Call for Abstracts - NIG Conference 2027 @ Wageningen University and Research
On this page, you will find an elaborate description of each panel and the papers they welcome for the NIG Conference 2027. The conference will be held on February 4th and 5th at Wageningen University and Research. We will be using a conference system (COMS) for submitting and reviewing papers. If you would like to submit an abstract to one of these panels, please follow the steps described below:
- Go to https://coms.app/nig27/welcome.html
- If you already have an account (for example from our previous conference) log in. Otherwise, create an account by filling out the required information (this option is available below the login option).
- Once you have logged in, you will have the option to submit your abstract. This can be done under “Abstract submissions”, in the menu on the left side of your screen.
- Fill out the form*.The deadline for submitting an abstract is October 30th 2026 at 23:59.
- After the deadline, the panel chairs will review your abstract. Once they have made a decision about acceptance or rejection of the abstract, you will receive an update from us. The update will be posted in COMS and you will receive an e-mail. Once your abstract has been accepted, you can upload the full paper to coms for the panel chairs to see. More instructions about this will follow at the time.
*The requirements for submitting an abstract are the following: which panel the abstract is intended for, the title of the paper, all authors and their e-mail adressess, 3 key words (max.) and the abstract itself (no more than 500 words including references). The requirements can also be found in the form on the COMS website.
Chairs:
Sjors Overman (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) s.p.overman@uu.nl
Dovile Rimkute (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) d.rimkute@vu.nl
Language: English
Key words: emotions, affect
Description of the panel and themes
Emotions are at the core of how bureaucracies formulate and implement governance decisions, yet emotional processes remain largely implicit in public administration research. Even with the advent of behavioral public administration, cognitive mechanisms have consistently been prioritized over affective ones. Political emotions are powerful and consistent predictors of human behavior in politics (Bakker et al. 2021), and there is growing evidence that emotions, from fear and anger to pride, enthusiasm, and hope, are equally powerful predictors of administrative behavior. They influence how citizens experience governance, process policy information, make compliance decisions, assign blame, and perceive bureaucratic legitimacy and reputation. This panel focuses on the emerging body of research at the intersection of public governance and emotions, with particular emphasis on reintroducing the role of affect into public administration theory and research.
The discussion in this panel builds on recent theoretical and empirical developments suggesting that emotions are essential for explaining variation in how citizens and bureaucrats process information, form judgments, and behave. For example, emotions have been argued to play an important role in regulators’ formulation of—and citizens’ responses to—regulatory interventions (Rimkut?, 2025). Scholars have introduced theoretical frameworks that identify emotion-based components of bureaucratic reputation and theorize how emotions shape audience reputation learning processes and perceptions of public institutions (Maor et al., 2025). Similarly, a framework for explaining citizens’ emotions and coping behaviors in citizen-state interactions has been proposed to capture how affective responses shape citizens’ engagement with the state (Ropes, forthcoming). Empirical research has also demonstrated that bureaucratic red tape evokes significant negative emotional responses—particularly confusion, frustration, and anger—among citizens (Hattke et al., 2020), as well as compassion (Szydlowski et al. 2022).
Also, within the cogs of the bureaucracy, emotions play an important role in shaping mutual relationships between actors and organizations. For example, the anticipation of accountability has various emotional consequences, including fear, anger, and pride (Overman et al. 2026). Such reactions predictably influence the governance of public sector organizations. And civil servants, such as police officers, may experience stereotyping, which triggers emotional responses, predicting subsequent coping (Neo and Overman 2025). These findings, drawn from diverse governance contexts and national settings, underline the affective dimension of public governance. Yet, they remain largely disconnected from one another, developed in parallel rather than as a cumulative research program.
By encouraging theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions, we aim to deepen our collective understanding of the emotional foundations of governance and promote greater integration of affective dynamics into the core concerns of public administration theory and research. The panel’s goal is, therefore, to advance affective public administration as a coherent research agenda. Advancing this agenda requires new empirical evidence, as well as attention to foundational questions: How do affective and cognitive processes interact in administrative settings? What methods are suited to studying emotions in governance contexts? And what does an affective theory of public administration look like?
Ultimately, this panel aims to initiate a broader scholarly conversation about how emotions shape the realities of governance. We welcome contributions that chart new directions, revisit classical questions through an emotional lens, or challenge conventional assumptions about how public administration works, as well as papers that challenge the current agenda. We equally invite papers in which affective dynamics appear as mechanisms, moderators, or boundary conditions within broader arguments about governance, accountability, or compliance. We welcome contributions from diverse national and institutional contexts, as comparative and cross-national perspectives will strengthen the generalizability of the agenda being developed. As a platform for junior and senior researchers, we aim to identify shared theoretical and methodological interests and priorities that can foster future collaborations.
References:
Bakker B., Schumacher G., Rooduijn M. Hot Politics? Affective Responses to Political Rhetoric. American Political Science Review. 2021;115(1):150-164. doi:10.1017/S0003055420000519
Hattke, F., Hensel, D., & Kalucza, J. (2020). Emotional responses to bureaucratic red tape. Public Administration Review, 80(1), 53–63.
Maor, M., Rimkut?, D., & Capelos, T. (2025). Emotions and reputation learning by audience networks: A research agenda in bureaucratic politics. Public Administration Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.70004
Neo, S., & Overman, S. (2025). Coping with occupational stereotypes: an emotional lens on police officers’ experiences. Public Management Review. Online first.
Overman, S., & Schillemans, T. (2022). Toward a public administration theory of felt accountability. Public Administration Review, 82(1), 12–22.
Overman, S., Neo, S., & Hall, A. (2026). The emotional backlash of public accountability. Public Performance and Management Review. 49 (3), 575-603.
Ropes, E. (forthcoming). CAT-PA: A Framework for Explaining Citizens’ Emotions and Coping Behaviors in Citizen-State Interactions. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance.
Rimkut?, D. (2025). Affective regulatory governance: Towards an emotion-based understanding of citizen–regulator interactions in regulatory politics. Journal of European Public Policy. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2025.2526550
Szydlowski, G., de Boer, N. and Tummers, L. (2022), Compassion, Bureaucrat Bashing, and Public Administration. Public Administration Review, 82: 619-633.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
We are particularly interested in research that examines the interplay between emotion, cognition, and behavior in public governance contexts. This includes, but is not limited to, theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that explore topics such as:
• The emotional dynamics of bureaucratic decision-making and rule enforcement.
• The role of affect in shaping citizens’ perceptions of reputation, legitimacy, and trust of public institutions.
• The emotional framing of policy communication and its effects on compliance and engagement.
• Cross-national or cross-sectoral variations in emotional responses to governance.
• Connections between current strands of literature that contribute to a more coherent theory of affective public administration.
• Critical assessments of the scope, limits, or boundary conditions of emotional dynamics in governance.
• Methodological innovations for studying emotion in public administration (e.g., physiological measures, experiments, surveys, ethnography).
This panel invites interdisciplinary perspectives, including work from psychology, sociology, political science, communication studies, and organizational behavior that can inform public administration’s understanding of emotions in public governance.
Chairs:
Petra van den Bekerom (Leiden University, The Netherlands) p.e.a.van.den.bekerom@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Tanachia Ashikali (Leiden University, The Netherlands) t.s.ashikali@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Peter Scholten (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands) p.scholten@essb.eur.nl
Language: English
Key words: diversity, inclusion, anti-discrimination
Description of the panel and themes
Public organizations operate in increasingly diverse societies, raising important questions about representation, inclusion, equal treatment, and discrimination, and racism. How do public organizations govern diversity and inclusion, both internally and externally? Which policies, leadership practices, and institutional arrangements foster representation and equal participation and help prevent discrimination? At the same time, how do broader societal and technological developments shape these organizational processes and their consequences for citizens and public service delivery?
This panel brings together two previously separate panels: Diversity, Representation and Inclusion and Governance of Anti-Discrimination and Anti-Racism. Combining these perspectives provides an opportunity to connect research concerned with diversity and inclusion within public organizations with scholarship examining discrimination, racism, and inequality in the interaction between public institutions and society.
These questions connect several strands of public administration research. Representative bureaucracy examines whether and how the composition of public organizations shapes decisions and outcomes for different social groups. Research on diversity and inclusion focuses on organizational conditions, leadership practices, and interactions through which organizational members experience in- and exclusion, and opportunities for participation. Research on discrimination and racism highlights how institutions, technologies, and frontline practices may reproduce, reinforce, or reduce inequalities.
This panel brings these perspectives together under the theme Governance of Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-discrimination and welcomes research that connects organizational and societal perspectives on diversity and (in)equality. We are particularly interested in research that advances understanding of how public organizations address diversity, representation, inclusion, and discrimination, and on the consequences for equality, legitimacy, responsiveness, and public service delivery.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
The panel welcomes papers on two complementary themes:
1. Governing diversity, inclusion, representation and anti-discrimination
Research may examine how public organizations organize and govern diversity, representation, inclusion, and equal treatment. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, diversity and inclusion policies, representative bureaucracy, leadership, organizational culture and practices, employee experiences of in- and exclusion, discrimination and racism in the workplace, inequalities in careers and leadership positions, and the organizational conditions under which diversity contributes to inclusive and effective public organizations.
2. Changing contexts and consequences
Research may examine how public organizations respond to diversity, discrimination, racism, and inequality in society and how broader developments affect public governance. Relevant topics include demographic change, polarization, migration, changing public attitudes, technological developments and digitalization, algorithmic decision-making, citizen–state interactions, frontline service delivery, unequal treatment, and the implications of these developments for representation, responsiveness, legitimacy, and equality.
We welcome theoretical and empirical work using qualitative, quantitative, comparative, or mixed methods, from scholars at all career stages.
Chairs:
Cato Janssen (Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium) cato.janssen@uantwerpen.be
Lianne Cremers (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) a.l.cremers@vu.nl
Language: English
Key words: sensitive research, ethics, wellbeing
Description of the panel and themes
Contemporary governance research increasingly addresses topics that are emotional and carry inherent social consequences. Public administration and political science scholars study issues such as democratic backsliding, political extremism, migration, discrimination, crisis governance, violence, health regulation, and the implementation of controversial public policies. While these sensitive research areas are central to understanding governance in contemporary societies, they also raise significant ethical and methodological challenges for researchers and participants alike (Silverio et al., 2022; Millum et al., 2019).
