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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive disruptions to governments and societies across the world. While public healthcare systems have come under immense pressure, public trust in governments and institutions are also in decline. In this paper, we seek to assess the resilience of policy systems and processes in 16 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic through the use of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). We focus specifically on robustness, preparedness, social capital, and institutional strength as key attributes of community resilience at city-level. Our analysis of the data reveals that COVID-19 resilience is dependent on a combination of factors, with a multi-factorial approach to policy design and governance necessary for effective pandemic and disaster recovery.

The first decade of the 21st century recognised the growing salience of transnational or global governance as an analytical field of inquiry and as a normative project. In this introductory article, we argue that IPE offers a wider and deeper contextual understanding of the ‘global’ in a way that the scholarship of international relations, on the one hand, and that of international economics, on the other, have not done. IPE has been less strong in the context of global policy analysis that faut de mieux and, rather strangely, has been left largely to the economics discipline as other disciplines have slowly ceded the policy playing field to economics – at times with disastrous outcomes for policy. In light of these strengths and weaknesses of IPE as a framework for policy analysis, greater efforts at triangulating the insights of IPE and global public policy may help provide richer and more nuanced analyses of policy and politics.

Singapore’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has largely been seen as timely and effective, with border lock-downs and contact tracing efforts by city-state’s policymakers serving to slow down the...

Despite its excellent public healthcare system and efficient public administration, Singapore has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. While fatalities in the city-state remain low and contact tracing efforts have been largely successful, it has nonetheless experienced high rates of infection and the emergence of large infection clusters in its foreign worker dormitories. This paper analyses this dual-track policy outcome – low fatalities but high infection rates – from a policy capacity perspective. Specifically, the policy capacities that had contributed to Singapore’s low fatality rates and effective contact tracing are identified while the capacity deficiencies that may have caused its high rates of infection are discussed. In doing so, I argue that the presence of fiscal, operational and political capacities that were built up after the SARS crisis had contributed to Singapore’s low fatality rate and contact tracing capabilities while deficiencies in analytical capacities may explain its high infection rate.

Once the muse of oracles and soothsayers, global systemic instability is now increasingly plausible given the convergence of wicked, synchronous, and interconnected problems like climate change and...

Faced with growing policy complexity and environmental uncertainty, policymakers are increasingly concerned with ensuring that policy processes retain functionality amidst shock and uncertainty. In this paper, we seek to address the ways in which robustness – or the capability of policies to maintain functionality and effectiveness in policy goal attainment – can be designed into policies, institutions or systems. We suggest that robust policy designs can be characterized by diversity, modularity and redundancy, whereas robust policy design processes require the presence of polycentric decisional process, political capacity and technical capacity. In identifying these design elements of policy robustness, we argue that robustness is a property that can be designed to ensure that policies continue to deliver, over time, its intended functions, purposes and objectives, even under negative circumstances.

This article examines the impact of policies for start‐up and entrepreneurship on the developmental model that remains a policy legacy in many Asian countries. The main argument is that the influence of central planning is deeply embedded in the institutions of the Four Asian Tigers, but globalisation and economic liberalisation are disrupting the old developmentalism by incentivising innovation and structural adaptability. In practice, although developmentalism once focused on infrastructure and industrial policy, softer strategies such as attracting educated millennials through urban amenities and creative clustering mimic those of the postindustrial West. Either this trend represents the end of developmentalism or top‐down industrial policy is being rebranded to embrace knowledge and service industries. This article examines this issue at the urban scale, examining policies used by Singapore and Seoul to encourage start‐ups and entrepreneurship in the context of innovation. Government documents are examined and findings compared. Published version

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 has revealed weaknesses in financial regulatory policies and institutions in many countries. These weaknesses extend to the regional and international domains of financial policy as well. This article calls for the need for better designed financial regulations and policies by taking a policy design perspective. It provides a multi-level approach to understanding financial reform as design that examines the various components of policy design — policy means, goals and change — at the three levels of policymaking — international regional, national. In doing so, we aim to provide a first step towards a more design-centric approach to financial sector reform.

Policy design, or the deliberate governmental effort to attain desired policy objectives, is an integral part of micro and macro-level fiscal and financial regulation. This paper seeks to address the role of regime coherence and policy capacity in contributing to effective financial policy design. Drawing on the cases of the Global Financial Crisis and Asian Financial Crisis and focusing on Asian states, we assess regime capacity at both international and domestic levels. We argue that it is the integration of analytical, operational and political capacities that have contributed to the overall ability of a government regime to address and respond to crises.

This paper conceptualizes political competences at the system level of capabilities to function as “legitimation capacity” in a policy context. It identifies trust in the political, social, economic, and security spheres as the key element driving this capacity. Trust ensures that state actions and institutions are perceived as legitimate and receive public support, which in turn allows political skills to be exercised, preventing political or institutional decay and policy ineffectiveness. Conceptualization of legitimation capacity as comprising trust across political, social, economic, and security dimensions offers a useful framework for analyzing and estimating a government's capacity in different policy spheres. It provides a practical tool for estimating any deficiencies in legitimation capacity that a government may face. While governments may be endowed with different levels of legitimate capacity when they first attain office, they may over time work on building up capacity by focusing on the spheres in which they may be lacking. Conversely, they may lose legitimacy if their efforts in these areas are counter-productive.

A roadmap for ‘new policy design’ studies now exists in the orientation which has emerged in recent years towards the formulation of complex policy mixes. The new design orientation focuses on bundles or portfolios of tools and the interactive effects which occur when multiple tools are used over time in policy packages designed to address multiple goals, and upon more complex multi-policy and multi-level design contexts. This review article examines the differences between the ‘old’ instrument orientation and the ‘new’ design one, setting out the current research agenda in this field and its rationale.