Disrupted governance: Towards a new policy science (2021)

(Publisher : Cambridge University Press)

Author(s) : Kris Hartley, Glen D. Kuecker

Kris Hartley is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Program Leader of the Masters of Social Sciences in Development Studies in the Department of Public and International Affairs at City University of Hong Kong. He researches global-to-local policy transfer in the application of technology to sustainability transitions and has published books with Cambridge University Press and Routledge Press.

Glen D Kuecker: His current interests focus on contemporary history, especially the problem of how humanity will weather the perfect storm of multiple, large-scale, global, and concomitant crises, including climate change, thermodynamics (energy), food insecurity, demographic transformations (population growth and aging, and rapid urbanization) environmental/ecological degradation, and economic stress.

The book explores the uncertain future of public policy practice and scholarship in an age of radical disruption. The authors argue that an anachronistic instrumental rationalism underlies contemporary policy logic and limits efforts to understand new policy challenges and searches for a solution.

Abstract

This Element explores the uncertain future of public policy practice and scholarship in an age of radical disruption. Building on foundational ideas in policy sciences, we argue that an anachronistic instrumental rationalism underlies contemporary policy logic and limits efforts to understand new policy challenges. We consider whether the policy sciences framework can be reframed to facilitate deeper understandings of this anachronistic epistemic, in anticipation of a research agenda about epistemic destabilization and contestation. The Element applies this theoretical provocation to environmental policy and sustainability, issues about which policymaking proceeds amid unpredictable contexts and rising sociopolitical turbulence that portend a liminal state in the transition from one way of thinking to another. The Element concludes by contemplating the fate of policy's epistemic instability, anticipating what policy understandings will emerge in a new system, and questioning the degree to which either presages a seismic shift in the relationship between policy and society.

1. Introduction
2. The Convergence of Crises Leading to Soft Collapse
3. Theoretical Evolution from Instrumental Rationalism to Policy Sciences.

Bibliographic Information

Hartley, K., & Kuecker, G. (2022). Disrupted Governance: Towards a New Policy Science (Elements in Public Policy). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009127868

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Disrupted governance: Towards a new policy science (2021)

Author(s) : Kris Hartley, Glen D. Kuecker

The book explores the uncertain future of public policy practice and scholarship in an age of radical disruption. The authors argue that an anachronistic instrumental rationalism underlies contemporary policy logic and limits efforts to understand new policy challenges and searches for a solution.

Abstract

Table of contents

Bibliographic Information

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