This panel brings together scholars from public administration and political science to critically examine what constitutes sensitive governance research and how researchers can conduct such work in ethically responsible and methodologically robust ways. Research is considered sensitive if it potentially carries a substantial threat for the researcher and/or the researched during the research design, sampling, data collection, storage and/or dissemination (Lee & Renzetti, 1990). The panel starts from the observation that researchers often navigate difficult ethical and emotional terrain without discipline-specific frameworks that address the realities of sensitive governance research.
The panel pursues three interconnected objectives. First, it seeks to conceptualize sensitive governance research by asking what exactly makes governance research “sensitive.” Sensitivity may derive from the topic itself (e.g., stigma, abuse of power, or violence) but it may also arise from the context in which research takes place, the populations involved, the political environment, or the potential consequences of producing and disseminating knowledge (Lee & Renzetti, 1990). Rather than treating sensitivity as an inherent characteristic of specific topics, the panel aims to develop a more nuanced understanding that recognizes sensitivity as a context-dependent, dynamic element of research; one that requires continuous attention.
Second, the panel examines ethics as an ongoing research practice rather than a procedural hurdle to overcome. Formal ethical review processes remain essential for protecting participants and ensuring accountability, yet they often struggle to anticipate the complexities that emerge throughout the research process. Ethical dilemmas frequently arise before data collection begins, during interactions with participants, throughout data analysis, and even after publication. Researchers conducting sensitive governance research must continually make decisions about informed consent, confidentiality, anonymity, data security, researcher positionality, collaboration and reciprocal relationships with participants, prevention of harm, and responsible communication of findings (Silverio et a. 2022 ; Millum et al., 2019).
Additionally, formal ethical approval for sensitive research topics may come with the challenge of convincing ethical committees to not shy away from such topics. In response to sensitive topics, ethical committees may respond with overprotective measures that exclude precisely those populations most in need of attention (Millum et al., 2019). However, avoiding sensitive research topics, simply because they are too sensitive, is also not the solution. In case vulnerable groups do participate, this brings other challenges. For example, they may feel constrained in their openness reducing the reliability of data. Herein, researchers face the dilemma of wanting to illuminate their experiences of discrimination without reproducing harm or reinforcing hierarchies of power (Jenkins, 2022). More importantly, we want to discuss how we can prevent that the research process itself becomes deeply entangled in the sensitive dynamics that shape participants’ everyday lives. The panel thus also aims to discuss how to approach such challenges, and how to respond in ways that foster security for both researchers and participants.
Third, the panel foregrounds wellbeing as a central methodological concern. While governance scholars increasingly acknowledge the importance of research ethics, considerably less attention has been devoted to the emotional challenges for both researchers and participants whilst conducting sensitive governance research. Researchers may experience emotional responses to discussing sensitive topics, such as feeling uncomfortable or even distressed (Silverio et al. 2022). For participants, the act of participation in research can carry emotional and social risk, such as revisiting difficult experiences or the potential of being exposed (Millum et al., 2019). This panel therefore asks how methodological approaches can be designed to support both participant and researcher wellbeing throughout the research process. We aim to include reflections on methodological approaches that allow for respectful and trustworthy researcher–participant relationships, co-created research initiatives, and the support of safe and ethical forms of data collection.
Ultimately, the panel argues that conducting ethically responsible governance research requires moving beyond procedural compliance to ethical guidelines toward a more holistic understanding of ethics for sensitive research practice. Ethics, wellbeing, and methodology are deeply interconnected: methodological choices shape ethical responsibilities, ethical practices influence participant and researcher experiences, and attention to wellbeing enables more responsible scholarship. As governance scholars increasingly engage with complex, contested, and emotionally demanding topics, developing research frameworks that integrate ethics and wellbeing becomes essential for both the quality and integrity of research. This panel therefor aims to discuss which thematic and methodological vocabularies allow for sensitive governance research, and how they shape the future of such research.
References
Jenkins, R. (2022). Doing research into discrimination: problems of method, interpretation and ethics. In The Research Relationship (pp. 144-160). Routledge.
Lee, R. M., & Renzetti, C. M. (1990). The problems of researching sensitive topics: An overview and introduction. American behavioral scientist, 33(5), 510-528.
Millum, J., Campbell, M., Luna, F., Malekzadeh, A., & Karim, Q. A. (2019). Ethical challenges in global health-related stigma research. BMC medicine, 17(1), 84.
Silverio, S. A., Sheen, K. S., Bramante, A., Knighting, K., Koops, T. U., Montgomery, E., … & Sandall, J. (2022). Sensitive, challenging, and difficult topics: Experiences and practical considerations for qualitative researchers. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21, 16094069221124739.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
We invite papers that explore sensitive governance research in its broadest sense, encompassing research on political contestation, emotions, ethical complexity, vulnerable groups, or otherwise challenging governance issues. We welcome contributions that engage with the conceptualization of sensitive governance research as well as the ethical and methodological questions that arise throughout the research process.
The panel particularly encourages papers that move beyond viewing ethics as a matter of institutional approval or procedural compliance, instead adopting process-oriented and reflexive approaches that recognize ethical decision-making as an ongoing responsibility before, during, and after data collection. Contributions may address, for example, topics such as the limitations of ethics review systems, protecting participants in politically sensitive contexts, ethical challenges in health governance research, conducting fieldwork in conflictual or authoritarian settings, navigating competing ethical responsibilities, or disseminating sensitive research findings.
We are equally interested in methodological contributions that foreground participant and researcher wellbeing. Papers may examine approaches such as trauma-informed interviewing, participatory and collaborative research designs, creative research methods, reflexive fieldwork practices, strategies for managing emotional labour, or institutional support mechanisms for researchers working on sensitive topics. We particularly welcome methodological innovations that integrate ethical responsibility and wellbeing into research design from the outset, rather than treating them as issues to be addressed only when challenges arise.
The panel welcomes both conceptual and empirical contributions employing qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, participatory, or comparative research designs. Methodological reflections based on researchers’ own experiences are also encouraged. We especially invite papers that reflect on established methodological conventions within public administration and political science or that draw on insights from neighbouring disciplines to advance the study of ethics and wellbeing in sensitive governance research.
Chairs:
Wieke Pot (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) wieke.pot@wur.nl
Marij Swinkels(Utrecht University, The Netherlands) E.M.Swinkels@uu.nl
Language: English
Key words: transformation, long-term policymaking, transitions
Description of the panel and themes
Inadequately addressed policy problems lead to calls from science and society that transformative change is needed. Transformative change can be seen as in-depth or system-wide change (Carey et al., 2019), and is sometimes also operationalized as a fundamental change of existing practices, like a change of land use in response to climate change (Harrison et al., 2019). Some scholars treat transformative change as opposite to incremental change; whereas others portray transformative change as something that can also be achieved through incremental but meaningful steps (Termeer & Metze, 2019).
In the literature, there are different governance pathways introduced that could produce transformative change (Termeer et al., 2024). First, rule-base change could help to produce quick and system-wide changes as it institutionalizes required action. Second, big plan approaches start from a vision and long-term plan and can produce deep and system-wide change, especially when a window of opportunity arises to adopt policy change. Finally, small wins are quick but radical local innovations that can produce deep changes when the initiatives offer inspiration and are reproduced by others.
Transformation is also introduced as one of the key capacities of resilience: absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity and transformative capacity (Pot, 2023). Absorption refers to the capacity of a (governance) system to keep delivering key system functions in times of turbulence. Adaptation refers to the capacity of a governance system to flexibly adjust based on changing insights and circumstances. Transformation, then, refers to the capacity of transforming the engrained processes, instruments and responsibilities of a governance system (Folke, 2016; Nightingale et al., 2022) or the capacity of a government to create and embed novelties and produce policies that alter the status quo. A key challenge for the transformative capabilities of today’s governments is the mainstreaming of long-term thinking and integrated thinking into governmental organizations (Hölscher et al., 2019).
Governments that will need to respond to wicked problems, will need to find ways to reflect on their own limitations and capacities for steering societal change. This will require insights into their micro-dynamics, their institutional and regulatory frameworks, their interactions with other actors, the role of politics, and the mechanisms that hinder or enable governments to successfully facilitate bottom-up radical change (Braams et al., 2021).
Within the literature, we can therefore distinguish different strands of scholarship that tries to find answers to how governments can enhance their transformative capacities. For example:
– transformative government: how governments are facilitating or obstructing transitions, how administrative and democratic processes can contribute to system change
– future studies and futures literacy: scholars in future studies put forward different methods for re-imagining the future and opening the solution space. They critically reflect on the capacity of governments to capture the future within the dominant paradigms and decision-support tools that they use.
– resilience: the focus is on helping governments to change their own characteristics and ways of operating in respond to stress and turbulence. How can governments stress-test their own system, monitor signals and seeds of change, and incorporate capacities of flexibility and learning. This can also include the capacities that governments develop to prepare for future climate extremes.
– small wins: the focus is on how governments can facilitate and learn from bottom up, quick and radical new practices that are produced by societal initiatives, frontrunners or businesses. This also aligns well with seeds-based change in which small societal seeds of change are imagined to grow into mature seeds over a longer period of time.
– policy integration: this literature focuses on overcoming the sectoral approaches to present-day policy issues and how governments can find ways to combine their different budgets and departments to facilitate societal transitions.
– long-termism: this literature focuses on how governments can embrace long-term thinking for more anticipatory and inter-generational policy making. How can governments apply and embed new practices like foresight methods, long-term insights briefings and future design; how can governments safeguard long-term interests in dedicated institutional structures; how can governments overcome democratic myopia?
In this panel we want to explore these different approaches to translate insights about what enables transformative change to key characteristics, institutional conditions, and strategies that can enable governments and civil servants to contribute to long-term policy problems.
The panel is part of the NIG colloquium on Robust and Time sensitive governance and builds upon on several ongoing research projects about long-termism, transformative change and transformative government.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
The panel welcomes conceptual and empirical papers focused on the following research questions:
– What institutional conditions enable governments to work on sustainability transitions?
– How can governments adopt more long-term and forward-looking policy capacities?
