LIST OF PANELS

Innovations in public policy are essential for addressing grand challenges like biodiversity loss and climate change. Despite their importance, existing policies often struggle with credibility, effectiveness, and legitimacy. While much attention has been given to innovation in policy design, less focus has been placed on innovations in the policy process itself. These innovations involve novel ways of organizing or structuring the processes of agenda setting, policy formulation, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation to enhance policy outcomes.

Examples of policy process innovations include technology foresight committees, crowdsourcing initiatives, behavioural insights teams, policy innovation labs, algorithmic governance, participatory decision-making, digital governance, co-implementation strategies, randomised control trials, and participatory evaluations. Although these innovations have gained prominence, questions remain about why they are adopted in certain policy domains and jurisdictions, how they spread, and their impact on policy outputs and outcomes.

This panel aims to address these gaps by:

- examining the origins and features of policy process innovations
- understanding how they diffuse across different jurisdictions and policy areas
- assessing their impact on policy outputs and outcomes, particularly credibility, effectiveness, and legitimacy
- bridging research on policy innovation with that on related concepts such as democratic innovation, governance innovation, institutional innovation, and public sector innovation

The research questions include:

- what drives the adoption of policy process innovation?
- to what extent do mainstream theories of the policy process explain process innovation?
- how do the dynamics of policy process innovation compare with policy design innovation?
- how do policy process innovations influence policy outputs and outcomes?
- in what ways do they affect the credibility or legitimacy of the policy (process)?

By exploring these, the panel seeks to advance scholarship on policy innovation, policy studies, and governance, contributing to a deeper understanding of how innovative policy processes can effectively address complex societal challenges.

We invite students, early-career researchers, and experienced scholars to submit manuscripts on the theme of innovating the policy process, engaging with research questions such as those posed above. We are especially interested in submissions that challenge conventional thinking, combine diverse perspectives, or investigate understudied settings in policy sciences/studies. We welcome conceptual as well as empirical work, so long as it contributes to the topic of policy process innovation.