders, M. (2016). Multi-Level Governance. In: Ansell, C., & Torfing, J. (Eds.) Handbook on Theories of Governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Bravo-Laguna, C. (2020). Transboundary Crisis Management under the Volcano: the Case of the Icelandic Ash Cloud. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management. DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12303 Börzel, T. A., & Heard-Lauréote, K. (2009). Networks in EU Multi-Level Governance: Concepts and Contributions. Journal of Public Policy, 135-151 Di Gregorio, M., Fatorelli, L., Paavola, J., Locatelli, B., Pramova, E., Nurrochmat, D. R., May, P. H., Brockhaus, M., Sari, I. M., Kusumadewi, S. M. (2019). Multi-Level Governance and Power in Climate Change Policy Networks. Global Environmental Change, 54, 64-77 Enderlein, H., Wälti, S., & Zürn, M. (2010). Handbook on Multi-Level Governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar González, C. I., & Verhoest, K. (2020). De Facto Regulatory Decision-Making Process in Telecommunications Regulation: Explaining Influence Relationships with Exponential Random Graph Models. Journal of Public Policy, 40 (1): 144-170 Hooghe, L., & Marks, L. (2001). Multi-Level Governance and European Integration. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Piattoni, S. (2009). Multi-Level Governance: a Historical and Conceptual Analysis. Journal of European Integration, 31 (2): 163-180 Robins, G. (2015). Doing Social Network Research: Network-Based Research Design for Social Scientists. London, UK: Sage Scott, T. A., & Ulibarri, N. (2019). Taking Network Analysis Seriously: Methodological Improvements for Governance Network Scholarship. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2 (2): 89-101 Tortola, P. D. (2017). Clarifying Multi-Level Governance. European Journal of Political Research, 56: 234-250

In times of rising nativism and increasingly restrictive national immigration policy making, cities are often on the frontlines of defending and expanding the rights of immigrants residing in their jurisdictions. Sanctuary cities, also referred to as freedom and refuge cities, are among the most visible cities that have challenged the national monopoly over immigration and citizenship issues by building a grassroots type of urban citizenship that is inclusive even of undocumented or unauthorized immigrants. Cities on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, for example, have developed policies and practices that include undocumented immigrants in public service provision, formal rights protections, and democratic participation modes. While such diverse sanctuary policies and practices can be found in cities worldwide, we do not yet have a good comparative framework for understanding them. The aim of this panel is precisely to conceptualize, analyze, and compare sanctuary policies and practices across space and time. What are the actors, drivers, barriers, and outcomes of such city sanctuary policies and practices? How do they vary depending on national, local, and temporal contexts? What lessons do these varied sanctuary policies and practices hold for understanding the multi-level and multi-actor political dynamics of immigration and citizenship? These research questions are important to ask from a theoretical point of view. Policy studies point out that vocal civil society organizations and sympathetic local government officials are crucial drivers of sanctuary policies and practices. These findings resonate with sociological, geographical, and anthropological research on “urban citizenship,” which emphasizes that cities are strategic sites for the mobilization of marginalized actors such as undocumented immigrants. In the context of the United States, political science scholarship on “immigration federalism” also highlights that partisanship is a key driving force of both anti- and pro-immigrant policies at various levels of government. Scholarship on European sanctuary policies and practices is more recent, and scholars have tended to use different theoretical lenses to study them. The “multi-level governance” perspective has promise for conceptualizing and explaining divergencies between national and local migration policy making and the subsequent conflicts across government tiers. By intersecting these and other strands of literature, this panel seeks to build a more coherent, comparatively-driven, and empirically-grounded framework to study sanctuary policies and practices across different geographical and temporal contexts. Finally, this panel offers an excellent opportunity to discuss sanctuary policies and practices in the conference site city of Barcelona, where support for undocumented immigrants has become a top priority of local officials and activists alike. We hope to engage local stakeholders as guest speakers or commentators on the panel.

This panel is mainly concerned with the process of recentralization of power and authority as a reaction to decentralization, and as a consequence its implication to the shifts of modes of multilevel governance. After decades of the popularity of decentralizing reforms across Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, there are signs that central governments are embracing a recentralization of power and authority (Almeida 2005, Dickovick 2007, Faguet 2004). Under a broad conceptualization of recentralization as augmentation of coordination and monitoring role of the central government, the panel fosters discussions about the various trajectories and strategies of central governments to regain more leverage of power in the vertical intergovernmental relations. OBJECTIVES The general objectives of the panel are the following ones: 1. To theorize about multilevel dynamics that lead to the recentralization of power and authority; 2. To identify the institutional and contextual elements that triggers recentralization as a reaction against decentralization; 3. To comprehend how the coordination and monitoring powers of the central governments are exercised in practice; 4. To delve into the different modes of multilevel governance that contribute to recentralization; 5. To dissect the consequences of recentralization to the exercise of subnational autonomy; and 6. To comparatively distinguish different conditions and trajectories of recentralization. RESEARCH QUESTIONS The main research question that the panel aims to answer is: How did recentralization emerge and replace decentralization? This overarching question can be broken down into five sub-questions. 1. How did recentralization become the reactive process to decentralization? 2. How did recentralization unfold in practice amid a multilevel governance context in which subnational government exercised some degree of policy and political autonomy? 3. Which institutions, actors and strategies were employed in the recentralization of power and authority? 4. What are the specific agenda-setting powers that the central governments use to exercise its coordination and monitoring powers? 5. What are the overall implications of recentralization to the notions of balance of power and hierarchy of authority implicit in a multilevel governance context? CONTRIBUTIONS The panel intends to contribute to the different debates related to multilevel governance in the following manner: 1. By offering an opportunity to examine the consequences of decentralization and post-decentralization context under the lenses of recentralization as a counter-reaction to decentralization; 2. By discussing the patterns of change through the shift from decentralization to recentralization, the panel will shed light into transformations in the hierarchy of authority, the directionality of power relations (top-down or bottom-up), and the disproportional relevance of different of groups of intergovernmental actors; 3. By broadening our interpretation of the relationship between decentralization and recentralization, which requires to move away from the dichotomy decentralization versus recentralization in order to embrace a via media by viewing recentralization as a different degree of intergovernmental power relations; 4. By comprehending the different elements behind the shifts of power relations in a context of multilevel governance with the hope of advancing a coherent framework of analysis to systematize patterns and dynamics behind processes that go from decentralization to recentralization.

Climate change is a cross-cutting issue which causes, and consequences cannot be addressed by a singular level of governance or policy sector (Gupta, 2008). On one hand, it is influenced by GHG anthropogenic emissions from different sources (e.g. deforestation, fossil fuel consumption, cattle, etc.) reflecting the cross-sectoral perspective of this policy field (Schmitz, 2016). On the other hand, the unbalanced geographical distribution of climate change impacts and GHG emission sources (within and across countries) adds an extra challenge with regard to the ways in which different levels of political power tend to address (and support) climate action (Bernstein and Hoffmann, 2018). These cross-sectoral and multilevel features of climate change policies shine light on the complexity of the governance of this policy field. Reaching well-balanced and effective policy agreements to mitigate GHG will require a high level of preparedness of governments and policy makers. For instance, fragmented responsibilities across governmental actors; policy coordination and integration; unbalanced flow of information between decision-makers; lack of financial and technical capacities within and between line-ministries and levels of government; vested interests; and the way in which the political authority is dispersed within a country, are some of the challenges that countries and their institutions must address to build an effective governance for climate policies. In the last decades, the literature on climate multilevel governance was primarily focused on the supranational and transnational issues of climate governance. Little theoretical and empirical attention has been paid to the internal country dynamics with regard to the way they are reaching policy agreements, reframing institutions and overcoming different barriers to enhance GHG mitigation actions and to employ climate agenda as a genuine opportunity to improve their respective economic development models (Jörgensen et al, 2015; Jordan et al, 2018; Gupta 2008; Fuhr and Lederer, 2009). Such lack of research, especially in the Global South, tends to obscure what happens within the “black box” of the national level and to what extent climate action is being effectively taken within countries´ policy and political systems. It is of critical importance to leverage the academic understanding about what is happening at the national and subnational ground of climate policy making and implementation, especially in the context of the post-pandemic economic recovery, where countries will need to find ways to resume economic activity without neglecting the current status of climate emergency that the world is facing. On that basis, this panel seeks to foster a structured discussion about the ways in which national and subnational levels of governmental are working in their country contexts to lower GHG emissions and build low carbon pathways in carbon-intense sectors of their respective economies. By encouraging the academic debate about the manner in which countries are building their governance arrangements to reduce GHG emissions we expect to contribute to the literature on climate multilevel governance and federalism. Ultimately, we also aim to foster the search for evidence and theories concerning the way climate change policies are governed within the same level of government (national level) and across different levels (national and subnational levels), a strand which we expect to be vastly explored by scholars and practitioners in the coming decades. References Bernstein, S., Hoffmann, M. 2018. Decarbonisation: The Politics of Transformation in Jordan, A., et al., eds., 2018. Governing climate change: polycentricity in action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gupta, J. 2007. The multi-level governance challenge of climate change, Environmental Sciences, 4:3, 131-137, DOI: 10.1080/15693430701742669 Jordan, A., Huitema, D., Van Asselt, H., Forster, J. (eds.). 2018. Governing climate change: polycentricity in action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fuhr, H, Lederer, M (2009) Varieties of Carbon Governance in Newly Industrializing Countries. The Journal of Environment & Development 18 (4), 327-345. Kirsten Jörgensen, K., Jogesh, A., Mishra, A. 2015. Multi-level climate governance and the role of the subnational level, Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences, 12:4, 235-245, DOI: 10.1080/1943815X.2015.1096797 Schmitz, H., 2016. Evidence report no. 180 – who drives climate-relevant policies in the rising power? [online] Available at: <https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/123456789/9933/ER180_WhoDrivesClimaterelevantPoliciesintheRisingPowers.pdf;jsessionid=053CB7C225A209A3824043EF5C56638C?sequence=1> [Accessed 11 December 2017].

Today the world debates the consequences caused by the negative effects of the spread of the Pandemic: CoronaVirus (COVID-19), with repercussions on economic growth, public health, and weakness in public budgets in the face of more pressure from spending to supply goods and services to citizens. This caused fragility to respond to the increase in demand in certain strategic sectors to face COVID, without existing as a global public policy issue before 2020. COVID-19, in almost a year since its spread from China and around the world, leaves lessons to prepare for public problems that have an exponential impact on the economy and public finances. Promoting saturation alerts in the local, national and international health system to react to the emergency to face the Pandemic with the installed capacity. Therefore, the great challenge is how to face this Pandemic with current resources in a limited budget, pressing to take public debt as an immediate option, in addition to efficient resources, austerity, reordering the budget, collaboration with the social and private sector, among other. The Federal Government, sub-nationals and municipalities, as well as the rest of the public entities must help to reduce the slowdown of the national productive sector, maintain and accelerate public and private investment for economic reactivation. It is imminent that face-to-face activities that represent an infection increase the probability of virus transmission, causing the decrease or suspension of productive, educational and social activities, weakening basic economic indicators such as consumption, investment, employment, taxation and economic growth. In this context, the capacity of the public sector is important as a measure to react to the health and financial emergency caused by COVID, reducing the effects depending on the capacity according to the budget available to public agencies. The actions of these governments have as a tool fiscal policy (expenditure of public resources and collection), to influence that they continue to maintain basic services in the cities, the provision of infrastructure goods and macroeconomic stability. If the action is delayed, it is possible that serious consequences will be caused in the productive structure in the coming months and even years, undermining the collection capacity in the weak economic environment. This leads to reflection to seek more resources to generate public spending to (re) build the productive and social structure in the countries by strengthening the collection capacity or letting other levels of government help alleviate the problem due to the high fiscal dependence. In this panel, the case papers and theoretical discussions will contribute to the debate to submit these important topics with peers around the world to expand the frontier of knowledge in the new tools to improve the public finances in subnational levels. Cases, practice and theory, all of them are welcome. Some of the main reflections of this panel are: What is the status of public finance instruments and their coordination at the subnational level? who practices were taken during the pandemic like new tools or ways to financing the budget? The public finances in urban areas are sustainable to provide the goods and public services? What fiscal coordination instruments would finance the works and infrastructure of the metropolis in a sustainable way? How improve the tax collection in this post pandemic context?

Much theorizing about policy interventions, in their post-decisional phase, conceives of them as essentially static phenomena, albeit located within dynamic contexts. By contrast, much theorizing of reform initiatives conceives of them as inherently dynamic phenomena, with the path and outcome of some events conditioning the path and outcome of contemporaneous or later ones. This panel will look to see whether policy research would benefit from researchers trying to transcend the intervention/reform duality. The argument isn’t so much that there’s a problem to remedy, as that each area of research might establish somewhat new directions by seeing each other area in a somewhat new light. The device used to convene such a discussion is to imagine that some policy interventions and many reforms are inherently campaign-like. The intellectual history of this idea lies in military affairs, where a campaign is inherently dynamic “purposeful” phenomenon. It is dynamic in that it is has the temporality of starts and finishes. It is dynamic due to internal path dependencies, where the path of one stage can interfere with the path of a contemporaneous one, while the path and outcome of one stage can set the context or initial conditions for a later one. And there are other qualities to a campaign, includes collaboration among actors placed within an institutional ecology’s differentiated policy subsystems, through some kind of temporary organization that plays a campaign-governance role. While the campaign idea has a specific history, it can be repurposed for research purposes in public policy generally. Some policy interventions are inherently campaign-like, such as attempting to control viral pandemics or responding to natural disasters in specific geographical areas. Policy interventions intended to transform systems such as public education are inherently campaign like. Policy interventions that involve the hosting of major cultural or sporting events are campaign-like. Public management policies, such as those seeking to suppress corruption or to adapt governments to discontinuous digital innovation, are often-times campaign-like. The panel would be designed to see whether policy intervention researchers can learn from reform initiative researchers, and vice versa. Likewise, it is meant to bring policy researchers and public management researchers into a more productive conversation. The papers could be single or collective instrumental case studies, research syntheses, or interdisciplinary perspectives on issues of theory and method. They could be working toward empirical theory or be developing archetypes of campaign-like policy phenomena as part of furnishing knowledge for use in policy planning and strategic planning in public organizations. If successful, then the panel may become the basis for proposing a special issue in IRPP.

