LIST OF PANELS

In recent years, many complex problems have emerged or become more acute, and they pose new and unprecedented challenges to public policies. The problems that have been troubling public policies for several decades (such as climate change, unequal distribution of development or social exclusion) have been supplemented by others, most notably the pandemic, increased migration pressure related to the ongoing armed conflicts or to environmental issues, the energy crisis in Europe and others.

Many of these problems fall under the definition of wicked problems (Rittel and M. M. Webber 1973; Head, 2019; Peters, 2017; Danken et al., 2016; Turnbull and Hoppe, 2019). For example, Covid-19 crisis, which started as a health crisis, has quickly turned into a multitude of other field crises, such as an economic crisis, a governance issue (e.g. the trust in government), a social relationship crisis, a mental health crisis, an organizational crisis (e.g. in the public structures due the smart working modality), and an epistemic knowledge crisis (Cairney and Wellstead 2020; Weible et al. 2020; Selg, Klasche, and Nõgisto, 2021).

Wicked problems, being highly complexed and multi-causal, have many interdependencies, and lead to unforeseen consequences. Usually, they cannot be conveniently handled by one policy and they go beyond the traditional ways public organizations are managed, also in the case of hybrid modalities. What is crucial from the evaluation and policy analysis standpoint, wicked policy problems require holistic rather than linear thinking, i.e. the identification of interconnections between the full range of causal factors and policy objectives is needed.

Our hypothesis is that the perspectives of multilevel and collaborative governance, multiple institutions, and stakeholder involvement in tackling wicked issues challenge also the policy evaluation domain, both in terms of research theories and methodologies.

Our panel aims to stimulate debate around what is needed to be changed or re-think in the policy evaluation field for the successful tackling of wicked problems and to provide fruitful, robust, relevant and timely delivered to policy-makers knowledge. Such a debate is a necessary precursor to re-assess current theories, systems, frameworks, and practice of analysis in public policies to ensure they are capable of responding to the complex issues they face nowadays.

Considering the context of crisis in many countries (wars, internal and external migrations, energy and environmental issues), the questions that we want to develop for discussion are:

- Do evaluation and policy analysis need to be re-assessed in order to address wicked problems more effectively?

- What newly emerged problems and challenges should be the particular subject of evaluation and analysis?

- How to assess the success of policies that want to deal with these complex issues and how to evaluate experiences such as collaborative governance, innovative ecosystems, etc.?

- What research methods and techniques should be used in the analysis and development of solutions to wicked problems?

We invite paper-givers to propose both theoretical and empirical contributions regarding the following themes:

- the role of evaluation and policy analysis in solving newly emerged challenges

- the new theories, methods, research approach, tools of evaluation and policy analysis for resolving wicked problems

- the exchange of concepts and methods between policy evaluations and policy analysis in studying cross-sector or/and supranational policies

- effective inclusion of multi-actors in evaluations and policy analysis, with particular interest in governance structures and innovation ecosystems.

Accepted papers are expected to share new knowledge on policy evaluation, including analytical frameworks, comparative analyses and in-depth case studies. The panel will take place from the 27th to the 29th of June 2023 on-site in Toronto, though allowing remote presentations. The deadline for papers submission is the 31st of January 2023, and accepted papers will be notified by the 15th of February 2023.