– How can futuring and imagination help governments to build their transformative capacity?
– How can governments take decisions about sustainability transitions despite uncertainties and required transformative change of existing practices?
– What enables governments to (1) facilitate and upscale small wins, (2) adopt big plans, (3) decide upon rule-changes that enable broader societal change?
– What civil servant tactics, strategies or behaviour can contribute to the transformative capacity of government?
– How can governments mainstream long-term and integrated thinking within their institutional and regulatory frameworks?
– What collaborative governance arrangements and stakeholder engagement methods facilitate meaningful interaction and inconvenient dialogues about transformative change?
– What bottom up governance arrangements can help governments to steer transitions?
– How can governments deal with under-represented and over-represented voices in policy debates, e.g. how to listen more to nature, youth/future generations, citizen initiatives and promising societal initiatives and listen less to the lobbying power of vested interests? How to deal with climate obstruction?
Chairs:
Igor Pessoa (University of Twente, The Netherlands) i.pessoa@utwente.nl
Andre Legarza (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) a.j.legarza@uva.nl
Language: English
Key words: governance footprints, spatial governance, place-based governance
Description of the panel and themes
Governance does not occur in a spatial vacuum. Policies, institutions, participation processes, and governance arrangements shape the physical, social, and environmental characteristics of places, while spatial contexts simultaneously influence governance capacities, stakeholder interactions, and policy outcomes. Yet despite the inherently spatial nature of many contemporary societal challenges, the relationship between governance and space remains relatively underexplored within mainstream Public Administration scholarship.
Traditional Public Administration research has made significant contributions to our understanding of governance networks, institutional arrangements, collaborative governance, participation, accountability, and policy implementation. However, these discussions often pay limited attention to how governance processes become materially inscribed in places and landscapes. At the same time, scholars in urban planning, human geography, regional studies, and environmental governance have long examined the spatial consequences of political decisions, but often without engaging directly with core debates in Public Administration.
This panel seeks to build bridges between these traditions by exploring the spatial implications of governance. It starts from the premise that governance arrangements produce spatial outcomes, and that spatial configurations themselves shape governance processes. Governance is therefore not only exercised through institutions and networks but is also manifested through the production, transformation, and management of space.
The panel introduces the concept of Governance Footprints as a useful lens through which to examine these relationships. Governance footprints can be understood as the observable spatial manifestations of governance arrangements, policy decisions, participation processes, and power relations. These footprints may become visible through patterns of accessibility, land-use change, environmental interventions, infrastructure development, housing provision, segregation, public space design, climate adaptation measures, or the unequal distribution of public resources and environmental risks.
The concept provides a common language for scholars working across disciplinary boundaries. It enables researchers to move beyond questions of how governance is organized and toward questions concerning how governance becomes visible, tangible, and experienced in everyday spaces. At the same time, it encourages greater attention to how local spatial contexts shape governance choices, stakeholder interactions, and policy effectiveness.
The panel is particularly interested in contributions that examine the reciprocal relationship between governance and space. On the one hand, governance arrangements influence the development of cities, regions, infrastructures, landscapes, and public spaces. On the other hand, spatial conditions influence governance capacities, participation opportunities, collaboration structures, and policy implementation processes. Understanding this two-way relationship is increasingly important in addressing contemporary societal challenges such as climate adaptation, housing shortages, energy transitions, urban inequality, environmental justice, mobility transitions, and public space governance.
The panel welcomes conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions from a broad range of perspectives, including Public Administration, Urban and Regional Planning, Human Geography, Urban Political Ecology, Environmental Governance, Policy Studies, Regional Science, and related fields. Contributions may employ qualitative, quantitative, comparative, participatory, or geospatial methods, including the use of GIS, remote sensing, spatial analytics, and mapping techniques to examine governance outcomes.
Ultimately, the panel seeks to stimulate a more spatially informed understanding of governance within Public Administration, while also encouraging planning and spatial scholars to engage more explicitly with governance theories and debates. By bringing together researchers working at the intersection of governance and space, the panel aims to contribute to a growing interdisciplinary research agenda that recognizes governance as both a social and spatial process.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
The panel welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that examine the spatial implications of governance and the ways in which spatial contexts shape governance processes and outcomes. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary contributions that bridge Public Administration, Urban and Regional Planning, Human Geography, Environmental Governance, Policy Studies, and related fields.
Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
• Spatial manifestations of governance and public policy
• Governance footprints and place-based governance
• Spatial dimensions of collaborative governance and participation
• Governance and the production of public space
• Urban governance and socio-spatial inequalities
• Housing governance, segregation, and neighborhood change
• Spatial justice and the territorial distribution of public resources
• Urban Political Ecology and the governance of socio-ecological systems
• Governance of waterfronts, coastlines, green spaces, and urban nature
• The spatial dimensions of energy transitions
• Governance and smart-city technologies
The panel is open to diverse methodological approaches, including qualitative case studies, comparative research, mixed-methods designs, participatory research, spatial analysis, and innovative applications of geographical and geospatial methods to governance questions.
Particular attention will be given to contributions that advance conceptual thinking on the relationship between governance and space, develop methods to identify and measure governance footprints, or generate policy-relevant insights for creating more inclusive, equitable, and context-sensitive governance arrangements.
Chairs:
Bram Klievink(Leiden University, The Netherlands) a.j.klievink@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Shirley Kempeneer (Tilburg University , The Netherlands) S.Kempeneer@tilburguniversity.edu
Language: English
Key words: digital government, AI, data
Description of the panel and themes
Co-convenors: Shirley Kempeneer (TiU), Haiko van der Voort (TU Delft), Sarah Giest (Leiden U.), Albert Meijer (UU), and Bram Klievink (Leiden U.).
Digital technologies are fundamentally reshaping government, public services, and policymaking. Governments increasingly rely on digital infrastructures, data, algorithms, artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and emerging technologies to organize public action, deliver services, and address societal challenges. At the same time, these developments raise important questions about governance, public values, institutions, professional practice, democratic legitimacy, and the relationship between governments, citizens, and technology.
Research in this field has expanded rapidly. While artificial intelligence has become a major focus of recent scholarship, it builds on a much broader body of work on digital government, information management, public sector innovation, data governance, digital services, and socio-technical change. The challenge is therefore not only to understand new technologies themselves, but also how they interact with existing institutions, organizational practices, policy processes, and public values.
This panel welcomes contributions that advance our understanding of digital transformation in the public sector. We invite empirical, theoretical, methodological, normative, and reflective papers on topics including – but by no means limited to – AI, algorithms, government data, digital public services, digital infrastructures, platform governance, digital innovation, information management, digital inclusion, regulation, and the governance of emerging technologies.
We invite contributions that are empirical, theoretical, normative, or reflective in nature. Submissions that cross disciplinary boundaries or involve transdisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged. By bringing together a wide variety of perspectives, we aim to stimulate a scholarly conversation on the current landscape and emerging challenges of AI and digital government, thereby advancing the growing academic field.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
• Public values in relationship to AI and (big) data analytics
• AI applications in the public sector
• AI and policy monitoring and analytics
• Smart cities
• Organisational consequences of digital or algorithmic system in government
• Big data analytics for policy making
• Digital innovations and innovation management in the public sector
• Public sector information management
• AI implementation cases and strategies
• Regulatory issues related to AI, data or digitalisation more broadly
• The politics of algorithms, including the emergence of new professionals
Chairs:
Koen Migchelbrink (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands) migchelbrink@essb.eur.nl
Bernard Bernards (Leiden University, The Netherlands) b.j.t.h.bernards@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Language: English
Key words: citizen-centered services; service delivery; customization
Description of the panel and themes
Public administration exists to serve citizens, yet citizens themselves have long remained surprisingly peripheral in much public administration research (Jakobsen et al., 2019). Governments increasingly seek to organize public services around citizens’ needs, capabilities, and life experiences rather than around organizational procedures and structures. In the Netherlands, this ambition is captured by the notions of maatwerk (customized public service delivery) and the menselijke maat (‘humanization’ of government and services), which have become central to political debate and administrative reforms. Internationally, this trend is also reflected in a growing body of research on topics such as: citizen-state interactions, citizen-centered service delivery, customization, rule-breaking and rule-bending, humanized services, empathy, proactive public service delivery, integrated services, services organized around life-event services, citizen experience, and administrative burdens. Although these strands of research address closely related questions about the place of citizens in public administration, they have largely developed in parallel substantive, theoretical, and methodological paths. This panel embraces this diversity and brings together public administration research of all kinds that examines citizens in relation to public organizations and public service delivery, with the explicit aim of connecting insights across bodies of literature and research teams.
Questions of citizen-centeredness play out at three interrelated levels. First, the level of policy and governance, public organizations are increasingly aware that citizens differ in their needs, preferences, capabilities, and circumstances. Delivering services that are responsive to these differences requires structures that enable balancing customization with consistency, legal certainty, accountability, and equal treatment (Visser, 2024), while ambitions for proactive, life-event, and integrated service delivery often require coordination across organizations and policy domains (Kernaghan, 2009).
Second, at the organizational level, citizen-centered services depend on how organizations design and deliver them. Organizational routines, leadership, team culture, political processes, information systems, and service design all influence the degree to which citizens as individuals are taken into account in service design and implementation (burgerperspectief) and whether they experience services as satisfactory, trustworthy, accessible, responsive, and empathetic (Bernards et al., 2024; Blijleven, 2021; Neo et al., 2023).
Third, at the individual level, citizen-centered public services should be assessed from the perspective of individual citizens and public professionals in citizen-state interactions. Citizens vary in their abilities, digital skills, resources, expectations, and trust in government, meaning that the same service may be experienced very differently across individuals and groups (Christensen et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2021). Meanwhile, public professionals require certain competencies to fit service provision to citizens’ specific abilities, attitudes and expectations (Houtgraaf et al., 2023) as part of discretion (Lipsky, 2010) and to alleviate burdens (Moynihan & Herd, 2015). Thus, understanding individual competencies, needs and experiences is essential for delivering services that are citizen-centered.
