P33 Governing through polycrisis

Panel Chairs

Corresponding Chair & Review Group Chair

• Christina S. Barsky, Associate Professor; Director, Master of Public Administration & Graduate Certificate of Community Resilience and Planning, University of Vermont. Christina.Barsky@UVM.edu

Co-Chairs

• Ebinezer R. Florano, Professor, National College of Public Administration and Governance; Convenor, Data Science for Public Policy Program, Center for Integrative and Development Studies, University of the Philippines.
• Evert Lindquist, Professor, University of Victoria, School of Public Administration.
• Lauren K. McKeague, Associate Professor; Director, MPH Generalist Program & Graduate Certificate Programs.
• Robert P. Shepherd, Professor, Carleton University, School of Public Policy & Administration. 
• Petri Uusikylä, Research Director, Preparedness and Planning, University of Vaasa.

Panel description

Public administrations worldwide are confronting new types of wicked governance challenges in the polycrisis environment. Climate change, geopolitical conflict, digital disruption, wider adoption of artificial intelligence, public health emergencies, democratic backsliding, economic instability, and migration pressures no longer arrive in tidy and predictable sequence. Instead, they collide, amplify one another, and generate effects that no single agency can predict or contain. Governments have also had to identify new priorities at speed - scaling up investment in defense, energy, climate, and cybersecurity - while reassessing what they expect of public service institutions.

This panel brings together three complementary lines of inquiry:

The first draws from policy analytics and anticipatory governance, asking how public administrators can detect interconnected and systemic risks - not just isolated hazards - before they cascade. It examines early warning systems, data fusion, and predictive dashboards that model interdependencies across policy domains. It also asks what it takes to make scenario planning and horizon scanning routine parts of budget cycles and performance systems, rather than one-off exercises.

The second line draws on themes of public service and coordination, asking how public managers and service systems adapt in practice. It examines service continuity, the interface between emergency management and routine administration, collaborative and networked delivery, and frontline discretion. It also asks how institutions manage trade-offs among speed, equity, legitimacy, and resilience when they must act under sustained turbulence.

Finally, tools such as spending and strategic reviews have been regarded as the principal instruments for appraising existing spending and reallocating funding to new priorities, and where they are institutionalized rather than episodic, they constitute a durable state capability. Whether crises actually trigger such reviews is an important sub-question. The questions that flow from this third level of inquiry are: have the significant shifts in government spending and investment been accompanied by spending and strategic review processes or some other reform initiative? Have those shifts and reviews been used to facilitate reform of public service organizations, or will the evolution of those organizations be the byproduct of incremental budgetary or reform initiatives? In either case, what has informed public sector reform if not rational processes such as spending or strategic reviews? The aim of such activities ought to be stabilizing or restabilizing institutions toward some new steady state. If this is the not the aim, then we are interested in what is motivating such reform initiatives.

Together, these strands ask what happens to core public governance constructs - accountability, performance measurement, coordination, and public trust - when linear causality, sectoral boundaries, and temporal predictability can no longer be assumed. The panel welcomes theoretical, empirical, and practice-oriented papers using any relevant methodology: large-N comparative studies, single or small-N case studies, action research with public sector partners, conceptual and critical/post-positivist analyses, systems and empirical approaches and mixed methods.

Sub-topics

• Policy analytics and anticipatory governance
• Public service adaptation and coordination
• Cross-sectoral and boundary-spanning institutional design
• Public trust, accountability, and democratic legitimacy
• Spending and strategic reviews as reform mechanisms
• Institutional reform trajectories
• Comparative and cross-regional case studies
• Critical perspectives on data and reform

Relevance to public management scholarship and conference theme

Public management and governance scholarship has traditionally assumed relative stability: identifiable problems, well-understood causal relationships, and discrete crises rather than overlapping cascades. This panel challenges those assumptions directly by asking what happens to accountability, performance measurement, coordination, and strategic planning when several of these conditions no longer hold at once. It brings policy analytics, service adaptation, and institutional reform scholarship into a single conversation, to ask whether public administrators are actively building the capacity to govern interconnected, cascading crises, or simply absorbing their effects into current reforms.

This panel matches the IRSPM 2027 theme, “Polycrisis, wicked problems and grand challenges: Public administration in search of safety and security.” Analytics and anticipatory governance address how administrators can see risk coming. Service adaptation and coordination address how administrations function while risk is unfolding. Spending reviews and institutional reform addresses what administrations become once the immediate pressure passes. The panel seeks to bridge scholarship and practice, ensuring the panel produces insights usable by public sector managers, policymakers, and reformers, consistent with IRSPM’s mission to connect international, comparative public management research with policy practice