The public policy/management academy’s intellectual history includes proclamations about its “constitution” as well as manifestos about how research and scholarship should be done. Notable examples are Lasswell and McDougal’s (1943) Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest”; Herbert Simon’s (1946) “Proverbs of Administration”; Shangraw and Crow’s (1989) “Public Administration as a Design Science”; Mark Moore’s (1995) Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government; Laurence Lynn’s (1996) Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession; and Eugene Bardach’s (2004) “The Extrapolation Problem: How to Learn from the Experience of Others”. There is a recent upsurge in scholarship that re-examines this history and provides counter-statements to it – both backward and forward-looking in character, including William Dunn’s (2018) Pragmatism and the Origins of the Policy Sciences; Alasdair Roberts’s “The Aims of Public Administration: Reviving the Classical View; Melvin Dubnick’s (2018) “Demons, Spirits, and Elephants: Reflections on the Failure of Public Administration Theory”; and Michael Barzelay’s (2019) Public Management as Design-Oriented Professional Discipline. This panel will examine and assess frames, theories, methodologies, and literary styles for conducting such “forensic history” of the field, as well as their implications of substantive work for research and teaching. Among the more specific issues that could be explored is how to balance historicist and presentist perspectives; how to represent purposive theories; and how to access and use accounts of standards for argument and presentation from such humanities fields as philosophy, rhetoric, and literary criticism. The panel could be either a round-table involving such authors as listed above, or as a forum for new work; or a hybrid. Alternatively, IPPA could offer two panels, one being the round-table, followed by another being for new work.

Computerized text analysis is a growing field in the social sciences and humanities (Gentzkow et al. 2019; Grimmer and Stewart 2013; Wilkerson and Casas 2017). Interestingly, while there is an evolving interest in ‘big data’ for policy analysis in general (Giest 2017; Giest and Samuels 2020; Pencheva et al. 2018), there are few empirical applications that actually focus on ‘policy’ as such, let alone ‘policy design’ more specifically (Clinton 2017). As highlighted by Brady (2019) in his review of data science approaches in political science, existing research foci include parliamentary speeches (e.g., Gurciullo and Mikhaylov 2018; Proksch, Lowe, et al. 2019; Proksch, Wratil, et al. 2019), party agendas (e.g., Loftis and Mortensen 2020), or stakeholder statements (e.g., Senninger and Blom-Hansen 2020) that are analysed to detect actors’ policy preferences. Data science approaches have also been employed for assessing the amount of government spending as indicators of (changing) policy preferences (Jones et al. 2003) and for identifying whether policies focus on particularistic issues in policy-makers’ voting districts (Gamm and Kousser 2010). Despite this lack of a clear focus of computerized text analysis to assess legal or policy texts themselves in order to achieve a better understanding of ‘policy’ or ‘policy design’, there is an emerging literature in the subfields of public administration (e.g., Anastasopoulos and Whitford 2019) and comparative legal studies (e.g., Alschner 2020) that aims at leveraging machine-learning approaches for categorizing policies in a general manner: For example, Hurka and Haag (2020) have used computational approaches to quantify the ‘complexity’ of policy proposals. There are also first approaches to tackle the question of ‘complexity’ of political texts, although first applications have focused on political speeches rather than policy or legal texts as such (Benoit et al. 2019). However, these existing approaches, aiming at broad characterisations of policy or legal texts, are far from being able to engage with or contribute to the research questions that the ‘new’ policy design literature (Howlett et al. 2015) is interested in, namely which design characteristics contribute to the effectiveness of public policies (Knill et al. 2012; Schaffrin et al. 2015). Empirical approaches that rely on hand-coding of policy design characteristics to analyse policy effectiveness (e.g., Schmidt and Sewerin 2019) are not scalable, leading to calls for developing automated or semi-automated approaches for coding such policy design characteristics (e.g., Sewerin 2020; Siddiki et al. 2019). Only very recently have first computational applications been proposed that aim at identifying one specific design feature of legal texts, namely the degree of ‘discretion’ and ‘delegation’ (Vannoni et al. 2020). This panel seeks to bring together scholars from different disciplines and (sub-)fields that are interested in utilizing computerized text analysis and machine-learning approaches for developing new tools to assess policy design characteristics in a scalable way. We also invite contributions that critically discuss how the production of policy-related data can be scaled up by collaborative or crowd-sourcing approaches (Benoit et al. 2016).

The idea of this panel is to bring together papers on evaluation methods. In recent years, evaluation has become a kind of industry for practitioners and a field of study in many domains of public policymaking. At the same time, evaluation methods are rapidly evolving. However, these discussions are often in other disciplines than public policy as scientific discipline. Moreover, while quantitative methodologists have created a type of 'gold standard' usually based on some method of causal identification, qualitative methods of evaluation go in all types of directions: process tracing, contribution analysis, realist evaluation, participatory approaches to name but a few. In this panel we would like to bring together contributions in this area and discuss trends, controversies and applications of evaluation methods in public policymaking. We would like to take stock of methods, compare their usage, and understand what types of methods have become more popular over time. We would also like to understand better when and why certain methods are chosen for what type of policy issues. Finally, we are interested in understanding whether there is a 'practitioner/ academic' divide in the type of methods discussed. As for the latter, we would also like to invite contributions from 'practitioners' in the field and those who work in institutions that effectively straddle academic and applied forms of evaluation.

Public policy research is mainly driven by approaches that seek to explain phenomena, and to try to establish causal links between factors that may thereafter improve the quality of policies, hence having an impact in our environment. However, in order to establish causal links, elaborate hypotheses and perform analysis, it is of utmost importance to have good indicators of the concepts and variables that we use. Measurement is a core substantive issue in science in general and it is often neglected in public policy research by either using proxies to the central ideas that we aim to capture, or by creating simple indices born from the aggregation of a list of more or less systematically collected data. The panel is aimed at providing a discussion forum for better development of indicators, scores and variables used in public policy research. In this sense, then, it does not deal with concrete research questions or with specific areas, but aims at being a meta-panel dealing with challenges of measurement that are inherent and specific to public policy research. The development of indices and scores is generally the result of a previous research necessity to establish some sort of comparisons between units of analysis, being either institutions (ministries, agencies, international organizations, etc...) or polities (countries, subnational entities). But the goal of the panel is not restricted to the comparative empirical perspective of producing more reliable indicators. Instead, it is aimed at establishing a dialogue with the theoretical implications of developing such indicators. To sum up, the objectives are the following: - To provide an forum for the discussion of how to advance, as a discipline, in generating better, more accurate measures of the concepts at hand.- To overcome the challenges of comparative public policy analysis dealing with comparable scores across countries and over time.- To elaborate systematic ways to link empirical developments on measurement with theoretical back-up and coverage.

That female academics and scholars face unique challenges in higher education institutions across the globe is well established (Bain and Cummings, 2000). While efforts have been made to minimize the gender gap including the use of equal opportunity clauses and measures, a glass ceiling persists especially as women attempt to advance in higher ranks (Kjeldal et al, 2005). Recent events and ongoing crises also shine a light on the increased burden sharing and implications for women in academia (Gabster et al, 2020). These challenges are not insurmountable. Of course, barriers remain, but it is also important to focus on the individual, institutional, and system-level strategies that have found to be successful in navigating barriers. In this panel, we are targeting the field of public policy specifically. How are we doing as a discipline? What measures are in place to ensure equal opportunity and representation? With the creation of networks and associations, such as the International Public Policy Association (IPPA), not only is our discipline growing, but is becoming more professionalized and identifiable. As a result, it is increasingly important that we take stock of where our field is at, and explore the opportunities and challenges that come with striving for equal representation. While studies have explored the gender representation in related fields including public administration, there has been scarce work on public policy (El-Taliawi, and El-Baradei, 2020). Taking into consideration IPPA’s ongoing gender audit, as well as a host of other initiatives, this panel begs the question: Where does the field stand in terms of gender and diversity? This panel is sponsored by the Women in Public Policy International Network. References: Bain, O., & Cummings, W. (2000). Academe's glass ceiling: Societal, professional-organizational, and institutional barriers to the career advancement of academic women. Comparative education review, 44(4), 493-514. El-Taliawi, Ola G. and El-Baradei, Laila (2020). "Gender in Public Policy: An Analysis of the State of the Field" Gabster, B. P., van Daalen, K., Dhatt, R., & Barry, M. (2020). Challenges for the female academic during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet, 395(10242), 1968-1970. Kjeldal, S. E., Rindfleish, J., & Sheridan, A. (2005). Deal‐making and rule‐breaking: Behind the façade of equity in academia. Gender and Education, 17(4), 431-447.

Open debates in the Welfare State include social investment, equality of opportunities, diversity, equity, or gender equality among others. Recently, social innovation in these areas has raised questions not only on citizens’ empowerment, but also on the capacity of existing public policies to address new demands and challenges in an increasingly complex and uncertain context (Barbieri et al. 2019, Gallego 2019). However, the connection between the research on social innovation and empowerment and the research on public policy has been scarce. We argue that the capabilities approach may help formulating research questions that integrate both strands. Most of the literature has linked “social innovation” and “empowerment” together, as two sides of the same coin (Moulaert et al., 2016). Social innovation includes practices that generate provision models different from institutionalized public and private sectors, and which are supposed to empower citizens (Grimm et al. 2013). In theory, social innovation aims to empower the communities and the individuals who are involved in its activities (Baglioni and Sinclair, 2015), but this does not necessarily always occur in practice (Blanco and Leon, 2017, Maestripieri, 2017a). Empirical results from studies on the relationship between women’s empowerment and involvement in social innovation have given contrasting results (Cukier, 2018, Maestripieri 2017b). The missing link between social innovation and empowerment has been a concern in the research on social innovation and on women’s empowerment from a capabilities approach (Cornwall 2016, Maestripieri 2017a,b, Lindberg et at. 2015). Capabilities refer both to the potential and to the actual power of what a person is able to do and achieve in terms of valued choices, and indicates a person’s well-being (Gangas 2016, Sen 1985). Empowerment is conceptualised as an increase in women’s capabilities and is operationalized through the relationship between three elements: resources, agency and achievements (Ibrahim and Alkire, 2007). Citizens’ resources are preconditions that influence their agency, which in turn influences their achievements (outcomes) (Chiappero et al. 2017). Thus, social innovation empowers only those with sufficient resources to participate in it, which deepens inequality a context of retrenchment (Oosterlynck et al. 2013). Therefore, as Ziegler (2018) points out, we need to pay attention to the capabilities conversion factors, among which public policy plays a central role. Research questions: How can public policy enhance citizens’ collective and individual capabilities to promote social innovation? Is public policy intervention a contradiction in terminis with the aims and means of social innovation? What can public policy learn from social innovation? Hypotheses: Hp1. Social innovation leads to inequality when it occurs in a context of welfare retrenchment and reduction of public intervention. Hp2. Social innovation can have a beneficial spillover over public policy, if it complements the action of the public, raising awareness on potential social needs not covered by current welfare provisions. Hp3. Social innovation generates women’s empowerment if women are actively involved in the definition of the scope and goal of the social innovation and social innovation occurs in a favourable institutional context in which public policies learn from socially innovative projects.

Description of General Objectives and Research Questions: This panel aims to address issues in policy research and practice that are related to gender and ethics. The panel has two main objectives. The first objective of the panel is to shed light on the unethical practices and behaviors that female, transgender and intersex students, researchers and academics face and are exposed to and their implications for academic progress, research creation and completion. Stemming from unequal power imbalances, such problems can have serious consequences for female, transgender and intersex academics and researchers and significantly affect their progress. This panel wishes to understand the prevalence of such problems, evaluate the impact of such variables on research creation and research completion and raise questions around ethics as well as research design which could be affected by the very practices that overlook gender dimensions, in the policy sciences and/ or other fields. The second objective is to question whether the research ethics protocols in place, take into account the gender dimension in policy research that involves human participants. The existing research protocols focus on protecting and safeguarding the interests of the research participants and overlook measures that protect the interests of the researcher undertaking the study. Do existing ethics protocols involve appropriate measures to protect female, transgender and intersex researchers in risky fieldworks and/or in cases where these researchers might be in a more vulnerable position to carry out research? What are the institutional measures to address these issues? In cases where the necessary measures are absent, what could be the best course of action to address potential problems that might arise? This panel aims to find answers for such questions. Justification of Its Scientific Significance: Studies have pointed to the gendered system of social practices that disadvantages women in academia. This includes sexual harassment (Rosenthal et al., 2016), gender disparity and inequality in academic publishing and peer review (Lundine at al., 2018; Steinberg et al., 2018), a gender bias in student evaluations (Mitchell and Martin, 2018) and a gender gap in tenure and promotions (Ginther and Hayes, 2003; Ginther and Kahn, 2004; Goulden et al. 2011). With the current COVID-19 pandemic, many of the known barriers to women’s career advancement have been amplified (Malisch et al., 2020; Gabster et al., 2020). Similar discussions around the issues faced by transgender and intersex individuals are largely absent. While the interplay of barriers that disadvantage women, transgender and intersex individuals in academia is complex, ethical dimensions often feature in one-form or another. These have, however, not been studied from the perspective of research creation and especially not in the discipline of policy sciences. The goal of this panel is to focus on the ethical dimensions of research that female, transgender and intersex students, researchers and academics encounter in the policy sciences (and/or in general) so as to usher in a discussion about ways to overcome them and help pave the way for a conversation that extends to other underrepresented groups in the future.