This panel welcomes all types of public administration research on citizen-centred public administration, whether the focus lies on policy and governance, on organizational and managerial arrangements, or on citizens’ own experiences. We aim for a conceptually, methodologically and empirically diverse panel. We particularly like to invite contributions on topics like:
• Citizen-centered public organizations and service delivery
• Citizen-perspective (burgerperspectief) in public service organizations, policy and service
• Customization
• Frontline discretion, rule-bending, and prosocial rule-breaking
• Humanized services
• Empathy and compassionate bureaucracy
• Citizen capabilities and vulnerabilities
• Proactive public services and service delivery
• Life-event services and public service design
• Affective frontline work
• Citizen expectations about public services and service delivery
• Citizen experiences and evaluations of public organizations and services
The panel welcomes conceptual, empirical, qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, and work-in-progress research that advances our understanding of citizen-state interactions and citizen-centred public services. We particularly encourage contributions that bridge policy, organizational structures and systems, implementation, and citizen perspectives, thereby helping clarify to concepts, connect insights from different literatures, and deepen our understanding of how citizens relate to, and interact with, public service organizations and public service delivery.
REFERENCES
Bernards, B., Schmidt, E., & Groeneveld, S. (2024). Rebel with a cause: The effects of leadership encouragement and psychological safety on professionals’ prosocial rule-breaking behavior. Public Administration, 102(4), 1323-1341.
Blijleven, W. (2021). Public Bricoleurs: The practice and experience of local civil servants at the frontlines of public engagement [Tilburg University]. https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/public-bricoleurs-the-practice-and-experience-of-local-civil-serv
Christensen, J., Aarøe, L., Baekgaard, M., Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P. (2020). Human Capital and Administrative Burden: The Role of Cognitive Resources in Citizen-State Interactions. Public Administration Review, 80(1), 127–136. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13134
Houtgraaf, G., Kruyen, P. M., & van Thiel, S. (2023). Public sector creativity as the origin of public sector innovation: A taxonomy and future research agenda. Public Administration, 101(2), 539-556.
Jakobsen, M., James, O., Moynihan, D., & Nabatchi, T. (2019). JPART Virtual Issue on Citizen-State Interactions in Public Administration Research. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 29(4), e8–e15. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muw031
Kernaghan, K. (2009). Moving towards integrated public governance: Improving service delivery through community engagement. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 75(2), 239–254. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852309104174
Moynihan, D., Herd, P., & Harvey, H. (2015). Administrative burden: Learning, psychological, and compliance costs in citizen-state interactions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 25(1), 43-69.
Neo, S., Grimmelikhuijsen, S., & Tummers, L. (2023). Core values for ideal civil servants: Service?oriented, responsive and dedicated. Public Administration Review, puar.13583. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13583
Visser, E. L. (2024). Customized interactions: How street-level practitioners, managers, and policymakers accomplish and challenge the provision of customized social services [Doctorate, Radboud University].
Zhang, J., Chen, W., Petrovsky, N., & Walker, R. M. (2021). The Expectancy?Disconfirmation Model and Citizen Satisfaction with Public Services: A Meta?analysis and an Agenda for Best Practice. Public Administration Review, puar.13368. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13368
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
We invite authors to submit theoretical and empirical research that advances our understanding of citizen-centered public service delivery from policy, organizational, technological, implementation, and citizen perspectives. We welcome conceptual papers, empirical studies, and interdisciplinary contributions, as well as research designs (including introduction, theoretical framework, and methodology). We particularly encourage early-career scholars to submit work-in-progress papers to the panel.
Examples of topics are:
• Conceptualizations of citizen-centered public service delivery, including citizen-centricity, human-centered government, menselijke maat, empathy, personalization, and service customization, and how they are implemented
• Governance arrangements, public values, and policy strategies that enable or constrain citizen-centered, proactive, and life-event-based public services.
• Organizational capabilities, leadership, and frontline practices that support customization, empathy, and responsiveness in public service delivery, including professionals’ use of discretion and (prosocial) rule-breaking.
• The role of digital government, artificial intelligence, information systems, and service design in enabling citizen-centered, proactive, personalized, and integrated public services.
• Citizen capabilities, digital inclusion, vulnerability, trust, and their implications for the design and delivery of public services.
• Citizen experiences of public services, including accessibility, responsiveness, fairness, legitimacy, and public value.
• All other topics that examine citizens in relation to public administration, public organizations and public service delivery.
Chairs:
Thomas Hoppe (University of Twente, The Netherlands) t.hoppe@utwente.nl
Tamara Metze (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands) T.A.P.Metze@tudelft.nl
Language: English
Key words: governance; energy transition; climate change
Description of the panel and themes
The governance of energy transitions is becoming more demanding and more contested. Technologies that once appeared mainly as promising solutions increasingly become entangled with questions about costs, public values, social acceptance, justice, institutional responsibilities and competing ideas about the future energy system. Decisions about energy are made across governments, markets and society, often without a single actor being fully in control. Governance therefore shapes not only how quickly transitions proceed, but also which problems receive attention, which solutions become possible and whose interests are reflected in the process. This makes energy transitions a particularly rich field for governance research.
Energy transition research, often rooted in science and technology studies and transition studies, has generated important insights into technological innovation and socio-technical change. Governance scholarship adds another lens by examining how collective decisions are made and how public authority is organized in relation to these changes. Who has the authority to act? How are responsibilities divided across levels of government and between public and private actors? What happens when responsibilities are dispersed across multiple sites of decision-making?
This panel seeks to bring governance research into closer conversation with energy transition studies. We invite contributions that a governance perspective to explore questions such as:
• What happens when energy-transition ambitions collide with other societal challenges, such as housing crisis and nitrogen crisis, and how are the resulting trade-offs governed?
• What social dynamics emerge in neighbourhoods, energy hubs and energy communities, and how do they affect the governance of the energy transition?
• How do governing actors navigate uncertainty, contested responsibilities and conflicting public values?
• Whose interests and experiences are represented in decisions about energy-transition pathways, and which voices remain less visible?
• What can we learn from the complex interactions, messiness and clumsiness of everyday governance practices in the energy transition?
• How do governance arrangements evolve as the energy transition raises new political and geopolitical challenges, such as strategic autonomy?
• What can public governance scholars contribute to the study of energy transitions?
The panel is organized ongoing NIG Research Colloquium on Energy and Climate Governance. Members of the colloquium are currently developing a collaborative paper on what a governance perspectives can contribute to the study of energy transitions. Participants whose work connects to this agenda will be invited to contribute to the further development and writing of this paper where relevant.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
We welcome theoretically informed and empirically grounded contributions from public administration, public governance, energy planning, energy justice, political science and related fields. Papers may focus on different parts of the energy transition, including electricity, heating, mobility, nuclear energy or hydrogen. We are particularly interested in research that studies governing processes in practice and connects empirical developments to wider governance questions. We especially welcome perspectives that are less often heard in current debates, including research on the financing of energy transitions and studies from beyond the Dutch context.
We particularly encourage early-career scholars, PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and practitioners to submit papers. The panel also welcomes practitioners working on energy transitions as their experience can provide valuable insight into how governance challenges emerge in practice.
Chairs:
Reinout van der Veer (Radboud University, The Netherlands) reinout.vanderveer@ru.nl
Puck Overhaart (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) puck.overhaart@ru.nl
Language: English
Key words: European Union; European Governance, European Politics
Description of the panel and themes
This panel is organized by the NIG Colloquium on EU and International Governance, and is open to both members and non-members of the colloquium.
The European Union is under ever-increasing pressure to solve complex societal problems that transcend national borders. Some of these problems unfold over extended periods of time, such as climate change, democratic backsliding and the rise of AI, whereas others seemingly appear as sudden and urgent crises, such as the outbreaks of the various wars and conflicts in the EU’s neighborhood.
At the same time, effective collective problem-solving is complicated by the strong politicization of EU governance at the national level, the rise of the far right at the European level, and the breakdown of the liberal international order, as evidenced by return of Donald Trump and increased great power competition at the global level. This contestation hampers further sovereignty transfers to the EU level, especially in domains that touch on core state powers and involve distributional conflict, while also weakening the EU’s capacity to operate as a player in global politics.
As a consequence, the EU is confronted by an increasingly pressing governance paradox: the EU’s member states are increasingly dependent on each other to solve common problems, but surrendering enforceable competences to supranational institutions is increasingly politically difficult. This paradox between collective action and member state control under conditions of geopolitical instability has had important ramifications for the institutional setup, functioning and outputs of EU governance.
Firstly, in recent years we have seen fundamental changes of an institutional nature. The upsurge of crisis and strengthening role of member states has led to important shifts in power between the EU institutions, as epitomized by the rise of the European Council and increasing manifestation of the European Parliament in the wake of the Treaty of Lisbon. These shifts in power also have important ramifications at the national level. The strengthening of the European Council, for instance, requires a recalibration of national coordination structures and complicates effective scrutiny and control by national parliaments.
Furthermore, to bridge the gap between collective problem solving and national control over implementation and enforcement, the member states have pieced together a European Administrative Space, characterized by composite administrative structures such as European Administrative Networks, comitology committees and European agencies. These developments coincide with a more political, flexible approach to enforcement of policies by EU institutions, which further undermines member states’ commitment to adequate implementation of EU legislation. This includes the weakening of EU commitment to issues it touts as ‘core values’, including the respect for international law, rule of law and human rights.
A second set of changes is attitudinal and behavioral in nature: both EU-level and domestic actors have repositioned themselves in response to these institutional shifts. A key development is the politicization of the European Commission, introduced by Juncker and continued by Von der Leyen. Furthermore, national parliaments have sought to ‘claw back lost powers’ by utilizing newly acquired institutional powers such as the Early Warning System, or improving their information position.
Thirdly, the European governance paradox has played out rather differently in various policy areas. Some areas are characterized by policy stagnation, as is the case for the Green Deal and the EU’s attempts to crack down on ‘Big Tech’. In other areas, rapid and unprecedented collective action ensued in response to crisis, as evidenced by the Recovery and Resilience Fund and the EU’s relatively unified response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s tariff threats.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
We welcome papers on:
1. The domestic public and political attitudes on EU governance, politics and integration;
2. The consequences of this political contestation for the EU’s inter-institutional balance and its effects on EU decision making and accountability;
3. The characteristics, functioning and impact of the different institutional elements of the European Administrative Space (European Administrative Networks, comitology);
4. The implications of these EU-level institutional developments for national systems of EU coordination and control;
5. The various EU policy responses to pressing collective action problems, both of a crisis and non-crisis nature;
6. Member states’ responses to these policies, in terms of compliance, implementation and enforcement;
7. EU institutions responses to these national patterns of policy delivery, e.g. in terms of enforcement.
8. Normative assessments of EU governance, e.g. focusing on notions of transparency, accountability, or legitimacy.
Papers can be theoretical, empirical or normative in nature. We welcome both papers that reflect on these topics in general terms, or in applied terms, i.e. focusing on one or more EU policy areas.
