The demand for IPE and public policy in the governance of global policy design

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• International political economy
• public policy
• policy design

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ Discussion of the rationalist-reflectivist divide is originally developed in Keohane, 1998 and analyzed at length in Higgott & Watson, 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Higgott

Richard Higgott is a Research Professor at the Institute for European Studies and Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at Vesalius College at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel working on an H2020 project on European cultural and science diplomacy. He is also Emeritus Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Warwick where he founded and directed the the UK/ESRC Centre for Globalisation and Regionalisation.

J.J. Woo

J.J. Woo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His research areas include urban policy, economic development, and financial regulation.

Tim Legrand

Tim Legrand is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Adelaide. His research is concerned with the national and international dimensions of global security decision-making.