Public gender policies, formulated to expand women's political, civil and social rights, have historically oscillated between conservative and emancipatory purposes. The first public policies aimed at women often reduced them to the condition of "working mother". However, in the last decades, the areas in which gender policies are formulated have been multiplied, involving themes such as violence, health and reproductive rights, sexuality, identity, education, work, job and income generation, politics, among others. For that, the feminist and women's movements were fundamental in demanding from the state an active position in the promotion of women's citizenship, based fundamentally on the principle of gender equality. In this context, some strategies aimed at promoting women's human rights have become more popular, such as the creation of institutional bodies within the state and quota policies. Gender-based violence (physical, symbolic and psychological), sexual harassment, human trafficking, female mutilation, early marriages and wage inequality are grounds for criticism widely supported today. However, there is still an understanding deeply rooted in common sense that the domestic sphere is separate from areas such as economics or culture. Needs then characterized as personal or domestic end up becoming “fugitives”, often from a political demand that can be translated into public policy demands. The advancement of public policies faces some resistance from conservative sectors and presents important challenges, among which the little space and the weak legitimacy of the political project of gender equality in government bureaucracies, reverting to limited human and financial resources and a hostile stance in the routines operated on bureaucratic machines. Faced with these challenges, women's movements have played a pioneering role in the development of innovative strategies, such as the “boomerang effect”, which mobilize global opinion through the denunciation of local problems (Fraser, 2009). This resulted in a promising form of transnational, multiple-scale and post-welfare state that motivates the establishment of public policies. Initiatives like these have appeared in several cities around the world, such as “Ni Una a Menos” and “#MeToo”. These movements constitute a broad, heterogeneous, polycentric, multifaceted and polyphonic field and work on the elaboration of proposals that range from the modification of school curricula to the promotion and monitoring of gender-related legislation. Thus, a new relationship with the state and its linked dynamics is established, highlighting, in turn, the transversal, intersectional and intersectoral actions that are configured in a new context (theoretical, transversal, intersectorial and transdisciplinary) of understanding phenomena such as race, generation, class, sexuality and gender, which unfolds in the need to think about micro and macro-strategies of actions built, integrated and articulated together with the state and civil society (Matos, 2013). Thus, based on the changes that have occurred in recent history, we propose to question: 1) how has the institutionalization of women's guidelines through public policies been taking place? 2) has the establishment of mechanisms and executive bodies for coordinating and managing such practices in governmental spheres reverberating in meeting these guidelines? If not, what are the challenges to be faced? 3) what are the results of the institutionalization of public gender policies? 4) what is the influence that different social actors have had on the process of making gender issues visible on the public agenda?

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Data-driven innovation, including the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI), has significant potential to address various issues concerning sustainability. These challenges range from reducing air pollution and increasing energy efficiency to maintaining resilience to natural disasters and providing accessible and inclusive health services to all. Vast amounts of various kinds of data are increasingly available from a variety of sources through sophisticated equipment and devices installed in buildings, automobiles, and infrastructure. For facilitating data-driven innovation, effective collection, sharing, and use of data through cooperation and collaboration among stakeholders are critical. While open data access and management can contribute to creating innovation, there are many challenges that we need to address in promoting societal benefits. There are technical issues related to data, such as metadata tagging, quality control, cleaning and error elimination, and interoperability between various standards, which must be addressed to support data sharing. Stakeholders would have different interests and motivations and would not necessarily be willing to disclose or exchange data with each other. A balance needs to be considered between open and proprietary data. Serious concerns are also raised about collecting, sharing, and using sensitive data, particularly personal data, in terms of security and privacy. A variety of ideas are proposed for institutional arrangements for data governance. The government would be in charge of governing public data, whereas platform enterprises in the private sector play a critical role in assembling and applying an increasing amount of data for various purposes. Alternatively, a data trust can be established as an independent institution to make decisions about who has access to data under what conditions, how that data is used and shared for what purposes, and who can benefit from it. Data-driven innovation poses a particularly difficult challenge to policymaking. The speed of technological change is rapid, and the path of its evolution is not entirely predictable or explainable. That would produce a widening gap between technological change and institutional readiness. Also, various sectors, such as energy, housing, and transportation, which were not connected previously, are increasingly integrated through data in cyber-physical systems. Hence new policy approaches, such as regulatory sandboxes, would be required to incorporate the ability to learn from real-world use and experience and improve performance through adaptation. In-depth research is required to investigate how policy measures and institutional arrangements influence the collection, management, and use of data and what impacts would be made on facilitating data-driven innovation while addressing societal concerns. The topics we discuss in this session concern the ownership of and accessibility to data, data management and governance systems, incentives to data collection, disclosure, and sharing, and the impacts of policy measures on creating data-driven innovation. Policy implications are explored for maximizing the potential of data-driven innovation while minimizing risks to individuals and communities.

This workshop starts from the assumption that, even though all cities are affected in similar ways by climate change and extreme weather events, the general conditions and, consequently, vulnerabilities and adaptation capacities of cities, megacities or city regions vary widely between countries of the Global North and Global South. In this workshop we propose to look at both, northern and southern metropolises, and their strategies to cope with the looming threats of the climate crisis, giving emphasis on emerging political patterns, on the procedural and institutional measures and practices aiming to overcome the hardly sustainable prevailing urban development processes. Our main attention will be given to potential strategies concerning adaptative and anticipatory governance in view of the enhanced vulnerability of the metropolises of the Global South and North as well as their peripheries. Therefore, we like to invite scholars from the Global South and Global North to present proposals of theoretical approaches and empirical studies on climate policies related to large metropolises from a politics and public policy perspective. We welcome comparative South-North analysis, but also specific South or North-focused papers, singular or multiple case studies, being the comparative perspective adopted during the workshop discussions with the expectation of a mutual fruitful dialog on the possibilities and restrictions of transformative climate policies. Thus, the workshop intends to bring together papers involving: · Theories and concepts on environmental governance and climate policy with a focus on the South-North divide/challenge, including theoretical concerns related to adaptive/anticipatory governance, ecological democracy, participation, (environmental) policy analysis, social inclusion, social and environmental justice. · Methodological approaches on comparative studies in the field of climate policy analysis in large metropolises · Case studies and comparative studies (South-South, North-North or South- North) on innovative climate policy and governance experiences in large metropolises.

The ‘circular economy’ (CE) is an old concept, rooted in well-researched concepts like resource efficiency, cleaner production, or reverse logistics. Despite a long-standing scholarly (Boulding, 1966) and political tradition (e.g. 1990s ‘circular waste economy’ legislations of Germany or Japan), the CE was prominently placed on the EU’s political agenda only a few years ago (European Commisssion, 2015). This political move triggered an exponential growth of scientific studies on the topic (Ghisellini et al., 2016). Large portions of these recent studies and political initiatives focus on technical and business aspects of a circular economy while research on political, social, ecological, and ethical aspects is still emerging (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017; Ghisellini et al., 2016; Hobson, 2015; Hobson and Lynch, 2016; Leipold and Petit-Boix, 2018). From a natural resource perspective, however, these aspects are crucial for conceptualizing and practicing a circular economy. A natural resource perspective on a circular economy implies that the socioeconomic system operates within the Earth’s carrying capacity (Steffen et al., 2015) and preserves natural capital by reducing resource extraction and emissions (Pearce and Turner, 1990). The ecological and social principles underpinning a sustainable CE remain underdeveloped in current CE concepts (Pauliuk 2018, Murray et al. 2017, Korhonen et al., 2018). Furthermore, we know next to nothing about the political rationales and power struggles that drive CE policies, their social, ecological and practical benefits and drawbacks (Lazarevic and Valve, 2017; Murray et al., 2017) and how existing corporate opinions and initiatives may (not) serve as a means to achieve a socially just and environmentally sustainable circular economy (Leipold and Petit-Boix, 2018). Political and stakeholder rationales are likely to be of great influence for CE enactment. For instance, Kirchherr et al. (2018) demonstrate that cultural aspects play a more crucial role in CE implementation than technological barriers. Hence, we require (1) better insights into the rationales and opinions behind political and corporate initiatives for a CE, and (2) CE concepts that allow evaluating these initiatives’ outcomes along the lines of social justice, ethics and ecological sustainability.

New human rights and environmental due diligence regulations: Towards hardened foreign accountability? New human rights and environmental due diligence regulations were adopted or are currently under discussion in states that are main importers of agro-commodities, for instance from the European Union (EU), the United States, Canada and Australia. Scholars have argued that public policies for regulating global commodity chains could contribute to accountability and press corporate actors to assume responsibility for their socio-environmental impacts in distant places (e.g. Bartley 2014; Eberlein et al. 2014). However, the concept of ‘accountability’ has mainly developed with reference to the national scale and more recently for analyzing private governance approaches. In our panel, we aim to reflect upon the question of how ‘foreign accountability’ (Partzsch 2020), ‘corporate accountability’ (e.g. Evans 2019), ‘hardened accountability’ (Moser and Leipold 2019) or the ‘politics of environmental governance’ (Kramarz and Park 2017) can be conceptualized in a way that helps to capture the complex situations in which importing states adopt regulations that target transnational private actors and that impact differently upon producers and local stakeholders, often located in the Global South. How can we conceive of accountability in a situation in which the actors involved in decision making do not represent the same constituency as the actors that are most affected by the regulations?; How can we conceptualize the enforcement dimension of accountability in a way that accounts for both, monitoring and sanctions in importing states and domestic politics and local contexts in the sites of production? and How could power and knowledge be incorporated in conceptualizations of accountability in due diligence regulations? Empirically, we see that importing states are increasingly adopting due diligence regulations with the aim to protect either the environment (e.g. EU-RED, EUTR, United States 2008 Lacey Act) or human rights (e.g. Dodd-Frank Act, UK and Australian Modern Slavery Act). These regulations refer to different legal bases for holding corporate actors accountable, such as international human rights norms, international law or domestic law. More recently, we observe a trend to increasingly discuss human rights and environmental protection in an integrated manner (e.g. French Duty of Vigilance Law, discussions on the German Lieferkettengesetz and the Swiss Responsible Business Initiative), which can result in more comprehensive regulations of global commodity chains in the future. Our panel asks: What can we learn with regard to differences in regulatory design, implementation and outcomes of these measures? Are there systematic differences in the design and implementation of human rights and environmental due diligence regulations? In all, this panel seeks to engage scholars of human rights and scholars of environmental governance to enter into a dialogue on the implications and challenges of the recent proliferation of policies aiming to hold corporations accountable for their impacts in producing sites. ReferencesBartley T (2014) Transnational Governance and the Re-centered State: Sustainability or Legality? Regulation & Governance 8(1), 93–109. Eberlein B, Abbott KW, Black J, Meidinger E and Wood S (2014) Transnational business governance interactions: Conceptualization and framework for analysis. Regulation & Governance 8(1), 1-21.Evans A (2019) Overcoming the global despondency trap: strengthening corporate accountability in supply chains. Review of International Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2019.1679220.Kramarz T and Park S (2017) Introduction: The politics of environmental accountability. Review of Policy Research 34(1), 4-9. Moser C, Leipold S (2019) Toward “hardened” accountability? Analyzing the European Union's hybrid transnational governance in timber and biofuel supply chains. Regulation & Governance. https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12268Partzsch L (2020) Alternatives to Multilateralism: New Forms of Social and Environmental Governance. MIT Press.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Their main aim was to provide a universal set of policy goals to address the global challenges until the 2030s. In a sense, SDGs were designed to provide a general blueprint or universal language on how various initiatives and actors could communicate with each other and better coordinate their efforts. SDGs succeeded an earlier set of goals – Millennium Development Goals, MDGs – which directed sustainable development efforts between 2000 and 2015. Though with the previous set of goals some progress was acknowledged in certain areas, SDGs were meant to improve upon the earlier iteration and to answer some of the most persisting criticisms. Biggest among them was the lack of clarity, concreteness, and measurably. For this reason, a set of targets and indicators were adopted alongside each SDG for monitoring its achievement at the country level. Differently to its predecessor, all countries, no matter their level of development, need to be involved in this effort. Nonetheless, the reaction to SDGs was also mixed, though strongly supported by the majority of the development community, they still received various criticisms from being too ambitious in some areas to being too modest in others. The five – year anniversary of SDGs represents a great opportunity to discuss various aspects of the SDGs and the SDG-related research. First, it is important to assess to what extent have the SDGs succeeded to become the “shared blueprint” they were designed to be. Considering there is a lot of ambiguity in the description of the goals, there is a lack of consensus in their interpretation. In addition, the understanding varies by different sectors, organizations, and communities. Hence, it is also important to analyse to what extent they represent a “shared understanding” among these different actors. Second, measuring the progress made towards these goals over the last 5 years. This encompasses all aspects related to measurement, from data acquisition issues to results at national, regional or global level. In this regard, it is crucial to look at different sources to effectively capture efforts towards SDGs. Additionally, given the recent methodological advances in machine-learning and Big-Data analysis, it is also extremely valuable to see how these improvements can be used to advance sustainability research. Finally, issues related to measuring commitment to sustainable development are also crucial. Even though the main responsibility for achieving these goals lies in the countries, various other actors at different levels (from international organizations such as the EU or OECD to Universities and publishing houses) try to monitor how much they have contributed. This has given rise to various initiatives to “map” the contribution of documents, policies, and research toward SDGs. However, there is a lack of consensus on the “right” way how this should be done and consequently, the current iteration of these mapping exercises heavily depends on the context and the methodological approaches used. Part of this flux is of course caused by the radical methodological innovations that are sweeping the field including the Big-Data analysis, machine-learning, and AI.

