LIST OF PANELS

The COVID-19 pandemic was a mega-crisis that not only presented governments worldwide with a major public health challenge, but also surfaced system failures, uneven collaboration within and across governments, and alternative ways to deliver services. Governments had to adapt quickly, release vast amounts of spending to deal with pressing public health and economic needs, work in new ways (often digitally), and wind-up programs. Governments are re-positioning public finances to deal with substantial fiscal and debt loads, and determining how to pivot from pandemic priorities towards future policies and service-delivery models in sector after sector. This raises important questions about how expenditure management systems of Canadian governments and other jurisdictions are evolving to meet these challenges, and the extent to which spending reviews have been launched, and if so, are they focused on cutting programs, reallocating to new ways of delivering policies, or collaborating across boundaries to address emerging challenges. 

This panel brings papers from different country contexts to determine how they are designing their expenditure reduction or budget exercises and the lessons each have learned post-COVID. The panel will explore these experiences through short papers. After panelists have provided their research and insights, a roundtable discussion with panelists and attendees will explore experiences with plans for expenditure reduction at either the national or sub-national level. It is anticipated that a collection of papers will be brought together to form a special edition in Public Management Review (PMR) or other international journal.

We are looking for papers that address some or all of the following elements:

· The political, economic or other factors driving discussions of spending, budgeting or expenditure reduction in a particular country, countries, or region;

· Institutional factors and conditions driving governance arrangements of spending, budgeting or expenditure reduction exercises;

· Choices of instruments being created that account for type of system of government, extent of cooperation or collaboration with other governmental and non-governmental jurisdictions and institutions, and alignment with existing or previous exercises;

· Extent to which internal or external actors are driving design and/or implementation, and any arrangements being undertaken to engage various actor communities;

· Monitoring and evaluation arrangements being planned or undertaken to ensure such exercises are on track.

Note: the panel chairs are flexible about leading ‘in-person’ or hybrid sessions.