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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.

This article seeks to understand policy change in the context of Singapore’s higher education system. It does so by applying Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Approach to two cases of policy entrepreneurs...

Faced with an increasingly complex policy environment, policymakers have sought to leverage upon non-state resources and expertise to supplement their policy efforts. What have emerged are ...

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...

This chapter is focused on describing how systemic governance in higher education has been changing in the two Northern American federal countries. To grasp the characteristics of governance and accountability in the higher education systems of Canada and the USA, the chapter shed lights on the systemic characteristics of such systems (the types of institutions are distinguished by their respective missions and ownership), on the role of and eventual changes to the state/provincial and federal governments across time, on the impact on NPM in the activities of the systems, and finally, on the characteristics and roles of policy networks. By focusing on these four dimensions, it is possible to better describe and understand how systemic governance works in the US and Canada and how the countries have been changing by remaining quite different each other

This chapter will discuss Singapore’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing in particular on how it has mobilised and adapted its policy capacities to deal with the pandemic. I will also discuss the new capacities that were established this period. In focusing on how policy capacities were drawn upon or created in its Covid-19 response, this chapter will provide readers with an understanding of the various policy capacities that are necessary for responding to pandemics and other healthcare crises, as well as the capacity limitations or deficiencies that may have posed challenges for policymakers.

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 purpose of this paper is to improve knowledge of the transnational diffusion of public policies. It argues that existing studies on the subject do not provide an adequate understanding of the m...

In this chapter, we will discuss the principles and criteria underpinning robust and agile policy designs. We begin with a conceptual delimitation of robustness and agility, focusing in particular on their relevance for policy design. We then provide a brief overview of policy change and stability, before focusing on agility and robustness as criterions for policy design and on the conditions that allow their fruitful adoption.

As an archetypal developmental state, Singapore has always emphasized the role of higher education as a means of human capital development. The recent introduction of the SkillsFuture scheme represents a similarly development-oriented higher education policy initiative. Taking a policy design approach and drawing from mechanism design, this paper argues that the SkillsFuture scheme constitutes an act of policy ‘integration’, whereby new policy instruments and goals are added to an existing policy mix without compromising instrument mix consistency or coherence of policy goals. However, the presence of information asymmetries has also resulted in a need for ‘mechanism redesign’.

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.

This article uses a case study of financial sector policy making in East Asia in the post 2000 period to examine and help to resolve questions surrounding the origins of the phenomenon of ‘dynamics without change’ in public policy making; that is, the appearance of policy activity and alteration without affecting the overall nature and orientation of policy outputs or outcomes. This is a phenomenon which has challenged existing notions of policy dynamics which associate enhanced policy activity with fundamental changes in outputs and outcomes and is an issue which has concerned policy studies since Robert Alford’s seminal study of British health policy dynamics first noted the phenomenon in the mid-1970s. The article develops and extends the ideas put forward by Rayner et al. (2001, Privileging the sub-sector: critical sub-sectors and sectoral relationships in forest policy-making, Forest Policy and Economics, 2 (3–4), 319–332) that ‘critical subsectors’ or subsets of actors within a subsystem which contr...

This article conceptualizes the financial policy regimes of London, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai, in the process of comparing and contrasting the sociopolitical relations that exist within the four cities. Based on the data collected from extensive field research, I identify four distinct financial policy regimes. First, a combination of low state intervention and influential industry actors in London reflects a financial policy regime that features dominant industry interest groups. While Hong Kong similarly features low state intervention, its industry actors are not influential. In contrast, financial sector development in Singapore features a ‘cocreation’ of financial policies by a close-knit network of state and industry actors. Lastly, Shanghai’s financial policy regime is largely dominated by state actors from both the central and local levels. By delineating and analyzing the policy regimes of the four international financial centers (IFCs), this article provides the first step toward a clear...

Existing studies of Hong Kong’s and Singapore’s success as leading Asian international financial centers (IFCs) have largely focused on economic structural factors at the neglect of political economic contextual variables. Taking a policy subsystems approach and based on extensive field research, this article attempts to address this shortcoming by conceptualizing the “policy relations” that exist between state, industry, and other non-state actors in the two IFCs and delineating the “division of policy roles” among these actors. In the process, this article contributes toward the existing IFC literature and conceptualizes the sociopolitical relations that exist among financial sector actors.

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.

Statutory boards represent an important feature of Singapore’s effective and efficient model of public administration. Despite their autonomy and separation from the rest of Singapore’s civil service, statutory boards represent policymaking units in their own right, developed and utilized by the government in the achievement of its policy objectives. Based on first-hand interviews and other primary data, this paper provides an analysis of two Singaporean statutory boards: the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Land Transport Authority, focusing in particular on their roles as policymaking units. In doing so, this paper attempts to sketch out and understand Singapore’s unique policy style. This contributes to a better understanding of Asian policy styles in the process, a topic which has thus far received scant attention in the existing policy styles literature.

Resilience and robustness are exciting concepts for policy researchers. Their broad use in other disciplines has motivated social scientists and policy researchers to adopt them in analyses. In the present paper, we review definitions of these concepts and the primary theoretical and empirical challenges presented by resilience and robustness as lenses for improving the understanding of policy process and policy design. The results reveal that the two concepts differ in their potential value for public policy analysis. Despite its diffusion and ‘charme’, resilience does not appear to be useful and may be misleading, whereas robustness exhibits great potential with respect to both analysis and design.

As important sites for financial transactions and innovations, international financial centres (IFCs) have dominated the research agenda and policy discourses on financial sector development and economic policy. This chapter provides a systematic overview of existing research and analyses on IFCs. In doing so, it identifies two key gaps in the literature. First, there is an imbalance in the geographical focus on IFC studies, with the bulk of existing research focused on Western developed economies. With economic growth and financialization in Asia, there is a need to understand the Asian IFCs that have emerged in recent decades. Second, existing studies remain focused within disciplinary siloes. There is therefore a need for more comprehensive approaches that incorporate the spatial, social, and political aspects of IFCs.

This book has highlighted the importance of four factors—history, space, policy, and politics—in driving or shaping Singapore’s emergence, subsequent development, and current success as an IFC. However, Singapore’s success as an IFC is more than simply a sum of these four parts. Rather, it has involved a pragmatic combination of the four factors through deliberate policy action. This chapter discusses Singapore’s integrated and multifactorial approach to IFC development as well as the various capacities that are required among financial policymakers for successful financial policymaking.