RC32 - Public Policy and Administration

Public policy studies have been bound by the Westphalian concept of sovereignty. Yet, increasingly at the transnational level there have been a proliferation of administrative practices and processes of policy-making and policy delivery beyond but often overlapping with traditional nation-state policy processes. New formal and informal institutions at the international level (i.e. transnational public administration) are behind these policy processes often in cooperation with national public administrations but sometimes quite independently from them.

Examples include practices such as the OECD’s standard setting and 'best practice' to the World Bank's 'global programs. There are many other 'multi-stakeholder initiatives', 'global public-private partnerships' and 'Global Commissions'. While policy norms and agendas may have global resonance, nevertheless the pattern of policy action can vary considerably. Implementation may occur at national or local levels in different countries more or less contemporaneously, or also in problem contexts that are cross-border and co-jurisdictional, hence our use of the term ‘transnational administration’.

These developments represent a challenge to traditional policy and public administration studies which have tended to undertake analysis of the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalise national policies rather than to ask if there is transnational policy-making above and beyond the state. There is little conceptualisation of global public policy – policy that is either co-authored by states, in coalition with other actors such as in ‘global public private partnerships’ or ‘private’ global policy and of transnational public administration. This special edition calls for papers that interrogate the idea of ‘global policy processes’ and the emergence of various modalities of ‘transnational administration’.

Guest Editors: Professor Diane Stone, Murdoch University (and University of Warwick). Email: d.stone@murdoch.edu.au

Dr Stella Ladi, Queen Mary, University of London. Email: s.ladi@qmul.ac.uk

We look forward to receiving submissions of papers via he Public Administration Manuscript Central pages by 1st June 2014.