Over the past decades, a considerable corpus of literature has focused on the distinction between modes of governance. Sharp lines have been drawn between ‘old’ and ‘new’ steering styles in terms of who takes part in them and what institutional settings shape decision-making processes within (Pierre/Peters 2005, Bell/Hindmoor 2009). Novel forms of socio-political interaction outside the state’s typical domains of influence —featuring a wider involvement of private and civil society actors in network-like structures and more flexible coordination methods— are usually at the spotlight of this research tradition. Among its preferred veins of enquiry count the inspection on whether there is more or less government within governance (Rosenau/Czempiel 1992, Kooiman 1993, Rhodes 1996, Pierre/Peters 1998, 2000, Börzel/Risse 2010), the nature and role of policy instruments (Howlett 2000, Héritier/Lehmkuhl 2008, Kassim/Le Galès 2010, Capano et al. 2019), the proliferation of network-based practices in policymaking (Rhodes/Marsh 1992, Bressers et al. 1994, Rhodes 1997, 2007, Marsh/Smith 2000, O’Toole/Meier 2004, Bevir/Richards 2009) and the overall changing role of the state (Majone, 1997, 1999, Bevir et al. 2003, Sorensen 2006, Bell et al. 2010, Lynn 2010, Levi-Faur 2011). As prosperous as the notion of governance have then been the typologies on its modes and, just as the concept itself, sometimes equally blurry. Despite considerable attention has been paid to the expressions of governance, a rather humble amount of practical investigation has so far explored its configuration in an integrative and systematic way. Artificial divides with relatively poor analytical value, such as the distinction between hierarchical/non-hierarchical steering styles and state/market/networks structures have permeated the scholarship. Far from capturing the complexity of real-world scenarios, the conceptual fuzziness of many of these typologies has weakened the term’s explanatory power and stretched the research agenda. Inspired by a narrower understanding of governance too intimately related with the realm of politics, most studies have so far analyzed who participates in governing processes and how these actors make decisions. Whereas especial consideration has thus been paid to the structural and processual aspects of governance, less is known about the contents and nature of the policymaking process taking place within. In few domains has the literature on modes of governance thrived as rapidly an as confusedly as in the field of sustainable development (SD). Under the opaque veil of ‘novelty’ —new actors and institutions, new forms of interaction and new policy instruments— scholars have, sometimes too enthusiastically, found proof of the governing rationale 21st century problems demand. These steering styles, scholars claim, would be better suited to tackle sustainable development challenges (Voß/Kemp 2006, Meadowcroft 2007, Jordan 2008, Arnouts/Arts 2009, Capano et al. 2012, Meuleman/Niestroy 2015, Dijk 2015). Yet the ways of governance towards sustainability are densely paved with empirical drought. How do governance arrangements for sustainable development work in which settings and what kind of policy contents emerge from them is, despite growing scholarship, a question still requiring practical evidence. This panel aims at further developing the theory of sustainability governance upon empirical basis. For that purpose, discussions within this panel will take on two main endeavors: first, to provide a coherent foundation for the conceptualization of governance and its modes, and; second, to explore specific governance arrangements for sustainable development. Overall, contributions shall advance the discussion on how sustainable development is governed across the globe.

The general aim of the panel is to bring together different ideas and good practices related to the governance of transformation to sustainability. The following research questions would be pursued: - Which governance modes or policy frameworks are needed to foster transformation? - Does the governance of transformation to sustainability go beyond authoritarian and democractic regimes? - How can policies be effectively integrated or mixed to address the challenges of transformation to sustainability? - What roles do non-state actors play in governing transformation to sustainability? The scientific relevance of the panel lies in its societal impact. Understanding the (im)possibility of governing of transformation to sustainability can limit the costs and burdens of transformation through a more "purposive" steering of the process.

Water governance inherently faces many social and ecological complexities. Water provides a large diversity of ecosystem services (water for irrigation, cooling, drinking, support for biodiversity, hydropower, etc.) that are often in conflict with each other. Consequently, water is an essential resource in other sectors such as health, energy, or agriculture. With increasing pressure of climate change and biodiversity loss, not only the protection of water resources and water-related ecosystems becomes increasingly critical, but also the protection from water gains importance, for example through flood protection measures. Such measures can have consequences again for drinking water provision, agricultural land use, or the state of ecosystems, in turn affecting a wide diversity of interests and stakeholders. Thus, water governance is complex spanning multiple sectorial, territorial, social and political boundaries. Due to its substantive importance for life and its emblematic manifestation of important governance challenges with relevance also to other fields, water has always been a key policy sector for studies of the policy process, public administration, and environmental governance. Research on the governance and management of water resources has thus traditionally contributed to new developments in these broader fields. Examples for this emblematic potential of water policy and governance include several landmark studies in policy theories such as the Advocacy Coalitions Framework or the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. More recently, for example, network approaches have been advanced in this field providing new insights in the governance of complex systems beyond the water realm. The objective of this panel is to continue this tradition and to understand and discuss the current complexity of water governance, and to provide ways of analyzing it, in the context of broader theories, approaches and methods of governance and the policy process. More specifically, this panel deals with the general question of how water policy and governance deals with complex interactions among the different levels of governance (from the international to the local), different stakeholders (from public administrations to research to private industry), or different sectors (from agriculture and land use to biodiversity and energy, and so forth), and others. Our focus includes both, structural aspects of the design, adaptation and innovation of institutions and governance structures, as well as procedural aspects of how actor interactions unfold and play out in dealing with these multi-faceted complexities. Potential aspects to be explored include: i) the exploration and analysis of important trade-offs between different sources of complexity and their consequences for governance systems; ii) the choice of policy tools and approaches (or the absence of adaptive action) in the face of increasing problem pressure and complexity; iii) the establishment of nascent, boundary-spanning policy problems and the responses of actors and policy systems;iv) the multi-scalar challenges of water spanning multiple environmental and political boundaries;v) water as a key policy sectors connecting other sectors, demanding new coalitions and new forms of collective action.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended many productive socio-economic policies and their associated programs towards the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the year 2030 in many hard-hit countries. With no officially recognized vaccines yet in sight, it has become a lingering threat to the self-imposed SDGs in these countries. This threat is compounded by other natural and man-made disasters. In some less developing countries, the reality is more glaring compared to those in developed countries as the former has to deal with widespread poverty. However, some have managed to retread their paths towards their SDGs through policies that were crafted in the midst of the pandemic, some in a rush to beat the problems and miseries associated with widespread infections. “Retread,” as used in this panel, means to fix or replace policies rendered inutile by critical events that have significant scope, intensity, time duration, and demand enormous amount of resources just like the on-going pandemic. A public policy is like a car, which is headed towards a certain direction, whose tires got punctured due to blunt objects on the road. To be able to continue the journey, the punctured tires have to be either fixed or replaced. For example, the effect of the pandemic on education, an important SDG area, has triggered debates worldwide on the appropriate policy to balance the need not to disrupt the education of learners vis-à-vis efforts to curb the spread of the virus. In the Philippines, this debate was resolved through the adoption of “blended learning” (i.e., use of online platform and printed educational modules), and change in the school calendar through the enactment of a national law that also took into consideration the typhoon season that could affect internet connectivity and the safety of learners and teachers.

In 2018, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argued carbon neutrality (a balancing of carbon emissions production, with carbon removal or elimination) needs to be achieved by 2050 in order to keep global warming under control. In response, countries, regions and cities across the world have made ambitious and high profile commitments to achieving carbon neutrality locally. However, the pathways to delivering on these targets remain unclear. Moreover, while many countries have had mandated climate change targets for decades, progress towards reducing emissions has been slow, suggesting the need to examine the assumptions that underpin these targets and the ways their interpretation in practice fosters action and inaction. From a governance perspective, much of the attention on low-carbon or carbon-neutral futures to date has been on supporting and understanding the uptake of technological innovations or the development of governance structures and mechanisms that can deliver these innovations (for example through Transition Management and Living Labs). These approaches have undoubtedly made a significant contribution to developing pathways towards carbon-neutral futures. However, there has been little analysis of the ways in which the actors involved in setting and implementing these targets understand their opportunities and responsibilities to do so. Moreover, there has been little analysis of the ways in which dynamic interactions across and between types of governance actors (e.g. public and private), policy areas (e.g. transport, energy, manufacturing, housing), and scales of governance and public policy (local through to supra-national) can shape, lock-in, inform, and transform attempts to deliver on carbon neutrality. This panel therefore seeks to cast empirical light on the barriers and opportunities for achieving carbon neutrality that may arise from different interpretations, interdependencies and interactions (or lack thereof) between different elements of complex governance systems. The panel also aims to develop and discuss diverse theoretical and analytical perspectives for understanding these issues through use of lenses from political and policy sciences. This panel will explore the following research questions: · How are carbon targets interpreted at and across different levels of governance and different policy areas? · What are the implications of different framings and problematizations of climate neutrality for policy action? · To what extent do network arrangements (e.g. institutional, social, policy) affect attention on and policy responses towards achieving carbon neutrality? · To what extent do institutional and/or social arrangements affect sectoral (e.g. transport, energy, business, manufacturing) policy responses to the carbon neutrality agenda and why?

In many countries, flood or drought risks have traditionally been managed with structural works, such as levees (dikes) or dams. However, from the late 1990s onwards, the negative impacts of hydraulic infrastructures on aquatic ecosystems and the false sense of security associated to these structures were publicized and brought to the political agenda in different countries. This situation led to substantial changes in water-related risk policy goals and instruments (Guerrin and Bouleau 2014). In Europe this process culminated with the 2000 EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the 2007 EU Floods Directive that entails the willingness to value and preserve floodplains according not only to economic justifications but also to ecological goals. In a context of an increasing politization of environmental hazards and changes, international institutions and scientists have recently developed a new concept: “Nature-based Solutions (NbS)”, which promises to strengthen this environmental turn by simultaneously reducing water related-risk, conserving biodiversity, and adapting to climate change (Cohen-Shacham et al. 2016, p. 5). NbS embeds measures such as river restoration, the conversion from impervious to pervious surfaces, or the use of green roofs. While global or international organizations have widely embraced the concept of NbS, some scholars also point its fuzziness and its Eurocentric focus (Bridgewater et al. 2018, Escobedo et al. 2019). A growing literature aims at developing and operationalizing the concept worldwide (Eggermont et al. 2015, Keesstra et al. 2018, Nesshöver et al. 2017, among others). National governments and the EU are now investing in NbS projects and actions, with the NbS label, are also starting to be implemented in very different local settings (EC 2015, p. 5, Keesstra et al. 2018). Not much is known about the dynamics and characteristics of such “territorialization” process apart from scattered case studies. Yet, scholars have pointed out the importance of national/local settings in how policy mechanisms such as the WFD are being implemented nationally (Liefferink et al. 2011). This is why putting in perspective different regions or countries, with their specific institutional, geographic and socio-political characteristics, and the manner they adopt, adapt and reframe such concepts and territorialize them appears to be particularly relevant. The actors implementing NbS usually have different and often conflicting goals, values, representations, sources of legitimacy and power. To assess whether, in practice, NbS keeps their promises to reconciliate risk protection with environmental stakes, we thus need to go beyond an evaluation of their “efficiency” or their “innovative nature”. This panel will specifically address the territorialization of NbS by exploring the following topics: 1. Do nature-based solutions illustrate a new framing of water-related risks problems? What are the constructions of the problems these new solutions are supposed to tackle? 2. What are the governance and the socio-political effects of NbS implementation in practice? Has the concept of NbS, within water-related risks policies, enabled more participative and decentralized making of public policies? 3. To what extent the capacity of NbS in reconciliating risk protection with environmental concerns depend on State characteristics and policy-making traditions?

The term "extractivism" is a concept that is now making its way not only in associative and committed discourses, but also in scientific analyzes. Eventhough extrativism is not yet very popular in political science. It designates a specific mode of wealth accumulation, based on activities that extract large quantities of natural resources that are not transformed (or which are only transformed to a small extent) mainly intended for exportation (Bednik, 2015 , 2016; Acosta, 2013; Svampa, 2011). Extractivism is not limited only to minerals or oil, it also concerns large hydroelectric projects, industrial agriculture, forest monocultures, intensive fishing. The limitless appetite of the productivist mega machine has made extractivism an activity cut off from reality and indifferent to its destructive effects for people, biodiversity and the safeguard of the Earth system. The originality of this thematic axis is based on both the privileged themes and on the interdisciplinarity of the approach envisaged, which encourages dialogue between political science and the various disciplines of the human and social sciences; philosophy, sociology, economic science, law, history, anthropology and geography. We specifically analyze the politicization of extractivism in Central Africa, in particular conflict areas around major mining projects (Barka, 2019). In doing so, we seek to cross the temporalities and scales of action of the various actors involved. The panel therefore wants to highlight a certain number of tensions that exist between extractive agencies (with a view to development) and sustainability in the setting in motion of extractive policies, but also the complexity of the temporalities to which the actors claim, which overlap and sometimes contradict each other and can be a source of conflict.

Addressing climate change and limiting its most adverse impacts requires rapid and comprehensive mitigation measures. The transformation of current carbon-intensive economic systems to carbon-neutral systems will not be brought about by market forces alone. Far-reaching public policies need to be enacted to phase out unsustainable technologies and scale up sustainable ones. However, the implementation of ambitious climate mitigation policies faces a wide set of social and political challenges. The purpose of this panel is to collect contributions that investigate the challenges and enablers of decarbonization policies. It focuses on three salient aspects that are currently the focus of academic and policy discussions: political dynamics, social acceptance, and policy feedback. Policy-making is a complex process involving a variety of actors: policy-makers, experts, civil society organizations, private sector organizations, and citizens. It is shaped by institutional rules and pre-existing policies. Understanding how these factors influence climate policy-making is key to assessing the political feasibility of ambitious climate mitigation strategies and understanding how obstacles to rapid decarbonization can be overcome. Policies to phase out carbon-intensive technologies and policies to scale up sustainable technologies face specific challenges at different development stages. Understanding how such challenges play out in different settings can provide important lessons for future policy-making efforts. Investigating challenges and enablers of ambitious climate policy-making, in particular in a comparative perspective, is of major importance to assess the social and political feasibility of different decarbonization pathways. We intend to foster dialogue among scholars studying climate policy-making in different settings and from different perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds. The panel will contribute to academic and policy debates, allowing to draw lessons and identify best practices. It will provide policy insights that are particularly relevant at a time when the European Union is designing the Green Deal and other countries discuss ambitious climate mitigation strategies.

