Public Administration & Research
The contemporary practice of public administration and policy continues to unfold amid profound turbulence and the proliferation of polycrises. Across many settings, executive aggrandizement and democratic backsliding are reshaping the rules of administration, policy, and politics, narrowing the space for public accountability. In parallel, disruptive technologies, including AI-enabled decision systems, new forms of surveillance, and platform governance, are reconfiguring how public authority is exercised, how services are delivered, and how citizens experience the state. These political and technological shifts intersect with compounding crises and "wicked" challenges such as climate and energy transitions, public health, migration, security, and inequality. The result is a governance environment marked by heightened uncertainty, rapid feedback loops, and contested public values, yet also one that creates possibilities for innovation, learning, and a renewed perspective on public value.
This workshop invites contributions that examine what these disruptions demand and enable from public administration and public policy research. If our mission is to generate knowledge that is empirically grounded, theoretically valuable, and normatively attentive, then the field must rise to meet the moment. We need insights commensurate with these disruptive trends, not only to understand the challenges they produce but also to identify opportunities for institutional adaptation, democratic renewal, and responsible innovation. Crucially, doing so often requires interdisciplinarity. Many of today's administrative problems are entangled with technological infrastructures, ecological systems, legal regimes, and ethical dilemmas, which means that public administration scholarship must engage in two-way collaboration with the social sciences, STEM and life sciences, and the humanities. Hence, in this workshop, we invite contributions in several directions, broadly including, but not limited to the following themes:
Renewing and extending knowledge of public administration and public policy in contemporary settings
Research that uses contemporary governance challenges, including executive aggrandizement, shrinking civic space, algorithmic governance, and crisis politics, to refine, challenge, or extend existing theories and frameworks in public administration and public policy. We welcome contributions that identify new mechanisms, revise scope conditions, and clarify how such developments alter administrative behavior, policy dynamics, and public value creation.
Interdisciplinary research that reshapes questions, concepts, and explanations
Research that builds genuine two-way engagement with adjacent disciplines, including computer science, engineering, public health, environmental sciences, law, ethics, history, and STS. We are especially interested in contributions that show how interdisciplinary collaboration changes the substance of inquiry, for example by introducing new problem framings, conceptual vocabularies, or causal pathways, rather than simply adding tools.
Disruption and the changing conditions of knowledge production
Contributions that examine how political, technological, and organizational shifts affect what we can know and how we come to know it. Topics may include data access and opacity, politicization of expertise, confidentiality and security constraints, the use of digital data, AI-assisted research practices, open science and replication, and methodological risks in fast-moving environments. Reflections that connect these challenges to concrete research strategies are particularly welcome.
Methods and designs for studying fast-moving governance
Research that develops or adapts methodological approaches suited to turbulent contexts, including experiments and quasi-experiments, comparative designs, computational methods, mixed methods, process tracing, participatory and co-produced research, and scenario-based or anticipatory approaches. We welcome contributions that explicitly discuss inference, validity, and ethics under conditions of uncertainty and institutional flux.
Based on this workshop, and depending on the nature and fit of submissions, the panel chairs are planning to explore the organization of one or more special issues in leading public administration and public policy scientific journals.
- Individual paper submissions
- Poster submissions
University of Padua, Italy
Ghent University, Belgium