LIST OF WORKSHOPS

This workshop seeks to create a multidisciplinary and internationally connected space for rethinking policymaking processes through decolonial, feminist, postcolonial, and critical political economy perspectives rooted in the experiences and epistemologies of the Global South. It aims to foster dialogue across diverse theoretical traditions and empirical contexts while challenging the universalization of Eurocentric frameworks in public policy analysis.

The workshop is grounded in the understanding that contemporary governance systems in many postcolonial societies continue to reflect institutional continuities inherited from colonial administrations, while simultaneously being reshaped by neoliberal reforms, globalization, extractivism, financial dependency, digital transformation, and transnational governance arrangements. These processes produce hybrid and contested policymaking environments in which formal institutions coexist with informal practices, traditional authorities, social movements, community-based knowledge systems, and multiple forms of resistance.

At the same time, feminist and decolonial scholarship has increasingly demonstrated how policymaking is also structured by patriarchal rationalities, racialized exclusions, epistemic hierarchies, and unequal distributions of legitimacy and authority. Public policies are therefore understood not as neutral or merely technical instruments, but as relational, affective, and political processes through which knowledge, power, values, and social hierarchies are constantly negotiated and reproduced.

The workshop is guided by the following central research question:

How can decolonial, feminist, postcolonial, and critical political economy approaches help us rethink policymaking processes in the Global South, particularly in contexts marked by historical inequalities, epistemic hierarchies, patriarchal governance structures, and contested forms of legitimacy?

More specifically, the workshop seeks to explore:

• How colonial and patriarchal rationalities continue to shape governance systems, institutional arrangements, and policy imaginaries;
• How epistemic hierarchies define what counts as legitimate policy knowledge, evidence, and expertise;
• How inequalities are reproduced through political economy structures, state practices, and policy regimes;
• How actors across multiple scales negotiate, resist, and transform dominant governance arrangements;
• How alternative forms of policymaking grounded in care, reciprocity, multiactoriality, and epistemic plurality may contribute to more just and democratic futures.

The scientific relevance of the workshop lies in its ambition to contribute to the ongoing epistemic transformation of policy studies. Although policy process research has developed influential frameworks such as multiple streams, punctuated equilibrium, advocacy coalitions, and governance network analysis, these approaches frequently assume institutional conditions characteristic of the Global North. In contrast, policymaking in postcolonial societies often unfolds within unstable, unequal, and historically layered contexts marked by colonial continuities, democratic fragilities, and asymmetrical relations of power.

This context demands theoretical and methodological innovation. Existing frameworks must be interrogated, adapted, and expanded to account for the hybridity, fluidity, and multidimensionality of governance in the Global South. By centering experiences, theories, and methodological innovations emerging from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other postcolonial contexts, the workshop contributes to broader debates on epistemic justice, feminist governance, sustainability transitions, democratic transformation, and decolonial public policy analysis.

Rather than treating decolonial and feminist perspectives as complementary additions to mainstream policy theories, the workshop positions them as foundational lenses capable of rethinking the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions of policy scholarship itself.

GUIDING AXES

The workshop will be organized around six interconnected thematic sessions:

1. Political Economy of Inequality and Capture

This session examines how coloniality, capitalism, neoliberal restructuring, and elite capture shape policymaking processes and reproduce structural inequalities across postcolonial societies. Contributions may explore state-market relations, extractivism, austerity, donor dependency, financialization, corruption, or the role of transnational actors in governance.

2. Knowledge Production through Feminist Policymaking

This axis focuses on the politics of expertise, evidence, and epistemic authority in policy processes. It explores how feminist and decolonial approaches challenge dominant forms of knowledge production while foregrounding situated knowledge, care, embodiment, relationality, and alternative methodological practices.

3. Impacts of Patriarchal Rationality on Citizens

This session investigates how patriarchal and colonial rationalities shape policy designs, institutional practices, and everyday experiences of citizenship. Contributions may address gendered governance, racialized exclusions, social reproduction, affective dimensions of policy, violence, moral regulation, and unequal distributions of rights and recognition.