COVID-19 urges us to develop, or re-consider, public policy and urban planning for sustainable city. Few arguments have been explicitly and effectively made on the validity of the urban and national land planning, such as urban railways and stations, residential development in historic area, mergers of hospitals, metropolitan highway, and Maglev, to make Tokyo more economically productive and globally competitive, for instance. In the period of the pandemic, however, the development image of Tokyo was shaken and diversified by witnessing unbelievably vacant commuter and bullet trains and experiencing ‘new’ lifestyles balancing work and private life. New urban policy and planning, not only in Tokyo but also in other global cities, should deal with the emerging change in value and behavior of people as well as the existing issues including climate change, resilience against natural disaster, gentrification, democratic governance, and sustainable infrastructure. Or, as Norman Foster maintains in his article on the Guardian, the evolution of cities would simply be accelerated by the pandemic.Holistic understanding of the social impact made by urban planning, especially infrastructure development, would not have been fully elaborated. Urban expressway reform, for instance, has been planned or executed in many cities, including Big Dig in Boston, Madrid Rio in Madrid, and the restoration of Cheonggyecheon, Seoul. Despite the huge budget and public attention, there have been a limited number of studies on those cases, particularly focusing on the wider impact on the society. In the case of Madrid, Madrid Rio would perhaps have contributed to the higher attractiveness of surrounding areas, especially for young creative people with various backgrounds, and the higher competitiveness of the city based on diversity and inclusion. But the policy process to plan the M-30 expressway reform and Madrid Rio has often been a matter of debate for the lack of deliberation and comprehensive planning. On what factors/aspects does an urban policy or infrastructure development influence in what mechanism? What policy, planning and infrastructure would serve for the sustainability and creativity of city?Democratic frameworks, such as collaborative governance, would be further explored for sustainable and creative urban planning. The resilience of city and/or community gets even more important to cope with the uncertainty and instability caused, or accelerated, by COVID-19. Moreover, the inclusiveness, one of the key factors to attract creative people, could be strengthened not only by urban space and infrastructure but also through participatory planning process and governance system. What collaboration should be formulated by what institutional/administrative framework for the resilient design of city in this transition period?This panel aims at developing our holistic understanding of the social impact by urban planning and infrastructure for future urban design responding to the changes and/or evolution caused by COVID-19. It would extend the discussion to the role of democratic frameworks and concepts for sustainable and creative urban planning. The panel invites both papers providing theoretical framework and ones from the practical perspective, especially case studies in various regions and multidisciplinary research.

As the effects of climate change become apparent across a range of issues – from the increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes, floods, heatwaves and forest fires to the dislocation of people and other social effects, and from species extinction to the rise of political conflicts – governments at different levels are grappling with how to make rapid and enduring energy transitions as one way to mitigate climate change. A considerable literature examines the different inputs to energy transitions across national contexts that are associated with a greater likelihood of nations adopting transition policies - such as political (Gromet et al., 2013), economic (Apergis and Danuletiu, 2014;) and social factors (Blanchet, 2015). Other literatures examine the ways path dependencies –particularly “carbon lock-in” and investments and sunk costs in fossil fuel infrastructure –make transitions difficult. While generally explaining policy inertia and stability (Erickson et al., 2015), some scholars in this tradition found exogenous shocks such as climate change itself and COVID-19 could break the carbon lock-in (Simmie, 2012). However, there are several important yet unanswered questions about energy transitions that we need to answer in order to explain not only how governments adopt transition policies but how they might implement them in ways that are enduring. This means moving beyond an examination of the ability of governments to muster the political will to adopt climate policies – especially energy transition policies – but also to develop implementation strategies with the potential for long-term success, such as changing infrastructure, institutions, and even democratic practice (Schlosberg et al., 2017). This research challenge can be addressed from organizational, sociological, and political theoretical perspectives that emphasize technological challenges. For example, several scholars have addressed how institutions could shape the possible transitions from one socio-technical system to another and how they influence actors and society (Geels, 2004). Questions about implementation are merely technological, however. But we also need normative perspectives that address questions related to environmental and climate justice in implementing climate policies (Caney, 2014; Hajer & Versteeg, 2019). Normative issues include, for example, the equity of the distributions of benefits and burdens of climate policies across social classes and generations (O’Brien et al., 2018; Carley et al., 2018; Barnett & Palutikof, 2015; Kartha, 2011), and the fairness of democratic (and other) forms of decision making (Schlosberg & Collins, 2014; Dodge, 2014). Climate justice is not a pure environmental issue at all, instead it represents an ethical issue (Caney, 2005). Many organized groups such as Climate Justice Alliance are demanding that these governing bodies address climate justice and equity. Several local governments also address climate equity issue in their climate action plan, ensuring that the implementation of energy policies would be an equitable and a democratic process. The focus of this panel is on the process of energy transitions, especially related to the implementation of energy transition policies, and the organizational, technological and normative aspects that arise after policy adoption. How do governments at different levels – local, sub-national, national, or even internationally – implement energy transitions policies? What organizational, political, technological and other resources must be mobilized to ensure the transformation of infrastructure, technology and governing system needed to mitigate climate change and its worst effects over the long term? In what ways do oppositional actors throw up barriers to implementation that do not derive from path dependencies, and how are these addressed by protagonists of energy transition policies? How are normative issues organized into or out of implementation plans? And what are the political and policy effects of this? These questions have the potential to develop new knowledge on energy transitions in unexplored areas, and also to provide meaningful lessons for practitioners on-the-ground who are attempting to implement energy transitions, often with fewer resources than they need to support rapid energy transitions.

In the last decades, inequality has emerged as a very significant topic affecting all the spheres of public life, and the recent crisis we are experiencing is only going to deepen it further. To date, public policies have not been able to reverse the socioeconomical problems linked to the most classic areas of inequalities, such as health or education. In this new scenario, where inequalities are spreading and diversifying the areas they affect, it seems that national governments have lost the capacity to address or even find ways to influence this reality. Beyond the objectives directly aimed at fighting inequalities, as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8 or SDG 11, the whole 2030 Agenda seeks for a multiactor and multilevel coordination to incorporate the principles of Inclusive and Sustainable Development into local agendas. This coordination should enrich the capabilities of national and local governments to address the social challenges they face. This panel aims to analyse the degree of progress in the adoption and implementation of the 2030 Agenda in national or local government agendas, with the intention of debating whether new mechanisms for the dissemination and transfer of transnational policies can have any impact on the way public policies are approached.

In a century of macro transformations (technology, climate, demography, health), sustainability remains a key concern for societies and policymakers worldwide. Within the realm of public policy, sustainability continues to simultaneously represent a challenge, an opportunity and a favourable policy outcome. The original Brundtland report identifies three main dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. The former two and their interrelation have been prominently analysed in academic, policy and political discussions especially on weak and strong sustainability paradigms, leaving social sustainability somewhat overlooked so far. Through the 2020 global pandemic, the social dimension of sustainability has yet gained momentum through an external shock to current socio-economic systems and through plausible negative economic repercussions in the pandemic’s aftermath. Social sustainability, understood as the controlled organisation of social and cultural systems contributing to sustainability at large, aims to ensure societies’ and communities’ wellbeing based on equity, inclusive growth, democracy, citizen engagement and empowerments, quality of life, anti-discrimination and anti–marginalisation. Its main objective is to meet the needs of current generation (intra-generational equity) without jeopardising the prospects for future generations to experience (at least) the equal level of wellbeing (inter-generational equity). Drawing lessons from the 2020 pandemic, there is a strong need to promote the social dimension of sustainability on academic, policy and political agendas. Against this backdrop, the panel aims to address questions concerning the current stage and position of social sustainability vis-à-vis its environmental and economic counterparts. The questions of interest focus on · conditions under which the three dimensions of sustainability reinforce each other; · whether environmental and especially economic sustainability are pursued at the expense of social sustainability; · the degree to which political narratives treat and propagate social sustainability; · the embeddedness of social sustainability into national and supranational political arenas and agendas; · the success of different types of welfare models in integrating social sustainability policies in their operations and outcomes; · the way in which public opinion can frame the discussion on social sustainability; · instruments through which multilevel political systems such as those of the African or European Union approach social sustainability and its position within the conceptual frame for a sustainable future. Moreover, the panel invites a global comparative perspective and explores policy options that underpin efficient and long-term social sustainability. The questions of interest include: · To what extent do the private and public sector cooperate and interact to promote and achieve social sustainability? · How do traditional social policy instruments blend with newly (re)emerged issues (e.g. social and human capital; diversity and inclusiveness; social and political participation; economic and social inequalities) in order to exploit opportunities and prospects for social sustainability? · Which relevant stakeholders foster social sustainability and what are their specific objectives? · What are best practices to evaluate existing social sustainability-related policy measures?

How do states govern societies with deepening inequality while simultaneously professing commitment to liberal, democratic values in the context of mid and low income countries? What are analytically productive ways to unpack governing processes that create, sustain and deepen inequalities and exclusions as well as sources of resistance to them. The panel invites papers that engage with this central question while critically examining daily practices of governance and bringing lived experiences of those who are “invisibilized” to the forefront. Despite its limitations, “what governments do” has served to be an enduring definition for public policy. Among the many things that governments do as they try to “tame wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber 1973; Crowley and Head 2017), they also look away (Mander 2015), exclude and reinforce inequalities (Schneider and Ingram 2005). In efforts to “improve” (Li, 2007), address inequalities, governing strategies of the state often fall short, or actively reinforce the very institutions they hope and claim to challenge. For example, policies that employ technological interventions like unique identification of ‘populations’ to improve efficient provision of public services, often exclude those who might need them most (Martin and Taylor 2020; Khera 2019). Efforts to formalise the organisation of work, often further marginalize and adversely affect those who rely on informal work for subsistence (Harriss-White, 2003). Likewise efforts to universalise education in some contexts, has led to a stratification in access to education services to the most marginalised (like indigenous populations), erasing their knowledge systems and limiting access to further economic opportunities (Schmidt et al. 2015). Several voices from the feminist, dalit, black and other scholars have written accounts of experiences of being invisibilized (Star & Straus, 1999; Hatton, 2017; Daniels, 1987; Singh, 2014). Central to these accounts, is an experience of being devalued and dehumanized, experiences that have also come to the forefront from an anthropological turn in public policy (Wedel et al. 2005).

The Covid-19 pandemic, natural or human-made disasters, large migratory flows, climate change, rising inequality, and financial crises are examples of some of the challenges which have transboundary implications in their effects and causes. Hence, the need to provide coherent and coordinated responses to address them is becoming more and more pressing. However, across the globe, multilateralism appears in crisis given the growing skepticism about the benefits of multilateral cooperation, the discredit of liberal values, and the resurgence of power competition, among other factors. In this context, the construction of global and regional strategies to respond to these shared challenges is endangered. Yet, transnational risks defy national boundaries, which no single nation or bloc can solve on its own. They demand multilateral cooperation as a mechanism on both global and regional levels. This is a practical necessity. Furthermore, the presence of transboundary risks of different nature calls for global and regional - either supranational and intergovernmental - responses beyond the borders of the nation-state. This demand for concerted and multilateral strategies varies across regions, but also across policies and issues. Our panel seeks to go to the heart of these global challenges by trying to elucidate which policy efforts are being put together beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Thus, we intend to answer the following questions: How are global challenges reconfiguring the role of the nation-state in the policy response to them? Moreover, one of the characteristics of transnational governance is the fragmentation of power and control between states and constellations of non-state actors and networks. Hence, a question the panel also intends to explore is which actors and networks underlay the articulation and implementation of these transnational responses. Thirdly, demands for multilateralism vary across policy areas - economic vs. social challenges, but also across sub policy fields - as these entail different risks and challenges. Are transnational responses strengthening in particular policy areas, and weakening in others? Is there variation across time? Understanding these variations across issue areas and time is important. Finally, there is a wide agreement that regions and regionalisms matter in world politics. Yet, the role of regions and regionalism in regulatory cooperation and integration remains unclear. In this respect, a question worth exploring is whether and how inter- and regional responses are being articulated. Do regions and regional powers seek to use regional strategies to complement, challenge, or contest global governance scripts?

