This Round Table assessed contemporary global dynamics that impact and impose challenges upon the state and its capacities to design and implement policy. Many accounts of globalization present a `strong' globalization thesis emphasizing the inevitable nature of globalization, the external constraints imposed on governments by global markets and inter-governmental organizations and the limitations placed on international and domestic politics and public policies. A less `defeatist' and more proactive way of considering the relationship between globalization and policy making is to consider, first, how states and other interests act domestically and outwardly through their own `multi-tiered', `multi-sphere' policy strategies to shape the pace, course, timing and effects of globalization; and second, the innovative policy tools, practices and institutions that have been embraced and which reconfigure both the structure and capacities of the state, and its relationships with other global and regional policy actors. This panel invited discussion of the range of actions taken by states in a number of spheres (national and transnational; political, social and economic) to regulate, transfigure or resist globalizing strategies. In seeking to learn about and adapt to a range of complex changes in cultural, institutional and market structures, state actors at the national level are attempting to reinvent the state and deploy new and traditional policy tools in a wider world context. Accordingly, globalisation does not lead to a simple decline of the state but may be seen to necessitate the expansion of de facto state intervention and regulation in the name of competitiveness or protection of national communities.