Chairs:
Kim Loyens (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) k.m.loyens@uu.nl
Margot Kersing (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) m.j.kersing@vu.nl
Language: English
Key words: bureaucrats; service delivery; complex environments
Description of the panel and themes
Street-level professionals, like social workers, police officers, inspectors, nurses, or teachers, often determine what, how, and to whom public services are delivered while operating in uncertain and complex environments. They (must) make these decisions while facing limited resources, juxtaposing different (and often conflicting) values, and operating in challenging and changing environments. They simultaneously navigate ongoing developments like digitalization, citizen co-production, regulatory pressures, and responsive lawmaking that can put conflictual demands on street-level bureaucrats. This panel focuses on understanding the impact of those environments on decision-making of street-level professionals and the impact it has on how citizen-clients are evaluated and treated.
First and foremost, street-level professionals must determine how written policies are implemented in real-life situations. These written policies, however, often do not match the complex realities and needs of the citizen-clients with whom street-level professionals interact (Lipsky, 2010). Moreover, policies often involve terms deliberately left open or vague for street-level professionals to interpret (Linthorst & Oldenhof, 2020; Raaphorst, 2018). Theoretically, it is important to understand these interpretations because they could involve or lead to, among other things, value tradeoffs, certain attitudes or enforcement styles, and stereotypes in decision-making (e.g., de Boer, 2019; Harrits, 2019; Keulemans & Van de Walle, 2020; Loyens & Paraciani, 2021; Oldenhof et al., 2014; Raaphorst et al., 2018).
Moreover, to deal with societal challenges street-level professionals increasingly collaborate across organizational and professional borders (Noordegraaf, 2011). Instead of making decisions individually, street-level professionals operate in teams, deliberate with other professionals (Møller, 2020), and sometimes have joint decision-making responsibility (Rutz et al., 2015). The role of frontline managers and citizen-clients in public service delivery changes accordingly. Frontline managers need to operate as boundary spanners to tie together various expectations and ways of working (Loyens et al., 2025). Moreover, citizen-clients are no longer passive receivers of services, but active actors who contribute to this process (Oldenhof & Linthorst, 2022). In this light, it has become ever more important to understand how social dynamics and social relations affect street-level decision-making (Keulemans, 2020).
Lastly, the roles of street-level professionals have been prone to substantial change. Digitalization by means of algorithms and other automated systems have become a core part of how service provision is structured and how professionals and citizens interact (Kersing et al., 2022). In turn, discretion has been partially moved from street-level professionals to those designing the automated systems (i.e., system-level bureaucrats). It is important to understand these changing roles of street-level professionals and their effects because it alters the way individual cases are handled (Bovens & Zouridis, 2002). These changes can, ultimately, lead to street-level professionals altering their behavior towards citizen-clients or unfair treatment of some groups of citizen-clients. Street-level decision-making, thus, has major implications for citizens, who may be discriminated against, differentially treated, or subjected to complex bureaucratic realities.
This panel aims to answer the following questions:
1. What decisions do street-level bureaucrats make and what behaviors and routines do they develop in complex contexts?
2. To whom do street-level bureaucrats direct their efforts and grant access to public resources?
3. How do individual, interactional, organizational, and environmental characteristics impact street-level bureaucrats’ decisions and behavior, including their evaluation and treatment of citizen-clients?
References
Bovens, M., & Zouridis, S. (2002). From street?level to system?level bureaucracies: How information and communication technology is transforming administrative discretion and constitutional control. Public administration review, 62(2), 174-184.
De Boer, N. (2019). Street-level enforcement style: A multidimensional measurement instrument. International Journal of Public Administration, 42(5), 380-391.
Harrits, G. S. (2019). Stereotypes in context: How and when do street?level bureaucrats use class stereotypes? Public Administration Review, 79(1), 93-103.
Kersing, M., van Zoonen, L., Putters, K., & Oldenhof, L. (2022). The Changing Roles of Frontline Bureaucrats in the Digital Welfare State: The Case of a Data Dashboard in Rotterdam’s Work and Income Department. Data & Policy, 4, e24.
Keulemans, S. (2020). Understanding street-level bureaucrats’ attitude towards clients: A social psychological approach. Doctoral dissertation.
Keulemans, S., & Van de Walle, S. (2020). Understanding street-level bureaucrats’ attitude towards clients: Towards a measurement instrument. Public Policy and Administration, 35(1), 84-113.
Linthorst, E., & Oldenhof, L.E. (2020). Maatwerk aan de keukentafel: van ’hoera’ begrip tot betwiste norm. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Bestuursrecht (NTB), 209(8), 511-521.
Lipsky, M. (2010). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public service (30th anniversary expanded edition). Russell Sage Foundation.
Loyens, K., & Paraciani, R. (2021). Who is the (“Ideal”) victim of labor exploitation? Two qualitative vignette studies on labor inspectors’ discretion. The Sociological Quarterly, 64(1), 1-19.
Loyens, K., Douglas, S., Schiffelers, M.J. & Himpers, J. (2025). Behind the frontline: Strengthening service delivery within the police force through enhanced interaction between frontline officers and support staff, paper presented at EGPA conference.
Møller, A. M. (2020). Deliberation and deliberative organizational routines in frontline decision-making. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 31(3), 471-488.
Nielsen, V. L., Nielsen, H. Ø., & Bisgaard, M. (2021). Citizen reactions to bureaucratic encounters: Different ways of coping with public authorities. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 31(2), 381-398.
Noordegraaf, M. (2011). Risky business: How professionals and professional fields (must) deal with organizational issues. Organization studies, 32(10), 1349-1371.
Oldenhof, L.E., Postma, J., & Putters, K. (2014). On justification work: How compromising enables public managers to deal with conflicting values. Public Administration Review, 74(1), 52-63.
Oldenhof, L., & Linthorst, E. (2022). Public encounters and the role of citizens’ impression management. In P. Hupe (Ed.), The politics of the public encounter : What happens when citizens meet the state (pp. 189–209). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Raaphorst, N. (2018). How to prove, how to interpret and what to do? Uncertainty experiences of street-level tax officials. Public Management Review, 20(4), 485-502.
Raaphorst, N., Groeneveld, S., & Van de Walle, S. (2018). Do tax officials use double standards in evaluating citizen?clients? A policy?capturing study among Dutch frontline tax officials. Public Administration, 96(1), 134-153.
Rutz, S., Mathew, D., Robben, P., & de Bont, A. (2017). Enhancing responsiveness and consistency: Comparing the collective use of discretion and discretionary room at inspectorates in England and the Netherlands. Regulation & Governance, 11(1), 81-94.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
We welcome both empirical and/or theoretical submissions. The research scope of our panel includes the micro-level focus of frontline decision-making, behavior and routines, and also welcomes contributions that focus on the meso and macro contexts in which these decisions, behaviors and routines take place.
Furthermore, we welcome submissions from a multitude of research philosophies and (quantitative and qualitative) methods. Methods can include discourse analysis, ethnographic studies, storytelling analysis, interviews, surveys, and experiments.
Since public administration is an interdisciplinary field, we welcome insights from different disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, criminology, and organizational studies. Contributions from other relevant fields are also welcome.
Submitted papers can be full manuscripts, research proposals (including PhD proposals or research designs), or anything in between.
Chairs:
Hester Paanakker (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) h.l.paanakker2@vu.nl
Andrei Poama (Leiden University, The Netherlands) a.poama@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Language: English, Dutch
Key words: administrative ethics, integrity and (anti)corruption, public values, good governance
Description of the panel and themes
This panel aims to feature research on normative questions of good governance, widely understood, i.e. ranging from applied ethics to empirical research on public values and integrity and methodological discussions in the field of administrative ethics. We envision papers on three related themes, but welcome other ideas as well. The first theme would be research on the application of ethical principles to moral questions of public policy and the fulfillment of public office, i.e. concerning behavior, decisions and actions undertaken by individual public servants as holders of specific public offices (including moral judgment, moral disagreement, loyal dissent, whistleblowing); concerning the design, implementation and reform of specific governmental practices in the context of good governance and democratic rule of law; and concerning the design and ordering of specific government institutions and organizations in the context of complex multi-governance networks or different regimes. The second theme would be research on public values and public value conflict, the study of integrity and anti-corruption and public sector reform in light of good governance, democratic erosion and the democratic rule of law. The third theme would be research that engages in meta-theoretical analyses about the disciplinary and methodological commitments of administrative ethics as practiced today. Here, we are concerned with where different methods place administrative ethics in the landscape of contemporary ethical theorizing (e.g., descriptive ethics, normative ethics, meta-normative ethics, meta-ethics).
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
We welcome papers on the three themes outlined above (but welcome other ideas as well) in a variety of approaches. Papers can be mono-, or multi-disciplinary, more theoretically or empirically focused, quantitative and/or qualitative. Grant proposal presentations with a clear innovative and theoretical substantiation, research agenda ideas or PhD pitches are also most welcome. Topics per theme that could be interesting to explore include but are not limited to:
Theme 1: the application of ethical principles
– Ethical reflection on specific individual or systemic actions by public actors, their displayed behavior, moral judgment, moral disagreement, loyal dissent, whistleblowing, etc
– Ethical reflection on events, procedures, legislation and/or specific cases of public policy, such as specific public-private interactions, the functioning of specific organizations or (current or future) legislative schemes, impact of ethics on democracy and rule of law and vice versa
Theme 2: public values, integrity and anti-corruption and public sector reform
– Research and/or ethical reflection on (causes and consequences of) value pluralism
– Research and/or ethical reflection on specific cases of (lacking) integrity or anti-corruption
– Research on and civil service and/or public sector reform and political-administrative relations in the context of good governance, democracy and the rule of law
Theme 3: meta-theoretical analyses
– Discussions on a move from descriptive empirical research to making normative ethical claims about the quality of governance.