The governance of global challenges is rapidly changing. ‘Super-wicked’ problems (Levin et al., 2012), diverse actors and overlapping agendas have led to increasing complexity and uncertainty about responses to global crises. Despite the multiplicity of actors, crises and fields of action, public policy has known one constant: quantification has always been the primary motivation behind the governance of the transnational but has received renewed momentum in the face of a world blighted by the multiple compounding crises of COVID-19, climate change, migration, poverty and extremism. This prominence of numbers as technologies of government (Rose, 1991) in public policy is enacted not only in their expansion into new spaces but also in the types of political effects they achieve. As they frame issues, link policy instruments and connect diverse actors, the making of numerical data (in whatever forms they may take) emerges, in fact, as the central venue for ‘policy work’ (Colebatch, 2006); as such, their production is of high significance to policy studies. Scholarship on the role of numbers in governing societies has been abundant and has attracted multiple fields of study, including sociology, political science, geography, anthropology, STS, and others. Prominent authors have written lucidly about the role of numbers in the making of modern states and the governing role of measurement regimes in various areas of public policy and social life (Porter 1995; Power 1997; Desrosiéres 1998; Espeland and Stevens 2008). Similarly, anthropologies of numbers suggest that ‘our lives are increasingly governed by – and through – numbers, indicators, algorithms and audits and the ever-present concerns with the management of risk’ (Shore and Wright 2015: 23). Further, important insights and perspectives on indicators in particular come from STS (Bowker & Star 2000; Lampland, 2010), including actor-network theory (Latour, 1987). Drawing on these multiple literatures and disciplines, this panel will explore various dimensions of the rise of metrics in global public policy and governance. In particular, it will aim to identify and propose new empirical and theoretical approaches to studying quantification as the ‘epistemic infrastructure’ that holds and steers the governance of public policy fields transnationally. The empirical investigation of the production and effects of indicators, models and targets as ‘epistemic infrastructures’ is particularly useful for capturing the emergence and consequences of the ways in which quantification has scaled-up, linking different sites of calculation and governance. Bibliography: Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT press. Colebatch, H. K. (2006). What work makes policy?. Policy sciences, 39(4), 309-321. Desrosières, A. (1998). The politics of large numbers: A history of statistical reasoning. Harvard University Press. Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (2008). A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 49(3), 401-436. Lampland, M. (2010). False numbers as formalizing practices. Social Studies of Science, 40(3), 377-404. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard university press Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S., & Auld, G. (2012). Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change. Policy sciences, 45(2), 123-152. Power, M. (1997). The audit society: Rituals of verification. OUP Oxford. Rose, N. (1991). Governing by numbers: Figuring out democracy. Accounting, organizations and society, 16(7), 673-692.

BackgroundWith the current global pandemic and simultaneous calls for a coordinated response to prevent zoonotic disease emergence and transmission, there is an urgent need to examine global and national governance responses to prevention. As evidence is key to ensuring the effectiveness of these responses, understanding the role of multiple forms of evidence in the development of governance strategies must also be prioritized. From a One Health perspective, these governance responses will necessitate an integration of evidence and perspectives particularly at the intersection of the food, environment and health systems that give rise to poor health and inequalities. They will also rely on synergies between national and global governance institutions and structures to effectively address transnational threats to health. Developing an actionable and evidence-based global governance approach for pandemic prevention presents significant challenges. Efforts to understand and shape policies, laws and systems must be based on an awareness of their inherent complexity and dynamism, as well as consider the intended and unintended consequences of introducing or changing governance structures. Research questionsHow have global or national governance approaches addressed pandemic prevention at the population level? How have these approaches been informed by evidence and considered the inherent complexities related to policy, law and/or systems? ObjectivesThis session aims to showcase examples from recent empirical or theoretical approaches to global or national governance related to the prevention of pandemics. Specifically, efforts that have addressed the complexity of policy, law and systems and those that have considered intended and unintended consequence toward the health of populations will be highlighted. Scientific relevanceProgress toward pandemic prevention at a global scale requires advances in the use of empirical and theoretical knowledge to inform national and global governance approaches. The aim is to explore national and global examples via the panel and discuss what is working, not working and how we can improve our efforts to develop relevant and robust global governance approaches to prevent pandemics and improve health and health equity.

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

Objectives This panel objective is to discuss papers studying the policymaking and/or implementation processes of covid-19 responses/policies, applying or advancing public policies’ theories and/or frameworks, as well as capacities and resilience theories and/or frameworks, to better understand the policy processes of covid-19 policies in different countries/contexts. Main questions: [General Question] How did distinct actors/experts/ stakeholders and institutions influence the formulation/re-formulation and implementation of covid-19 policies, in a period that entailed/required a dynamic and rapid process of learning and re-adaptation? [Policymaking] What were the main coalitions and other political actors directly influencing the policymaking, and what types of knowledge, learning and feedback characterized them? Did the formulation and re re-formulations entailed a collaborative process with the participation of front-line health workers and other institutions/organizations? How have the processes of learning and feedback and communication of information taken place? [Implementation] How frontline health workers have implemented the covid-19 measures in distinct facilities: public general hospitals, temporary facilities and primary care facilities? How were frontliners levels of knowledge regarding new policies and to what extent have they adopted discretionary actions while dealing with challenges/ everyday resilience? What were the main organizational and relational constraints? To what extent have new funds and supplies enabled front liners to cope with the demand? To what extent have citizens and community been involved in the implementation of covid-19 measures. Scientific Relevance Covid-19 exacerbates both ambiguities and the role of experts in varied types of top-down policymaking processes. Governments’ capacities to respond to the crisis became critical everywhere in the world, and their analytical capacities, among other issues, turned out to be one of the main Achilles heels of policymaking processes. The pandemic also exacerbated frontline health workers' coping and everyday resilience, as well as critical capacity and risky conditions at the street level. As far as impact is concerned, analyses in varied countries show that covid-19 also exacerbates inequalities, as infection rates are higher among vulnerable groups, with poor housing/living conditions, using public transport. In the first semester of 2020, the covid-19 pandemic presented unprecedented policy and health system challenges to countries around the world. In diverse and politically significant ways countries answered with rapid, adaptive and constant-learning social and medical responses in the fight against the new coronavirus. At the initial six months of the pandemic, we (seemed to have) learned that countries that rapidly adopted social measures together with tests and monitoring, or had managed to keep transparent information and trust in government measures, were considered as examples of success in tackling covid-19. With the arrival of the second wave in Europe, and the possibility of spreading the second wave to the other parts of the globe, the learning process needs to continue and policy process theories can greatly contribute to that purpose. Therefore, the current emergence of a second wave of covid-19 pandemic (in late Oct-20) reveals that this pandemic requires a deeper understanding of policy processes, what could be achieved by using concepts in a critical or adaptive perspective. Covid-19 also constitutes an opportunity to advance theories and frameworks in public policies, advancing our understanding regarding specificities of policy processes and with respect to vulnerable groups as well.

In the policy studies literature crises have been highlighted as main factors of policy change, for instance with the notions of “critical juncture” (Gourevitch, 1986 ; Capoccia and Kelemen 2007) and of “focusing event” (Kingdon 1984, Birkland, 1997). Different types of crises, especially economic crises, accidents or natural disasters, are conceptualized as turning points opening windows of opportunity for policy change. However, the first policy studies publications analyzing responses the COVID-19 pandemic stress the key role of the legacies of the past and the degree of preparedness to sanitary crises (Capano and al, 2020). Uncertainty and time pressure that characterize sudden shocks can be a hindrance to policy innovation. Thus, the aim of this panel is to analyze how crises can trigger (or not) health policy innovations in three kinds of crises: 1. Crises external to the health sector. This is especially the case of economic and financial crises. For instance, in the USA the Affordable Care Act, containing several policy innovations, has been adopted in the context of the Great recession. A first question here is the relation between health policy innovation and economic crises, reinforcing the weight of financial and budgetary issues in healthcare, so as the diffusion of new economic instruments for the healthcare system (for instance capital markets). 2. Sanitary crises, like the current COVID-19 pandemic. That kind of focusing event cannot only trigger medical innovations but also policy innovations, concerning more policy processes (for instance the shaping of a new scientific council in France) than policy instruments (most of them rooted in the past). Such kind of crisis can also be a window of opportunity to sustain and to legitimate previous policy innovations. In another perspective sanitary crises, like other focusing events, can reveal policy failures and provide evidence and arguments for policy shifts. 3. Crises in the healthcare system corresponding to longer lasting processes and constructed by policy actors. The main question here is the link between the definition of a health problem as a crisis (for instance the “opioid crisis” in the USA) and policy innovations (for example new primary care organizations developed as a policy response to the “demographic crises” of the medical profession in France and Germany –Hassenteufel and al., 2020). This panel welcomes papers based on case studies (at the local or national level, comparative or not), exploring the different links between different types of crises and health policy innovations. References BIRKLAND T. (1997), After Disaster : Agenda Setting, Public Policy and Focusing Events, Washington (D. C.), University of Georgetown Press. CAPANO G., HOWLETT M., JARVIS D., RAMESH M. et GOYAL N. (2020), « Mobilizing Policy (In)Capacity to Fight Covid 19 : Understanding Variations in State Responses », Policy and Society, 39 (3), p. 285-308. CAPOCCIA G. et KELEMEN R. (2007), « The Study of Critical Junctures. Thoery, Narrative and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism », World Politics, 59 (4), p. 341-369. GOUREVICH P. (1986), Politics in Hard Times, Cornell (N. Y.), Cornell University Press HASSENTEUFEL P., SCHWEYER F-X., GERLINGER T., HENKEL R., LÜCKENBACH C., REITER R. “The role of professional groups in policy change: Physician's organizations and the issue of local medical provision shortages in France and Germany”, European Policy Analysis, 6 (1), 2020, p.38-57 KINGDON J. (1984), Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, Boston (Mass.), Little Brown and Company.

General Objectives The world is increasingly becoming more digital, interconnected and person-centered. While the very nature of digital health projects addresses the availability of high-quality data, the digital transformation of health systems requires an understanding of essential governance practices beyond the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) use in healthcare. It becomes increasingly clear that the deployment of wide-scale digital health projects is less of a technical problem and more of a governance issue. We would like to discuss this topic which has started to gain great importance in recent years in an interdisciplinary panel. Questions What are the enablers and barriers of digital transformation of healthcare systems from public administration, public policy or governance point of view? How can we best address the “contextual” challenges in digital transformation of healthcare systems? Scientific Relevance Research shows that the availability of technological advancements is not enough for digital transformation of health systems. Indeed, the most important part of such projects is to understand the complexity of health systems and appreciate the national context, namely the political, social, economic circumstances. We should not take the digitalization projects in healthcare as technological endeavors only, but see them in a more holistic way, including the settings in which they emerge. To give an example, Estonia, a small Baltic country with 1,3 million inhabitants, gained a reputation as a model of digital society. Successful e-health practices such as electronic patient records, digital patient registration, e-prescription are widely accepted among Estonians even though they are not older than fifteen years. Taking a closer look at the national context, however, reveals that e-health in Estonia owes its success to the developments that took place not within but beyond the healthcare sector. Historically speaking, a rapid modernization process after its independence from the Soviet Union and joining the European Union brought a fully-fledged market economy to this country. Very much in line with the New Public Management approach, the vital ICT infrastructure for digitalization of governmental services was accomplished through public-privatepartnerships. Thanks to its whole-of-government approach, Estonia has established an intersectoral cooperation between the ministries which helped integrate digital aspects into healthcare. On the demand side, Estonians, already being accustomed to digitalized public services, showed a high level of trust in sharing their data with their national (health) authorities. Thus, the implementation of e-health services in Estonia was not a matter of public debate. Rather, it was a natural result of its national digitalization strategy.

The aim of this panel is to investigate and better understand how different health care systems worldwide responded to the coronavirus pandemic and which lessons could be learnt to improve health systems’ resilience in the current ongoing pandemic. All health care systems had to adapt quickly (and as best as they could) to face the enormous challenges posed by the Coronavirus pandemic, like the capability to deal with COVID patients while keep delivering other healthcare services, the reorganization of hospitals wards, the impact on the healthcare workforce and the coordination between different levels of care and different levels of the health policymaking process. Despite facing similar challenges, health care systems around the world put in place different strategies and approaches to face the pandemic and to avoid being overwhelmed. While there could be different perspectives to investigate health systems responses (epidemiology, medical, etc.) this panel is focused on the ‘policy’ implications of such responses and is aimed at addressing the following questions: - How the different institutional settings and the different health systems’ organizational models affected the response to the Coronavirus pandemic? - How can we disentangle the relation between health systems, the management of the pandemic and health inequalities? - Which key factors allowed some heath systems to get better results in terms of population health outcomes, containment of infections and overall resilience? This panel will provide public policy scholars from all over the world with the opportunity to investigate, share and discuss health policy and health system’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic, trying to identify their rationale, impact, strengths and weaknesses. The panel welcomes papers with both a ‘single country’ or a comparative perspective, in order to discuss if and how different countries could learn from each other and to offer a contribution to the policy, societal and academic debates concerning health systems developments and health systems resilience. Papers focused on both developed and developing countries are welcome.

The COVID-19 pandemic magnified the disconnect between policy makers, academia, people and communities, particularly for vulnerable and under-served groups who faced even more inequalities, largely based on social determinants of health. The disproportionate impact – for example in minorities and indigenous populations; people in aged care facilities; rural and remote communities; the poorest; and people with complex needs – highlights a continued inability to coordinate a cross policy response to achieve equality for vulnerable groups. As a consequence there is an increasing call to take the pandemic as an opportunity to fundamentally rebuild our society and systems in a more sustainable, equitable way – but how? The Sustainable Development Goals highlight the complexity and intersectorality of the challenges, but also offer a unique opportunity to promote community-led transformational change. This calls for policy making using agile and active learning (Dewing 2008) or similar approaches: critically analysing personal actions, discussing and reflecting with others, and learning through actions. This panel will explore new important understandings on inequalities across the life course in different cultural and policy contexts; how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities, but also how the pandemic has accelerated innovative ways of overcoming them, and how person-defined outcomes can inform and accelerate achievement of policy aims. Our panel goes beyond the state of the art by employing a multi-disciplinary theoretical lens and giving a voice to underrepresented groups, in order to tackle inequalities regarding the social determinants of health. Our innovative methodological approaches and collaborative learning will generate interdisciplinary scientific knowledge on how to address social inequalities, how to build the case for reform and how to turn citizen movements into community-led change programmes. Scientific outcomes will include innovative and actionable policy and practice solutions designed to deliver concrete changes. Our research questions contribute to several cross-cutting themes, though mainly to the complex learnings for policy solutions using the impact and lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic regarding better, more equitable and evidence-based health and care policies for the future: How have policies implemented during the pandemic impacted the rise in inequalities, especially for the most vulnerable groups? What new insights into identifying and counteracting inequalities can be gleaned through multi-stakeholder exchanges of learning and best practice? How can spontaneous innovations on the ground, which were developed during the pandemic, be supported by evidence and policy to create sustainable change? What are the policy lessons to be drawn about how best to address inequalities experienced in order to increase resilience against future health and economic crises?

