To show all of you what RC32 stands for, here is former chairman Hal Colebatch’s report on RC32 activities for the past six years – an impressive account of scholarly activities and networking, worthy to be maintained and expanded upon in the next years!!////
Report on the activities of RC32 2006-2012////
By former Chair Hal Colebatch
(a) 2006-2009
A strong and representative board was elected at the Fukuoka Congress, with an executive on which Europe (Kettunen), Asia (Kim), the Americas (Pal) and Oceania (Colebatch) were represented. The membership in this period was around 150; it was decided not to have a membership fee, and all activities had to cover their own costs.
We recognised that travel costs are a major constraint on participation in RC activities, and pursued a strategy of focusing on regional activities, making links with cognate organizations and their activities, and establishing a web site (with assistance from IPSA).
In 2007, we organized a practitioner/academic workshop in Utrecht on policy work. This was originally planned to be a component of the Interpretive Policy Analysis in Amsterdam, but outgrew the space available at the conference, and the very fruitful discussions gave rise to a book Working for Policy (see below).
We also established a link with the Public Policy Network which links policy-oriented academics in Australia and New Zealand It became a ‘regional chapter’ of RC32, and RC32 members participated in its conferences in Adelaide (2007), Caloundra (2008) and Canberra (2009).
In 2008, we held a conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on ‘Constructing policy work in a changing governmental environment’. About fifty participants heard nearly thirty papers presented, and the discussants for the sessions included Jorge Heine, IPSA Vice-President, and Yvonne Galligan, editor of the International Political Science Review. The conference attracted a strong attendance from Croatia and the region, reflecting the challenges to the mode of governing that the region has experienced in the last couple of decades: the end of communism, the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the growing influence of the European Union.
We also worked hard at building linkage within IPSA. We responded to the invitation to participate in the Montreal conference, where the discussions in which we participated led directly to sessions at the Santiago Congress and to publications now in train. We tried without success to organize joint sessions with other RCs, but were able to organize four policy-related Congress sessions in addition to the four RC32 sessions, and our proposal for a session on governance was taken over as a Main Theme session.
(b) 2009-2012
The executive and most of the board elected in 2006 was re-elected at the Santiago congress, and the same strategy was pursued. (figs on membership if we can get them)
Organising even small regional conferences continued to prove difficult. Two proposals for 2010 came to naught, one (in the UK) when funding could not be secured, and one in North America when the funding that was available was so circumscribed with conditions that it was not possible to fund the conference. But there was a very successful conference in Dubrovnik in 2011, jointly sponsored by RC32 and RC5, the Croatian Political Science Association, the Croatian Public Administration Association, the Russian Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Public Policy and Governance, and the University of Zagreb.
In addition, collaboration with the Public Policy Network in Australia in New Zealand continued, and conferences were held in Canberra (2010), Auckland (2011) and Melbourne (2012). RC32 Board Members also organized panels at the Interpretive Policy Analysis conferences in Grenoble (2010), Swansea (2011) and Tilburg (2012), and the ECPR Joint Sessions in Reyjkavik (2011), with the collaboration at IPA Tilburg being a very explicit attempt, on both sides, to strengthen the links between the political science community and policy analysis scholars.
This collaboration continued at the Madrid World Congress, where RC32 organised 22 panels, 10 of them in collaboration with other research committees: RC05 (Local Government), RC10 (Electronic Democracy), RC25 (Health Policy), RC30 (Comparative Public Administration) and RC32 (Political Philosophy).
The discussions at the workshop on policy work in 2007 gave rise to a book Working for Policy, edited by H.K. Colebatch, Rob Hoppe and Mirko Noodegraaf and published Amsterdam University Press in 2011. The proceedings of the 2011 Dubrovnik conference were public in Politika Misao, the Croatian Journal of Political Science.
The web site, which had been established in St Petersburg, was hacked by an American commercial agency, and was shifted to the IPSA web site.
The collaboration with other research committees was facilitated by some action from IPSA – the financial assistance for the 2011 Dubrovnik conference, and the rule changes which enable other RCs to agree to joint sponsorship of sessions without feeling that this was at the expense of their own activities. But at the same time, the IPSA Executive Committee agreed to establish a separate Research Committee on Comparative Public Policy, despite it being quite clear that this label did not denote a distinct intellectual area, that all the things proposed for the new committee could be done within RC32, and that RC32 would welcome this additional activity. It is widely recognised that many of the IPSA RCs overlap with one another, and that this fragmentation of the research focus does not contribute to the achievement of IPSA’s goal of facilitating linkage among political scientists. But when faced with a choice, IPSA opted for more fragmentation. This simply means that the energy available for organizing a research focus on policy is split between two RCs, and some of it has to be spent on facilitating linkage between them.