4. State Reconfiguration across Multiple Borders

This axis explores how states are being transformed through globalization, migration, regional integration, geopolitical realignments, digital governance, and transnational policy flows. Particular attention will be given to hybrid institutional arrangements and the coexistence of local, Indigenous, national, and global governance rationalities.

5. Policy Crisis in Postcolonial Regimes

This session examines institutional crises, democratic erosion, authoritarian resurgence, legitimacy disputes, and governance instability in postcolonial contexts. Contributions may analyze how crises expose the contradictions and fragilities of inherited institutional structures while opening spaces for resistance, reform, or reactionary politics.

6. Transitions and Rationality in Sustainable Futures

This final axis focuses on competing imaginaries of development, sustainability, and social transformation. It invites reflections on ecological transitions, solidarity economies, cooperative futures, climate governance, Indigenous alternatives, and pluriversal approaches to policymaking beyond dominant technocratic paradigms.

The workshop aims to create an intellectually collaborative and dialogical space for advancing critical policy analysis from decolonial and feminist perspectives rooted in the Global South. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary traditions, geographical contexts, and methodological approaches, the workshop seeks to deepen theoretical and empirical understandings of how governance, policymaking, and knowledge production are shaped by intersecting systems of coloniality, patriarchy, capitalism, and racialized inequality.

Through comparative and interdisciplinary exchanges, participants will be encouraged to develop new conceptual vocabularies, methodological innovations, and analytical strategies capable of addressing the complexities of policymaking in postcolonial societies. The workshop also seeks to strengthen connections between theoretical critique and empirical analysis, fostering reflections grounded in concrete policy experiences, institutional transformations, and practices of resistance.

By integrating the chairs, intellectual agendas, and scholarly communities of the previously independent workshops, the initiative also aims to consolidate a broader international network of researchers committed to epistemic plurality, collaborative knowledge production, and the decolonization of public policy scholarship.

More broadly, the workshop seeks to contribute to the consolidation of critical policy analysis as a field attentive not only to governance effectiveness and institutional rationality, but also to care, emotion, legitimacy, inequality, and the unequal conditions under which knowledge claims are produced, validated, and sustained.

Selected contributions may support future collaborative publications, comparative research initiatives, and the continuation of broader dialogues on decolonial feminist critical policy analysis in and from the Global South.

This workshop brings together three previously independent proposals into a shared critical dialogue on policymaking, governance, and knowledge production in the Global South. By integrating decolonial, feminist, postcolonial, and political economy perspectives, the workshop seeks to rethink how public policies are conceptualized, legitimized, enacted, and contested across historically unequal and epistemically disputed contexts.

The workshop departs from the recognition that policymaking processes continue to be profoundly shaped by colonial legacies, patriarchal rationalities, racialized hierarchies, capitalist dependencies, and asymmetrical regimes of expertise. While mainstream policy process theories have generated influential analytical frameworks, they frequently remain grounded in assumptions derived from institutional experiences of the Global North, often overlooking the hybridity, instability, and multiscalar dynamics that characterize governance in postcolonial societies.

Drawing inspiration from authors such as María Lugones, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Aníbal Quijano, Ochy Curiel, Catherine Walsh, Walter Mignolo, Rita Laura Segato, Lélia Gonzalez, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, the workshop seeks to foster a plural and interdisciplinary conversation capable of advancing critical approaches to public policy analysis. It approaches policymaking not merely as a technical or administrative activity, but as a contested arena in which power, knowledge, emotion, discourse, and material inequalities intersect.

The workshop also preserves the collaborative spirit and intellectual diversity of the original proposals by bringing together all chairs from the previously independent workshops into a shared collective coordination. This integrated format seeks not only to merge thematic agendas, but also to foster sustained dialogue across different critical traditions, regional experiences, and methodological approaches within decolonial, feminist, and postcolonial policy studies.

The submitted papers will be reorganized into six interconnected thematic sessions that collectively explore inequalities, governance transformations, epistemic disputes, and alternative futures in public policy research and practice.

Chaired by:

Rosana Boullosa

Aritra Chakrabarty

Deborah David

Ola El-Taliawi

Mireille Manga

Preeti Raghunath

Emily St Denny