There is wide agreement in policy circles, academia and society at large that life in societies where people can trust the institutions which govern social relations (Eg. law, police, politics, medicine), is easier and happier; that such societies are more likely to be prosperous, politically stable, democratic and inclusive. The Edelman Trust Barometer Survey has consistently recorded low and falling levels of trust in key societal institutions globally; in 2017 they noted that levels of trust were at an all-time low. Similarly, research from across the world points to falling levels of trust in the medical profession and in health systems. This panel will engage with some key issues that have a bearing on this problem; broadly, it tackles the research questions: - What bearing do current public and health policies have on trust in the medical profession and in health systems? - And what mechanisms might enable policy responses to engender and enhance trust? In relation to these research questions, a number of related issues stand out in the literature. While trust in the medical profession and in health systems is falling, world over, people tend to be very trusting of and confident about the competence, benevolence, and integrity of ‘their’ doctor. This paradox of falling institutional trust and high interpersonal trust in the medical professionals, presents unique challenges to how health services are provided, organised and governed, globally. A further but related contradiction was evident in the recent policy response to COVID 19 where the populist movement, supported by some governments, voiced a decline in trust in experts in general, including medicine, yet in many parts of the world governments tied themselves to science or medical science as a basis at least for their initial policies. This complicated and contradictory interaction notwithstanding, it is widely believed that COVID 19 might shape trust in the medical profession and in the experts in the health system in unexpected and unprecedented ways.

Since the 1990s, the strive for raising the level of adult skills and educational qualifications have been pursued by a large part of advanced democracies. Gaining the right skills for the labour market is considered a precondition for successful and competitive economy and full employment. With the deepening of European integration, the EU action on lifelong learning has shifted from a programme-based to a more comprehensive approach better embedded in the overarching socio-economic approach of the European Union. In the wake of the new millennium, the Lisbon Council fully included education and training as one of the building pillars of the knowledge economy (Council 2000). In terms of governance, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) was set up to ensure that member states improve their education and training systems towards European standards, which were to contribute to achieving growth and full employment. Yet the OMC has delivered mixed results (De la Porte and Pochet, 2012), not only in the field of education and training (e.g. Veiga and Amaral 2006), but also in social inclusion and pension policies. As a renewed ‘governance architecture’ (Borras and Radaelli 2011), the Europe2020 strategy was meant to relaunch the OMC while setting the bar higher for education and training objectives. The heavy tool of the economic crisis on member states’ economy and the fear of not achieving the ambitious goals set in the strategy urged the EU to set up a more constraining and closer monitoring of national policy developments. Launched in 2011 the European Semester is a yearly exercise that includes the Commission, the Council, the European Parliament and the member states and aims to jointly tighten fiscal and economic matters within the Union. Recent analyses have underlined that the European Semester and its evolving nature (Crespy and Schmit 2017) are: 1) challenging the existing power distribution among EU actors by shifting the balance in favour of EU institutions (European Commission and European Council) (Verdun and Zeitlin 2018; Milana 2020); and 2) affecting the existing relation between social and economic policies. The way in which the European Semester affects both the EU governance architecture and the balance between its policy components is still under discussion in the literature (Milana 2020, 120). Moreover, it is still to determine whether the European Semester triggers Europeanisation through similar learning mechanisms already identified for the OMC (de la Porte and Pochet 2012) or whether new dynamics are at play. This is particularly relevant for those member states that have been under ‘special surveillance’ because of strong economic imbalances. While changes in relation to macro-economic and social policies have been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the role that the European Semester has for lifelong learning policies which are instrumental for reaching overarching socio-economic objectives. The complementary focus of this panel is on new funding opportunities for education and training with the aim of reducing (young) unemployment. The Youth Guarantee and the Upskilling Pathways are two examples of new programmes launched in the context of the Europe 2020 strategy. On top of being launched in more constraining governance settings, these funds have specific features as compared to ‘regular’ European Social Funds opportunities that might increase their potential for Europeanisation (Bussi and Graziano 2019). The question is then to investigate whether Europeanisation mechanisms already explored in the literature on European funds and Europeanisation (e.g. Vanhercke et al 2011) apply to these cases too. Bringing together studies on EU governance (De la Porte and Pochet 2012) and on the Europeanisation of education and training (Lawn and Grek 2012), the two leading research questions of the call for papers aim at: 1) developing further knowledge of the dynamics of lifelong learning policies at the European level, but also of their impact that the national level; 2) unveil what novelty the European Semester has brought in terms of new governance tools; finally, 3) investigate fundamental overlaps and connections that lifelong learning policies have with broader social, labour market and economic policies.

Food security and poverty alleviation become prime concern for world community in general and developing countries in particular. Despite various measures taken to alleviate the world hunger problem, food insecurity and under nutrition remain serious problems in developing countries. Achieving food security and eradicating poverty is extremely high priority in Public policy agenda of developing countries. Growing population created greater food demand but reduced crop productivity, higher food prices along with income inequalities, natural disasters and climate change adversely affected food access and availability for poor people. Solution of food insecurity and poverty can be traced in economy of developing countries. These countries are primarily agricultural economies with nearly 70% of the population engaged in agriculture. Therefore poverty alleviation and food security must be ensured through sustainable agricultural policies. Agriculture is the main driving force for developing economies, so there is a need to adopt innovative techniques to increase and diversify production of farmers and promote sustainable agricultural development. Agriculture sector needs governmental intervention through a coherent policy approach and an increase of public and private investment in sustainable agriculture. The aim of this panel is to discuss the sustainable agricultural policies and practices which ensure food security and eradicate poverty and also discuss and explore different alternative for devising a comprehensive and workable policy frame work able to address food security and poverty alleviation through sustainable agricultural practices in developing countries. Objectives of the Panel: 1. Discuses the governmental intervention and efforts through sustainable agricultural polices to ensure food security and poverty eradication. 2. Discuss and explore different alternative for devising a comprehensive and workable policy framework of sustainable agricultural policies to address food security and poverty alleviation. 3- Understanding the main challenge in adopting sustainable agricultural policies for food security and poverty alleviation. 4. Examine the commitment and strategies of developing countries for the attainment of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure food security and poverty alleviation through sustainable agricultural policies. 5. Understand a self-reliant and sustainable agriculture responsive to farmers’ need. 6. Suggest sustainable agricultural policies and practices to ensure food security and improve financial condition of farmers. Scientific relevancy in contemporary pandemic situation food security is prime concern for all countries. Increasing world population is threat to food security and leads to increases in poverty, hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. Sustainable agricultural policies and practices are solutions of these problems. UN Sustainable Development Goals and governmental and private sector intervention through sustainable agricultural policies are essential to ensure food security and poverty alleviation for human dignity.

While historically the domain of education policy, the role of international students in higher education systems around the world has expanded dramatically and now encompasses multiple policy domains (Sá & Sabzalieva, 2018). This effect is felt most strongly in jurisdictions that have historically attracted significant numbers of international students such as the United States, Australia, and the UK, the three countries with the highest net flow of internationally mobile students in the world (UIS Institute for Statistics, 2020). However, this is no longer the domain of the Anglophone ‘West’, with large international student flows of between 200,000 and 300,000 students a year also evident in Germany, Russia, France, Canada, Japan, and China. Globally, the number of internationally mobile students has grown by 25% since 2011 to over 5.5 million in 2018 (UIS Institute for Statistics, 2020). That international students are drawn from every single country in the world not only highlights the scale of this globalized phenomenon, but also the importance of understanding the effects this has on public policy. Responsibility for international students now tends to lie at the intersection of education policy and immigration policy (Riaño et al., 2018). This has been represented in the policy discourse in the notion that international students are ‘ideal’ immigrants (Scott et al., 2015), framing this highly skilled and socially acculturated group as key targets for future immigration (Trilokekar & El Masri, 2019). This discourse is now circulating globally and has been translated into a policy priority in multiple countries (Conrad & Meyer‐Ohle, 2019; Gribble & Blackmore, 2012; Morris-Lange & Brands, 2015). The education-immigration nexus puts particular emphasis on the notion of global competition, from which naturally follows an imperative to attract the best and brightest international students. In turn, this is shifting the roles and functions of higher education, whether by turning higher education providers into devolved immigration agents or in the additional responsibilities placed on higher education to organize provision in line with local labour market requirements. The various ways in which this is unfolding and how this is presented in policy terms form the focus of this panel. References Conrad, H., & Meyer‐Ohle, H. (2019). Transnationalization of a Recruitment Regime: Skilled Migration to Japan. International Migration, 57(3), 250–265. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12529 Gribble, C., & Blackmore, J. (2012). Re-positioning Australia’s international education in global knowledge economies: Implications of shifts in skilled migration policies for universities. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 34(4), 341–354. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2012.689181 Morris-Lange, S., & Brands, F. (2015). Train and Retain. Career Support for International Students in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. The Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration. https://www.svr-migration.de/en/publications/train-and-retain/ Riaño, Y., Mol, C. V., & Raghuram, P. (2018). New directions in studying policies of international student mobility and migration. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 16(3), 283–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2018.1478721 Sá, C. M., & Sabzalieva, E. (2018). The politics of the great brain race: Public policy and international student recruitment in Australia, Canada, England and the USA. Higher Education, 75(2), 231–253. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0133-1 Scott, C., Safdar, S., Desai Trilokekar, R., & El Masri, A. (2015). International Students as ‘Ideal Immigrants’ in Canada: A disconnect between policy makers’ assumptions and the lived experiences of international students. Comparative and International Education/Éducation Comparée et Internationale, 43(3), 5. Trilokekar, R. D., & El Masri, A. (2019). “International Students Are … Golden”: Canada’s Changing Policy Contexts, Approaches, and National Peculiarities in Attracting International Students as Future Immigrants. In M.-J. Kwak & A. H. Kim (Eds.), Outward and upward mobilities: International students in Canada, their families, and structuring institutions (pp. 25–55). University of Toronto Press. UIS Institute for Statistics. (2020). National Monitoring: Inbound internationally mobile students by continent of origin. http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx?queryid=3804 UIS Institute for Statistics. (2020). National Monitoring: Net flow of internationally mobile students. http://data.uis.unesco.org/index.aspx?queryid=3808

State-owned enterprises (SOE), government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCC) [or generally known as public enterprises] are created by governments as instruments to support and help attain national development goals, deliver public goods and services, and/or address market failures arising from lack of private investment or effective market competition in critical industries of the economy. In the Philippines, from 14 SOEs in the 1930s, the number dramatically increased to more than 300 in the 1980s. Experience indicates that (SOEs) have become “major arenas for the consolidation of economic and political power” (Dytianquin, 1985) and used as “laundry services and tools to transfer public resources to the hands of cronies and the private few” (Briones, 1985). Privatization, or the “transfer of ownership, management, responsibility, functions, and resources for supplying goods and services from public organizations to private hands” (Villamejor-Mendoza, 2003), became a defining feature of public sector reforms. However, the presence of a conflicted/captured regulator and vested interests in many SOEs has made liberalization, deregulation, and privatization a difficult and daunting task. This has also preserved the status quo (Basilio, 2018). While public enterprise reforms in the last decade have produced some tangible results – i.e., a substantial reduction in the number of SOEs to around 120, ‘fit and proper’ rule requirements in the appointment of directors to the SOE boards, adoption of ‘balanced-scorecards’ to measure performance, and the creation of the Governance Commission for GOCCs (GCG) that oversees public enterprise activities among others – improving regulatory quality among public enterprises has been slow because they “face unique governance challenges that make reform more difficult compared to the private sector” (Villamejor-Mendoza, 2007).

Since the 1990s, international actors have intensively promoted the establishment of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) to accompany electricity sector reforms in developing countries. Accordingly, IRAs were meant to be the central actors in the implementation of new market-based electricity policies and operate at arm’s length from governmental actors. 30 years after the start of this process, we know that, whereas IRAs have indeed been subject to a wide diffusion in the developing countries, they have often not emerged as the independent and central regulatory authorities in electricity sector according to the governance model of IRA based regulation. When created, IRAs face different types of challenges, such as a lack of capacity, limited delegated powers and important political pressures (Rosenzweig et al. 2004, Pollitt and Stern 2011, Dubash and Morgan 2012). Policymakers have even refrained from setting up IRAs altogether in many countries. Hence, if electricity regulation is often not dominated by IRAs, how is it governed? What is the actual role of IRAs? Who are the other actors taking part in regulation? Those actors that pre-existed sectoral reforms are expected to continue playing a major role. Governments, ministries and former incumbent companies are probably still dominating the sector in many cases. But sectoral reforms and recent developments have also paved the way for the emergence of new actors. New economic players have entered the sector on those segments subject to competition. Companies operating in electricity generation or retail may have gained an important influence in sectoral regulation. More recently, the shift towards renewable energies also bears the potential to transform electricity governance, perhaps with the involvement of ministries in charge of environmental issues, or newly created agencies in charge of fostering renewable energies. Actors’ constellations in electricity governance is subject to empirical variation across countries. Actors specialized in renewable energies may play a major role in some countries and not in others. IRAs may be relatively powerful in some countries but inexistent in others. These patterns are also likely to evolve over time, as sectoral policies are sometimes subject to substantive modifications. How can we explain these outcomes? How can we make sense of the empirical variation that characterizes electricity governance in the Global South? Different types of explanations can be explored, for example the types of developmental policies preferred, political regimes, the ideology of governments in charge of adopting reforms, the influence of the sectoral bureaucracy, or links to international funding organizations. References Dubash NK, Morgan B (2012) Understanding the Rise of the Regulatory State of the South, Regulation & Governance 6 (3): 261‑81. Rosenzweig MB, Voll SP, Pabon-Agudelo C (2004) Power Sector Reform: Experiences from the Road, The Electricity Journal 17 (9): 16‑28. Pollitt M, Stern J (2011) Human Resource Constraints for Electricity Regulation in Developing Countries: Developments since 2001, Utilities Policy 19 (2): 53‑60.