– Discussions on methodology of ethical and/or normatively driven research, such as historical archival work, ethnographic research or experimental design.
– Examples of ways in which the empirical study of public administration and politics leads to normative arguments and claims.
Please note: if you have doubts about whether your paper idea fits, please do not hesitate to contact us!
Chairs:
Krista Ettlinger (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) k.m.ettlinger@uu.nl
Martin Rosema (Twente University, The Netherlands) m.rosema@utwente.nl
Language: English
Key words: democratic innovation, citizen participation, democracy
Description of the panel and themes
Democracies world-wide are facing a range of urgent challenges: decreasing citizen trust in government, complicated societal issues requiring policy solutions, and democratic backsliding through the erosion of democratic institutions.
In response to these challenges, many countries have experimented with innovative ways to let citizens participate in the political process. Examples of such procedures that complement the traditional representative institutions are the Dutch national citizens’ assembly on climate policy or Ireland’s combination of a citizens’ assembly and referendum on the issue of abortion and on constitutional provisions about family and care. At the local level, there are even more examples, such as participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, referendums, e-democracy platforms, “right to challenge” procedures, and combinations of these forms.
In this panel, we aim to bring together scholarship from diverse fields and subfields that study citizen participation, to foster intellectual exchange and strengthen connections among researchers studying these developments, and to collectively reflect on the potential of these forms of participation to address the challenges facing democracy today.
Democratic innovations can be studied from multiple perspectives, for example:
• Public administration scholars and political scientists might investigate how innovations are implemented within the political-administrative system and the roles civil servants and politicians play.
• Public administration scholars may analyse how such procedures are best designed in order to foster particular democratic values.
• Political scientists might assess whether such initiatives succeed in including citizens from different demographic backgrounds and in building trust in political institutions.
• Political philosophers might explore how they align with core democratic values, drawing on classic democratic theory.
• Policy specialists may analyse how citizen participation affects established decision-making in their field, such as climate, sustainability or healthcare.
• Legal scholars may reflect on the regulations in place to shape such processes and how they relate to other judicial practices.
These are just some examples of the rich way in which different perspectives can deepen our understanding of the theory and practice of democratic innovation and citizen participation. Through this panel, we hope to stimulate discussion among scholars about what research in this area can contribute to those challenges.
We welcome papers on these and related topics, including the design and effects of citizen participation and democratic innovation at micro, meso and macro level. Topics include, but are not limited to:
1. description, explanation and evaluation of the current state of citizen participation at different levels of government;
2. design of democratic innovations, e.g. how processes are organised in terms of themes, participants, logistics, deliberation, voting procedures;
3. what citizens expect from participation and which roles, guidance or follow-up they would prefer for democratic innovations;
4. elite perspectives on democratic innovations within the context of representative democracy: what drives politicians or civil servants to engage in such processes, how this affects their role perceptions, and which challenges they face in practice;
5. democratic values realised by democratic innovations, such as inclusion, effectiveness, and citizen competences;
6. inclusion of harder-to-reach participants, for example minority groups or youths, and which design features and organisational aspects are most successful in involving them;
7. The role for and effect on organized interests and civil society organisations in relation to citizen participation.
The red thread we urge participants in this panel to consider in their submissions is the context of urgent challenges facing democracy, and the extent to which citizen participation and democratic innovations have the potential to be part of the solution to these challenges. In this way, we hope to connect the vibrant theoretical and academic work on democratic innovation and citizen participation to relevant and urgent societal issues.
While this panel focuses primarily on democratic innovations in the Netherlands and Belgium, contributions addressing other contexts are also welcome. These may be studies of individual cases elsewhere, as well as comparative analyses. Papers may be empirical studies that use any quantitative of qualitative methodology (e.g. case studies, surveys, interviews, focus groups or document study) or theoretical accounts of the rationale and potential for further facilitating participation and deliberation.
We aim for a fruitful mix of senior, mid-career and early-career researchers, and we encourage colleagues in all stages who are interested in these topics to join and share their recent work and work in progress.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
We welcome academic papers focusing on democratic innovation or citizen participation from both theoretical as well as empirical perspectives. Content wise, papers might focus on the preferences of citizens, politicians and civil servants, study how democratic innovation and citizen participation function in practice, or provide theoretical and normative reflections on the involvement of citizens within a broader democratic context. Method wise, suitable papers include those that present in-depth case studies, comparative analyses, survey studies, experiments, content analysis, focus groups or interview studies. Additionally, we welcome practitioner papers detailing cases of democratic innovations at national, regional and local level, reports discussing findings based on data collected among participants and organisers of democratic innovations, and evaluation studies of participation processes.
Chairs:
Jasper Simons (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) j.p.simons@uu.nl
Ferdi De Ville (Gent University, Belgium) ferdi.deville@ugent.be
Language: English
Key words: green transition, political economy, governance
Description of the panel and themes
Prepared by the convenors of the ‘Political Economy of the Green Transition’ NIG Colloquium.
Fabio Bulfone (Leiden University, f.bulfone@fgga.leidenuniv.nl)
Ferde De Ville (Gent University, ferdi.deville@ugent.be)
Jasper Simons (Utrecht University, j.p.simons@uu.nl)
Aneta Spendzharova (Maastricht University, a.spendzharova@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Natascha van der Zwan (Leiden University, n.a.j.van.der.zwan@fgga.leidenuniv.nl)
This panel seeks to examine the politics, policies, and governance of the green transition, particularly in light of political developments that are moving attention away from environmental concerns. The term “green transition” refers to the shift towards a sustainable, climate-neutral economy by 2050, as outlined in the Paris Agreement. Achieving this transition is a complex, multi-level governance challenge that requires coordinated public action across all levels—from local municipalities and national governments to supranational institutions like the European Union (EU)—alongside significant private sector involvement.
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of ambitious policy interventions and generously funded incentive schemes aimed at facilitating the economic transformations required by the green transition. Prominent examples include the EU Green Deal and the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act. However, the green transition’s long-term and transformative nature makes it politically vulnerable—not only to domestic electoral cycles, but also to shifting geopolitical priorities, economic crises, and emerging security threats that increasingly dominate policy agendas worldwide. In the same vein, the current global reordering presents new opportunities for the EU to (re)position itself as global leader in green policies, while increasingly common manifestations of climate change (e.g. droughts, wildfires) might spur increased domestic mobilization and action. This panel seeks to investigate which institutions, policies, and actors actively push for keeping the green transition, and climate action more broadly, high on the policy agenda. Equally, we delve into the sources of opposition to ambitious climate policies.
Theoretically, recent scholarship reflects a growing convergence between political economy and public administration in addressing urgent questions about the role of politics and institutions in driving or impeding the green transition. Shared research interests—such as the design of state institutions, the role of expertise in policymaking, and the political dynamics of policy implementation—provide fertile ground for interdisciplinary dialogue.
This panel aims to build on that productive engagement by combining theoretical and empirical insights from these fields to explore three interconnected themes:
1. Institutional Governance and Policy Instruments:
How are public institutions and agencies maintaining attention to the green transition at (sub)national and cross-border levels? For example, the EU’s Green Deal seeks to catalyze green technology innovation, industrial transformation, and broad societal adoption of renewable energy. Yet governments also deploy alternative tools—such as off-balance-sheet financing mechanisms or regulatory mandates in private markets—some of which have recently been backtracked or substantially weakened. This raises questions not only about effectiveness, but also about legitimacy, transparency, and public accountability. How are these instruments coordinated across EU institutions and member states? Are they coherent and politically sustainable? Do they enjoy public support amid increasing geopolitical fragmentation?
2. The Role of Organized Interests and Stakeholders:
How do interest groups—such as businesses, labor unions, environmental NGOs, and civil society actors—influence the direction and persistence of green transition policies? As the transition often generates distributional conflicts, especially between environmental goals and the socio-economic interests of carbon-intensive sectors (e.g., agri-food or petrochemicals), it becomes highly politicized. Organized interests or individual actors as large transnational firms can maintain political attention to the green transition but also try to weaken it in order to prioritize other policy issues (e.g. agriculture, housing). How do policymakers mediate these tensions? What compromises are struck with legacy industries that are simultaneously economically strategic and environmentally problematic? And what role do private actors and other stakeholders play in the implementation of green policies and their long-term persistence required for effective, structural decarbonization outcomes?
3. Political Constraints and Strategic Trade-offs:
What are the major political and economic obstacles to implementing the green transition as well as opportunities for greater European autonomy, for example, in renewables? Key challenges include uncertainty about market uptake of green technologies, intense lobbying from high-emissions industries, and escalating global competition over critical raw materials essential for clean energy production. These materials—often controlled by a few global players—have become focal points in international negotiations between the EU, China, the United States, and others, sometimes undermining long-standing climate commitments. How do domestic and geopolitical dynamics reshape national and international environmental agendas in the EU? And what does this mean for the EU’s (weakened) position as frontrunner of green technological development and emissions reduction?
Considering the long-term nature of the green transition, its successful implementation depends on stable political support from elected officials, continued access to public funding, and regulatory requirements such as policy stability and transparency. Recently, the strong political backlash in the U.S. from the Trump Administration and the rollback of previous ambitious green initiatives by the von der Leyen EU Commission also indicate the political vulnerability of policy packages already put in place to facilitate the green transition. These examples of politicization, and even erosion, of green transition policy targets and actions in major global jurisdictions call for further research into the drivers of resilient green transition policies.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
In general, we invite paper submissions that employ political economy and/or public administration theoretical approaches. We aim to create fruitful dialogue between these approaches. We also welcome a wide range of methodological approaches and research designs engaging with the themes above, ranging from qualitative single and comparative case studies to large-n statistical analyses. We encourage young scholars to submit papers based on dissertation articles and chapters (work in progress). The chairs will strive to ensure a constructive atmosphere and detailed discussion of each paper to develop the manuscripts further in line with the publication goals of the authors.
Furthermore, we warmly welcome dialogue with practitioners from the Dutch and other European public administration organisations working on these matters. Hence, this panel is also open to practitioners who would be interested in discussing practical policy insights and ongoing policy work in the field of the green transition.
