The Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice (JCPA) is planning for a series of events to celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2018. The first such event is the 16th Annual JCPA and ICPA-Forum Workshop: “Comparison of Policy Experiments: Practices in the Asia-Pacific Region”, which will be hosted by the School of Public Policy & Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, March 30-31, 2018. The workshop will also be a part of the 3rd Asia-Pacific Public Policy Network (AP-PPN) Annual Conference (March 30-April 1, 2018).
Faced with unprecedented challenges, such as pollution, corruption, decline of government trust, an aging society, economic slowdown, and an increase in income inequality, governments across the Asia-Pacific region need specific know-how and capability. They need to be able to design detailed policy instruments, find concrete evidence of policy feasibility and effectiveness in order to advocate and persuade different policy actors, as well as to assess possible unintended consequences. To gain specific knowledge and operational experience, policymakers sometimes carry out a series of small-scale policy experiments before implementing a large-scale policy change. The comparative route can facilitate design and implementation, and avoid fallacies in what are acutely sensitive public policy/effects of real life experimentation.
Whereas policy researchers have looked into policy innovation or policy experimentation at different national, sub-national, or cross-sectoral contexts little is still known about how policy experiment dynamics vary in different administrative systems (unitary vs. federal, centralized vs. decentralized, etc.) and in different policy domains (such as economic vs. social welfare, complex vs. simple, distributive vs. redistributive policies).
The 16th JCPA and ICPA-Forum Workshop welcomes theoretical and empirical papers focusing on policy processes taking place within naturally occurring experiments now widely used in Asian-Pacific region, in order to comparatively examine lessons drawn while initiating, designing, implementing, and evaluating policy experiments.