Historically, there has been an inseparable link between producing knowledge about public policy and producing knowledge about how to teach it. Nevertheless, those delivering policy teaching and training have continually been confronted with the challenges of reconciling ambiguities inherent to the field since its emergence. In particular, debates continue to unfold about how best to articulate teaching approaches depending on, for example, whether to place an emphasis on either academic or applied research, on approaching public policy as a specific field of knowledge or through the lens of interdisciplinary perspectives, on adopting sectoral versus theoretical perspectives, or on approaching policy as a subfield of economics or as an element of politics and government studies. Questions also persist concerning the ability of public policy teaching and training to meet the ambitions of current public sector agendas, as well as the problem-solving limits of public policy knowledge more generally. Moreover, paradoxically, even while the field of public policy becomes increasingly internationalised, and even as the number of international students in postgraduate programs continues to grow, many public policy-related teaching practices remain relatively similar across locales. Indeed, for example, no matter the language they are written in, policy textbooks are highly homogenous in terms of the examples, theories, and authors they refer to. The central question therefore remains: How can we best teach and learn public policy in an internationalized academic context? Addressing these questions is not only crucial to further institutionalizing and internationalizing Public Policy as a field of teaching and learning, but also addresses more fundamental issues concerning about the nature of the knowledge relevant to policy research and practice, about the complex relationship between knowledge for and knowledge of policy, and about the interconnections between applied and theoretical knowledge.

Active learning techniques in teaching political sciences are popular in academic courses and training sessions. These techniques come in various forms such as role playing, simulations, and stochastic games. Several institutions boast specialized centres devoted to creating educational games in this field (e.g. TUDelft Gamelab or PAXsims at McGill, and the recently created Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security). There are also websites and international networks like Active Learning in Political Science or Eurosis. This trend has obviously affected also public policy studies. A review by Igor S. Mayer (The Gaming of Policy and the Politics of Gaming: A Review, Simulation & Gaming 2009, 40(6) 825–862) has emphasized how “Gaming makes it possible to address the technical-physical-economic complexity aspect—that is, the substantive complexity of the problem that can be modeled either through formal or more conceptual methods—as well as the multi-actor aspect of policy problems”. The COVID 19 pandemic, and the shift to online teaching that we are all experiencing, raises questions about the rapid and effective development of new digital games that can assist the instructors to overcome the obstacles that the restrictions to on-campus teaching pose to active learning. The general objective of this panel is to discuss new projects, proposals, and experiences of educational digital games in the field of public policy. The conveners are involved in an Erasmus+ strategic partnership – P-CUBE Playing Public Policy – that aims to teach the theory and practice of public policy making in different policy fields (urban innovation, social inclusion, science and evidence-informed policies, and European Union policies) through the creation of a digital game, a simplified version of which, developed in paper and cardboard, has been already tested in some university courses. The basic assumption is that that policy making processes have structural identifiable properties across different policy fields, but the set of actors varies from one policy to the other. Therefore, the goals of the game are twofold: · to help learning how decisions on the public sphere are taken and which kind of decisional strategies the policy entrepreneurs can employ, · to help familiarize the players/students/trainees with the specificities of the policy fields in which they are involved. The first goal of the panel is to present to scholars of the policy process and policy sciences the beta version of the game. The aim is to collect criticisms, suggestions, proposals for extensions, and learn about the limitations and opportunities of our product. The panel, however, also represents an opportunity to present other planned, ongoing, or recently piloted educational games in public policy studies not only related to agenda setting or policy decision-making, but also to policy implementation or policy evaluation.

This panel seeks to identify what are the main challenges that societies are facing in security terms and how institutions, at their different levels of action, are implementing new responses adapted to this new landscape. Bearing in mind that any policy, and specially security-oriented ones, are structured in strategic, operational and tactical aspects, this panel provides a discussion framework for the analysis of new trends in informal violence, such as global jihadist terrorism or white supremacism, international organized crime and its impact at the national and local levels, with specific attention to international human beings trafficking -sexual and labour exploitation purposes-, drugs trafficking and local drugs dealing, and weapons trafficking as violence trigger, and last, but not least, new-related criminal incidents taking place in the cyberspace, which may rank from fraud and minor robberies to the disruption of basic services by attacking critical infrastructures and that present a new range of problems, going for identification of the authors, location or prosecution of crimes. Emerging threats as the ones related with new patterns of terrorism, the internationalization of organized crime and the diversification of illicit traffics and related activities such as money laundering and fraud, or new cybercrimes attacking personal information and systems, are incrementing the number of tasks that security forces are assuming globally. However, special attention is paid to how policing strategies have changed, in order to provide prevention and response capabilities to these new trends, securing citizens rights. New units have been created in many law enforcement agencies, with new core training capabilities, such as in tactical care during multiple assault incidents, and new research and fighting tools against narcotraffic in their logistic and hierarchical structures, with an impact even in terms of international cooperation, as for instance is the case of the European Union. How law enforcement and police work has changed in the last two decades at the strategic, operational and tactical levels, to the aforementioned changes and other ones, as new emerging challenges and security threats? With this research question in mind, the main hypothesis for this panel are: - The new security threats are modifying traditional police work, looking for new models of response. - Tactics, techniques and procedures are changing too, to adjust the new needs to the existing protocols to tackle these new criminal phenomena. - International cooperation is gaining momentum, in terms of information-sharing, know-how sharing and common protocols in the persecution and prosecution of the new forms of crime. - New aspects, not previously considered part of the classical police work, are introduced, such as civil protection, tactical or combat casualty care, drills or multiagency cooperation and public-private partnership to respond to new security threats. The final goal, thus, is to analyze how the changes in the security ecosystem have impacted into the development of public security policies in the ground, regarding the law enforcement force and its relation with criminal patterns and communities.

This panel proposal is based on the premise that while refugee policy is an area of avid activity, it has largely been overlooked by scholarship. Over the past decades, refugee studies as a field has not developed a systematic way of engaging with the study of refugee policy. Further, while the field of policy science has tools and frameworks to inform this line of inquiry, its engagement with refugee studies has so far been minimal.A review of the literature reveals that the scholarly work on forced migration in the past decade can be categorized into two broad categories. The first category includes works that are non-policy focused. They generally take a bottom up perspective by examining issues such as refugee livelihoods, coping mechanisms, and others (ex. Baines and Gauvin, 2014; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2011; Whyte et al, 2012; Ruiz et al, 2015; Rasmussen and Annan, 2009). On the other hand, the second category includes works that are policy centric. They take a top down approach by addressing state policy issues. Most of the work on forced migration, in fact, falls within the scope of the first category, where less attention has been given to the state policy perspective (El-Taliawi, 2018).Therefore, this panel aims to bridge the gap between the two fields by proposing a research agenda that engages with refugee policy and for it to be examined using relevant policy theory tools and frameworks. This is especially relevant, because while the field of refugee studies has traditionally drawn upon various disciplines, it has rarely made use of policy science frameworks and tools to inform its analysis. The use of such analytical tools can help build a more nuanced understanding of refugee and asylum policymaking.This panel is organized by the Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (LERRN), Carleton University. References:Baines, E., & Gauvin, L. R. (2014). Motherhood and social repair after war and displacement in Northern Uganda. Journal of Refugee Studies, feu001.El-Taliawi, Ola G. (2018). Governance of Mass Displacement in the Middle East: Lebanon and Jordan in Comparative Perspective. National University of Singapore. Doctoral Dissertation. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2011). The pragmatics of performance: Putting ‘faith’ in aid in the Sahrawi refugee camps. Journal of refugee studies, 24(3), 533-547.Whyte, S. R., Babiiha, S. M., Mukyala, R., & Meinert, L. (2012). Remaining internally displaced: Missing links to security in Northern Uganda. Journal of Refugee Studies, fes040.Ruiz, I., Siegel, M., & Vargas-Silva, C. (2015a). Forced Up or Down? The Impact of Forced Migration on Social Status. Journal of Refugee Studies, feu035. Rasmussen, A., & Annan, J. (2009). Predicting stress related to basic needs and safety in Darfur refugee camps: A structural and social ecological analysis. Journal of refugee studies, fep044.

Objectives: The panel seeks to foster a conversation about the role and contribution of the education sector as an instrument of public policy. This will be achieved through a holistic approach to the theme of education policy that recognizes that centrality of education policy and the education sector as a key area of public policy, which is most OECD countries the second budgetary expenditure after healthcare. Context: Education has increasingly been recognized as one of the main enablers of societal and economic transformation and a key lever if developing and developed countries are to face down the 21st C. challenges of the human and social development. Additionally, education policy is recognized as a key lever to advance other policy issues and priorities such as the consequences of inequality, sustainable development, green growth and climate change, demographic change and the knowledge economy, among other challenges. Public education, from primary to tertiary and beyond increases wealth and well-being. Educational attainment has direct correlation with increased income, better health, increased social capital, and individual happiness. In most countries public education is the second most important budgetary expenditure after healthcare. Further, the education sector also exhibits complex governance arrangements involving multiple governmental and non-governmental actors, including the private sector. As governments and other sectors transition toward new tools and approaches to the delivery of services in an effort to make citizens’ lives easier. This may include recourse to new technologies and new service delivery design. At the same time the education sector has also been changing to adapt to new citizen expectations, which is challenging the traditional institution-centred educational deliver model. Thus, just like other sectors of public policy, education is not immunized the questions around relevance and appropriateness. Scientific relevance: Despite the salience of education as an area of public policy and administration, it is dwarfed by research in other sectors of social policy, such as health care (returns for articles on health in Public Administration Review were twice those recorded for education). This panel seeks to prompt a scholarly discussion about the education policy as a internal part of the State public policy space.

GENERAL OBJECTIVES The main objective is to be migrant-centric and focused on Africa and Africans in the process and development of migration policies and frameworks. The panel aims to explore the migration policy analysis and development process through coalition building, consensus rallying, enquiry and collaboration, to make visible the vibrant state of migration public policy making process. RESEARCH QUESTIONS · Why is the application of migration management frameworks asymmetrical vis-a-vis the experiences of African migrants? · How can migration management policies and frameworks be transformed to become more migrant-centric and humanistic in its development and implementation process? SCIENTIFIC RELEVANCE In this Contemporary era of unparalleled and unprecedented scale of economic globalization, this panel will contribute to an informed public debate around issues of African Migration Policy and the resultant effects on development policy, welfare policy and economic policy. It will create a deep voice to open new and fresh scholarly frontiers on the future of migration management in Africa. It will also establish a much-needed interdisciplinary dialogue between migration studies, public policy, sociology and anthropology. We foresee that this will foster interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and academic exchange beyond conventional formats and provide new theoretical avenues for tackling similar other key global issues.

Public policy does not exist in a vacuum; it is affected and affects public administration's service delivery. It is crucial to study the relationship between policy on the practice and operation of the public sector organizations. The objective of this panel is to understand the role of leadership in improving or hindering the delivery, management, and implementation of different government policies that public organizations and nonprofits aim to achieve. Recently, the world has been changing with an increase in partisanship and the appointment of heads of agencies to pursue a specific political agenda. It is essential to understand how organizational leaders affect the goals, culture, performance, wellbeing, and satisfaction of street-level bureaucrats and their organizations. What are the effects do new leaders have on the original organizational goals? Do public organizations resist political pressure in the implementation process? Does the incongruence of new leaders' goals decrease satisfaction, moral, or commitment? Can street-level bureaucrats maintain neutral in their implementation of policies even if they disagree with the policy decision? On the other hand, the policy environment is not safe from externalities. Events such as COVID do affect policy implementation and service delivery. It is essential to explore the implication of external shocks on public organizations and leader behavior. What do leaders do when they face budget cuts, decreased resources? How do they ensure the ethical and legal delivery of their organizational service? Does have a transactional or authoritative leadership style appropriate in times of negative externalities? Leaders and public organizations are essential to the delivery of public policy. Thus, it is vital to understand the implication of change in the policy environment on leaders and their respective organizations.

Since the decade of the 2000s, the analysis of public policy has significantly progressed in Africa (Darbon, 2003; Enguéléguélé, 2008). The fruitful work that will be carried out at the end of the period of democratic transition will allow researchers from both inside and outside the continent to construct categories by typifying the State and sometimes singling it out as being elsewhere (Sindjoun , 2000). The views of these researches will mainly be focused not only on the political system, but also on government work starting from the observation model from the top, that is an analysis targeting public authorities. This way of reading public action is more and more reductive when we follow the paradigmatic evolutions in the analysis of public policies which is constantly tackled during scientific gatherings on public action and public policies in Africa. The enthusiasm that this sub-disciplinary field of political science has known since the 1990s (Provini and Darbon, 2018) will also witness plural investments from different sectors (health, education, environment, agriculture, security, investments, etc.). These sectors will be explored from a constructivist perspective with the specific aim of consolidating the knowledge acquired around a community of researchers (Machikou, 2014). The gazed focus on the interest of public policies taking place on the African continent will therefore arise in this panel by questioning the contribution of the African field to the theorization of new paradigms in the fields of public policies. Conversely, this questioning can be understood by the blind spots within the production of knowledge and know-how in public policies. The objective of this panel is to take a critical look at what is being done in terms of work in the field of public policy in Africa. It is a sort of introspection over two decades of work on public policy. Reflections will be centered around a critical analysis of the contribution to the universal of knowledge built on African lands, this from four stand points: - From socio historical standpoint ; - From the major sectors that are of interest to work on public policies; - From the various local, national and international scales; - Based on the boundaries between other social science disciplines and public policies. The proposals could fall within the different sectors, we emphasize that the major interest of the questioning (s) of each contribution will have to link the contribution of the singularity of the African field in terms of the way public policies are made and the strong contribution that they would make overall to the analysis of public policies elsewhere.