Chairs:
Rianne Warsen (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands) warsen@essb.eur.nl
Scott Douglas (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) s.c.douglas@uu.nl
Language: English
Key words: networks, collaborations, partnerships
Description panel and themes
Collaboration between organizations is increasingly propagated as the best possible solution to deal with complex policy issues (Head, 2022; Raab, 2024), such as water security, urban development, energy transition, poverty, and improving service delivery. Collaboration in networks also gains ground as a pathway for innovation (Verhoest et al., 2024) and crisis management (Kapucu and Demirhan, 2019).
While networks connect interdependent actors to exchange information or pool resources (e.g. financial resources, staff, expertise, competencies, legitimacy) to achieve a public purpose (Klijn et al., 2025), managing these networks and other collaborative arrangements has proven to be challenging (Kenis, 2026). This panel will explore several key issues to achieve effective network and collaborative governance.
For example, extant research has shown how challenging it is to get the structural design ‘right’, to organize productive interaction and learning processes, to pacify power struggles, and do all this during the full lifecycle of the collaboration (Keast et al. 2023; Raab, 2024).
The panel also hopes to explore questions about accountability and learning. Both political principals and regulators still need to adapt to the new network reality on the ground, highlighting the need for innovative practices.
We approach this issue from different levels: the macro level (e.g. institutional structures that shape the network’s operational context), the meso level (e.g. governance arrangements concerning issues and sectors, and the micro level of management capacity of public and non-public organizations to operate (in) networks as well as their strategies, perceptions, interests.
Papers seeking to make a theoretical contributions in relation to these questions are welcome, just as papers that provide empirical evidence for current theoretical assertions. We explicitly welcome different types of methodology, and papers employing novel methods for engaging with these questions – ranging from new data analytical methods to transdisciplinary action research strategies are also invited.
The panel offers a supportive environment for all scholars seeking to improve their work, featuring contributions from early career and established scholars, with people hailing from across the NIG network and beyond.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
In this panel, we invite papers dealing with networks and collaborations between organizations; theoretically, empirically, and practically. The co-chairs will engage with participants to discuss their work, but also want to collectively discuss overarching questions, such as the mismatch between network ambitions and governance capacity and the need to promote innovative practices for accountability and learning. We welcome papers addressing a wide range of topics related to governance networks and collaborations, including:
1. The specific role(s) of governments in creating/maintaining network governance capacity & the instruments that can be used;
2. The democratic questions related to impact and governance capacity, addressing tensions between license to operate, legitimacy, and accountability;
3. The role of learning and innovation in collaborations and new methods for stimulating these;
4. The tensions faced by individuals when caught between the desire for horizontal collaboration and the forces of the vertical hierarchies of their home organizations;
5. The trade-offs between various aspects, including potential trade-offs between accountability, autonomy, learning, and effectiveness.
Chairs:
Ben Suykens (Gent University, Belgium) ben.suykens@ugent.be
Arjen de Wit (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) a.dewit@vu.nl
Language: English
Key words: nonprofit, civil society
Description of the panel and themes
Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are key actors in the public administration field (Pandey & Johnson, 2019). Covering a broad range of service fields, NPOs can (a) supplement the government by providing services that governments fail to provide, (b) complement the government by providing services on behalf of the government in exchange for public funding, and/or (c) take an adversial stance towards the government by advocating for policy change on behalf of their constituents (Young, 2000). Doing so, NPOs can among other things collaborate with governments in public-private networks (e.g., Cornforth, Hayes, & Vangen, 2015), function as governmental stand-ins in the coproduction of public services (e.g., Larsson, 2023), facilitate public-civic interactions by mitigating administrative burden (e.g., Tiggelaar & George, 2025) or influence public policy by taking an insider- or outsider approach (e.g., Johansen & LeRoux, 2013).
This panel welcomes theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions studying public-nonprofit relationships from a nonprofit- or an integrated public-nonprofit perspective. Topics include, yet are not limited to:
1. Public-nonprofit financing – In corporatist welfare state regimes like Belgium and the Netherlands, public-nonprofit relationships are typically described as institutional partnerships in which NPOs receive public funding in exchange for public service delivery (Suykens, De Rynck, & Verschuere, 2020). Here, important research questions include, yet are not limited to, the dynamic between charitable donations and governmental funding (e.g., De Wit & Bekkers, 2017), the so-called creeping shift from lump sum- to project-based funding (e.g., Bode, 2011) and the tension between restricted and unrestricted public financing of NPOs (e.g., Wiepking & de Wit, 2024).
2. Public-nonprofit accountability – A perennial debate, one of the key questions is arguably the search for boundary conditions under which public accountability demands are purposeful for both the government (control of efficient and effective use of public spending) and the NPOs (facilitating organizational learning and stakeholder communication). Complexity is infused by the knowledge that both public accountability and nonprofit performance are best understood as multi-layered concepts that can materialize in different ways (Ebrahim, 2003; Suykens, Hvenmark, Hung, & Verschuere, 2025), and that contextual factors at the organizational, field and country level are likely to affect the public accountability – nonprofit performance nexus in different ways.
3. A shrinking or shifting space for NPOs – Relative recent research describes how the discretionary space of NPOs is increasingly limited in (quasi-)authoritarian countries (Toepler, Zimmer, Levy, & Fröhlich, 2023). Examples of shrinking space mechanisms constitute the limitation of self-organizing rights, suppression of NPOs’ critical voice towards the government and/or decreasing access to transnational funding (Onyx et al., 2010; Toepler, Zimmer, Fröhlich, & Obuch, 2020). Here, challenging questions constitute to what extent shrinking space dynamics can be observed in Western welfare state types that are considered non-authoritarian, which mechanisms drive said manifestations and what the main consequences are. In addition, a more provoking question may be to what extent the idea of a shrinking space is better understood as a shifting space, as this dynamic may produce so-called winners and losers. Indeed, while (subtle) regime shifts may limit the maneuvering space for some NPOs, it may actually enlarge it for others.
4. Public-nonprofit responsibilities in service delivery – This theme explores the critical role of unpaid workers in service delivery, with a particular focus on their interaction with government policies and expectations. It explores the dynamics of replacement and displacement between paid and unpaid work, highlighting how (local) governments increasingly rely on volunteers and informal caregivers to deliver social services. While volunteering may have a unique value in terms of the outcomes on the micro, meso and macro level (De Wit et al., 2009; Van Overbeeke, 2024), the reliance of governments on unpaid work can lead to significant challenges (De Waele & Hustinx, 2019). Research may critically assess the assumptions behind government policies; study antecedents, consequences and experiences of unpaid work on different levels; and examine dynamics between governments and the voluntary sector when it comes to delivering crucial social services.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
This panel welcomes theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions studying public-nonprofit relationships from a nonprofit- or an integrated public-nonprofit perspective.
Chairs:
Julia Penning de Vries (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) j.penningdevries@uu.nl
Martin Sievert (Leiden University, The Netherlands) m.c.g.sievert@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Language: English
Key words: public leadership, public management, human resource management (HRM)
Description panel and themes
This panel proposal is developed in close collaboration with Professor Brenda Vermeeren (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Professor Ben Kuipers (Leiden University) and endorsed by the PUPOL Academic Network Public and Political Leadership.
Moreover, this panel is a joint effort of two previous panels presented at earlier NIG conferences: “The Multiple Levels of Public and Political Leadership” (part of the PUPOL Colloquium) and “Managing and Leading Employees in Public Organizations.”
Public organizations increasingly operate in an environment characterized by persistent labor shortages, rapid technological developments such as AI, geopolitical uncertainty, societal polarization, and increasing demands to create multiple forms of public value simultaneously. To address these complex and multifaceted challenges, leadership and managing people across multiple levels of the public domain are indispensable. Public leadership and Human Resource Management (HRM) play an important role in dealing with these challenges. They enable public organizations and – importantly – public (frontline) employees to navigate complexity, balance competing demands, strengthen institutional resilience and adaptability, respond to continuous change, and ensure the continuity of public service delivery. For instance, public organizations such as schools, hospitals, police units, municipalities, must simultaneously address labor shortages, demographic change and diverse stakeholder expectations, while continuing to deliver high-quality public services.. Successfully navigating these interconnected challenges requires, leadership and HRM that strengthen organizational resilience, adaptability, and the continuity of public service delivery.
To understand the functioning, antecedents, and impacts of both leadership and HRM, especially within the public domain, much more attention for the many aspects, multiple layers, various levels, and the interactions between them, is needed (Kuipers & Murphy, 2023; Vermeeren, 2025). Hence, this panel invites contributions that examine how leadership and HRM at different levels – both separately and in conjunction – enable public organizations and professionals to navigate competing demands, create public value, and enhance service performance. The panel is intentionally broad in scope, welcoming diverse research within the field of public and political leadership, managing people and (strategic) HRM. By bringing together scholars working at the intersection of leadership and HRM in the public and political domain, we seek to foster exchange and integration between these two fields, which have largely developed in parallel but often pursue similar objectives.
To provide structure to this broad topic, the panel adopts a framework that considers leadership and managing people in three directions: inwards, upwards and outwards.
The inwards perspective concerns one of the more dominant ones in leadership and managing people. Public employees play a critical role in the performance of public organizations and services (Leisink et al., 2021). High-quality education depends on skilled teachers, effective healthcare requires professional health workers, and public safety relies on capable police officers. Consequently, the management and leadership of public employees has long been recognized as a central element in the effective administration of public organizations (O’Toole & Meier, 2009). Both leadership and HRM scholars have shown a sustained interest in understanding how to effectively manage and influence employees (Leroy et al., 2018), also emphasizing the relevance of employees’ perspectives (e.g. Jacobsen & Andersen, 2015; Penning de Vries & Knies, 2022). Building on previous work, we argue that advancing our understanding of employee management in public organizations requires an integrated approach that brings together insights from both public leadership and HRM research.
