Governing global policy: what IPE can learn from public policy?

ABSTRACT

As the state has become more susceptible to global pathologies, public policy scholars have found increasingly common ground with their IPE cousins. The development of these relatively young fields of study – increasingly they are sub-disciplines – has been commensurate but rarely intersecting. Yet contemporary maelstroms of global politics, economics, health, and security, span borders with ease, and increasingly force us to recognise, reconsider, and reconceptualise the overlapping realms of the national and international. In so doing, we must overcome the disciplinary distinctions. In this article, we traverse the prominent in-built disciplinary imperatives and methodologies that have kept these two disciplines from concerted inter-operability or, at least, interchange of theories and concepts. To do so, we begin by presenting a brief overview of the conceptual pedigrees and trajectories of these disciplines, before drawing attention to the prominent prevailing overlaps, ‘trespasses’ and tensions as they specifically relate to policy convergence and diffusion, and policy transfer. We proceed to specify a reconciliation of these tensions through, in the third section, a brief study of the growth of global administrations, administrators, and administrative spaces. This, we contend, stands as a paradigm case of how reconciled IPE/public policy concepts can produce enhanced theoretical and substantive insights into the transnationalising political world.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnationalism
• public policy
• IPE
• interdisciplinary research
• global policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This cross-pollination has also taken root in political geography where the language is more about policy mobilities and flows (Peck & Theodore, 2010).

2. See the program on ‘global administrative law’ at New York University School of Law: https://www.iilj.org/gal/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Legrand

Tim Legrandis Associate Professor of International Security in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Adelaide. Tim's interdisciplinary research concerns transgovernmental networks, policy transfer and security politics. His most recent monograph, The Architecture of Policy Transfer: Ideas, Institutions and Networks in Transnational Policymaking (2021), is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Diane Stone

Diane Stone is Chair of Global Policy in the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on transnational administration, global policy networks, higher education, think tanks, policy analysis, knowledege utilisation and more. Diane Stone’s most recent book is Open Access with Cambridge University Press,Making Global Policy, 2019.