The outwards perspective concerns a growing field of interest in the role of leadership and public professionals working with a diversity of stakeholders and network collaborations (Crosby & Bryson, 2010). Working on the boundaries between (public) organizations to contribute to societal value requires new competences and work arrangements that support both organizational goals as well as those of the network collaborations (e.g., Huxham & Vangen, 2013). Additionally, we aim to explore the leadership roles and behaviors of public professionals working in these settings that often lack formal leadership power due to the networking constellations (Akerboom et al., 2024)
The upwards perspective involves the way leadership and management deal with political-administrative relationships (Hartley et al., 2019). As such it concerns matters of political astuteness and acting in complex stakeholder settings. This is the direction of leadership and developing competences of public professionals in various positions to acquire the resources needed to deliver the required public services and contribute to societal value. It concerns developing strategies for public organizations and policy fields involving strategic competences not only at top managerial levels, but in all relevant positions (Christensen, 2021).
Accordingly, this panel welcomes contributions from scholars in both broader fields that focus on the management and leadership of people working in the public domain, and on how such efforts shape public value creation and service performance within and between public organizations.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
We welcome a wide range of submissions, including theoretical or conceptual papers, empirical studies, and research proposals (such as PhD projects or research designs). As noted in the previous section, the panel embraces contributions that address a broad spectrum of topics related to leadership, managing people and/or HRM within the political and public domains. We particularly encourage submissions that explore the intersection of HRM and leadership with the societal challenges currently confronting public organizations.
Chairs:
Hessel Bos (Nijmegen School of Management/ Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) hessel.bos@ru.nl
Dr. Carola van Eijk (Leiden University, The Netherlands) c.j.a.van.eijk@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Language: English, Dutch
Key words: citizen initiatives, co-production, dynamics of interaction
Description of the panel and themes
After the success of last year’s panel, we would like to continue the ongoing and stimulating debate on the dynamics of citizen participation. Societal challenges such as climate change and the shortage of personnel in elderly care can no longer be addressed by government actors alone. As a result, citizens are increasingly taking responsibility through collective initiatives aimed at contributing to the resolution of these complex, or ‘wicked’, problems. For consistency, we use the term citizens to refer to a broad range of collective, not-for-profit activities directed at public goods, values, or policies, including co-production, co-creation, community-based initiatives, citizen collectives, and social innovation. Citizen involvement can take various forms and levels of intensity, ranging from loosely connected activities to more structured and sustained collaborations with public authorities. For example, citizens may voluntarily collaborate with local governments to conduct energy scans that help households reduce their energy consumption, while local authorities support these efforts through funding, expertise, and organizational assistance.
Furthermore, citizens’ interactions with governments are not limited to collaboration. It is common for CBIs and citizen collectives to start out of a dissatisfaction or disagreement with government policy or (a lack of) service delivery that (initially) spawns more adversarial interactions (Edelenbos et al., 2020; Gofen, 2012). Initiatives might also deliberately shun collaboration with government, for example when trying to reach marginalized groups with a high distrust towards government. But also in co-production, the arrangement can be involuntary or even enforced (McMullin, 2025), or collaborations could evolve into different interactions if co-producing citizens shift towards community and/or market domains (Bos et al., 2025).
Yet, regardless of the form these initiatives take and how they relate exactly to public authorities, citizens will and have to interact. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that sustained, long-term government-citizen interactions will play an important role in resolving wicked societal challenges. Moreover, the great dynamics of interaction are not limited to interaction with public authorities alone. Within the initiative, citizens have to organize themselves and consider for instance their working procedures and internal structures. Across the borders of the initiative, it is crucial for citizens to interact or at least to be aware of how they relate to non-participants and society at large. This includes the balancing act among the general interest and the interests of citizens involved within the initiative, the question of how public value can be achieved, and the continuous search for representativeness and inclusiveness.
This panel invites contributions that focus on the great dynamics of interaction; within initiatives like co-production and CBIs, between citizens and government, and between citizens and society at large. How do the interactive dynamics between citizens, governments and society at large evolve over time, and what does this mean for the governance capacity to address wicked societal challenges? We are welcoming both empirical research and conceptual proposals that can advance our understanding of it.
We identify four core elements that warrant further investigation in relation to the central question:
1. Sustaining successful initiatives: While the existing literature provides substantial insights into how successful citizen involvement emerges, highlighting key early-stage factors such as trust, motivation, and self-efficacy, the focus is now gradually shifting towards understanding their long-term impact. What does productive collaboration with government look like at different stages of initiatives?
2. Sustaining internal structures and working procedures: While citizen–government collaborations often emerge around a specific goal, the internal organization of citizens is typically less defined than their overarching aims. Understanding how citizens develop and maintain their operational structures while over time the scope and activities are extended is therefore essential.
3. Shifts in actor involvement and roles: A key area of interest is who becomes involved in the collaboration and how roles evolve. As experience accumulates and the external environment changes, actors may adopt different positions from those initially envisioned, and new actors such as commercial parties may enter the mix. How do these developments change the dynamics of interaction? Explications of (shifts towards) non-interactions, where governments and citizens do not engage with each other, are also of key interest.
4. Representation and legitimacy: whom do these collaborations represent and with what legitimacy? Do the citizens involved act on behalf of a broader community, or do they merely lend support to governmental actions? To what extent can/should we assess the legitimacy of (different forms of) citizen initiatives and government actors along the same standards? Moreover, how does all this change over time?
We intend to organise this panel partly in the same format as last year. An open discussion will welcome contributions related to the topic from any stage of the research process, with the aim of supporting participants in advancing their research and fostering constructive scholarly exchange. In addition, we will organise a more closed session dedicated to the book proposal that emerged from last year’s fruitful panel discussions. During this session, contributors will discuss both the theoretical chapters and empirical contributions to ensure coherence and alignment across the volume. This panel will be organised by Dr. Carola van Eijk (Leiden University), Dore Engbersen (Wageningen University) and Hessel Bos (Radboud University).
References
Bos, H., Zwaan, P., & Brandsen (2025). After the Initial Start of Co-Production: A Narrative Review of the Development of Co-Production and Changes in Orientation. Sustainability, 17(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17030971
Edelenbos, J., & Meerkerk, I. V. (2016). Critical reflections on interactive governance: Self-organization and participation in public governance. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Edelenbos, J., Molenveld, A., van Meerkerk, I., Healey, P., & Gofen, A. (2020). Positioning and Conceptualising Community-Based Initiatives in Waves of Civic Engagement. In J. Edelenbos, A. Molenveld, & I. Van Meerkerk (Eds), Civic Engagement, Community-Based Initiatives and Governance Capacity. Routledge.
Gofen, A. (2012). Entrepreneurial Exit Response to Dissatisfaction with Public Services. Public Administration, 90(4), 1088–1106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2011.02021.x
McMullin, C. (2025). “We’re not there to lead”: Professional roles and responsibilities in “citizen-led” co-production. Public Administration Review, 85(1), 165–175. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13770
Types of papers and themes we welcome
We welcome all types of contributions, whether early-stage research proposals or papers ready for submission. Theoretical papers that explore the dynamics of interaction and the long-term development of citizen initiatives in any form are particularly relevant. While the long-term objectives of co-production and related practices have not been a central focus in the literature, some studies do refer to them implicitly. Empirical work is equally valuable, and we particularly encourage the use of underrepresented research designs within this field. This includes, for example, quantitative approaches, experimental methods, or longitudinal studies that move beyond the traditional single case study model.
The research may focus on one of the mentioned concepts, such as co-production, community-based initiatives (CBIs), co-creation, or any other form of citizen initiative that requires collective effort from citizens to generate public services or public goods. We encourage researchers to take an integrated perspective that considers all actors involved in the collaboration and focuses its analysis on the dynamics of interaction. However, research that contributes to a better understanding of one of the actors involved in the collaboration is also welcome.
We welcome both solution-oriented research that aims to explain/understand how to leverage the relationship between government and citizens’ initiative in order to address societal challenges, and critically oriented research that aims to problematize elements of this relationship, including examination of underlying social structures and processes.
Following last year’s panel, the panel chairs developed a book proposal that has been accepted for publication by Boom Publishers. Alongside the open panel for all conference participants with an interest in this topic, we will organise a separate, more closed session for contributors to the volume. This session will serve as a forum for discussing the draft chapters and strengthening the overall coherence of the book project.
Chairs:
Erna Ruijer (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) h.j.m.ruijer@uu.nl
Federica Fusi (VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands) f.fusi@vu.nl
Language: English
Key words: data, digital equity, digital transformation
Description of the panel and themes
Digitalization in the form of online public services, social media, open government data, public engagement tools, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence, has fundamentally re-shaped the interaction between government bureaucracy and the public (Peeters & Widlak 2023; Bovens & Zouridis, 2002; Marienfeldt; 2024; Dunleavy & Margetts 2025). Digitalization is enabled by both innovations in government capacity to collect, process, and utilize data, as well as the development of new digital tools to enhance public service delivery and participation. This digital transformation has been justified by efficiency and effectiveness gains (Dunleavy & Margetts 2025; Mergel et al., 2019), but scholars, practitioners, and citizens express growing concerns about the impact of digitalization on other public values, particularly social equity and inclusion (Ruijer et al. 2023).
Social equity broadly describes concerns on the disproportionate distribution of access, procedural treatment, quality, and outcomes of digital public services (Ruijer et al 2023) reflected in government willingness (or lack thereof) to design and deliver digital services based on the needs of different society groups (Cepiku & Mastrodascio, 2021). Inclusion is a multi-faceted concept distinguished by the degree to which individuals are part of (digital) democratic and organizational processes, by the extent to which they have access to government information and digital information services, and have the digital skills to participate and influence decision-making processes (Ruijer & Piotrowski 2022). Digital equity and inclusion regard both digital technologies and their underlying data infrastructures (Ruijer et al., 2023: Peeters and Widlak, 2023), representing a wicked problem, which is hard to define and to solve.
In the past decade, several studies of digital equity and inclusion have been produced outside of the public administration field, which has meant that little attention has been dedicated to their implications for public service delivery (Ruijer et al 2023). PA scholarship is filling this gap at a fast pace, with a growing number of studies investigating – for example – how data-assisted decision-making contributes to equity and inclusion goals, for instance by expanding access to government services and reducing administrative errors and biases in interactions with bureaucrats (Compton et al 2023). Other studies have examined how online interfaces (Schwoerer, 2025; Fusi et al 2023) might include or exclude societal groups because of how they are designed and conceptualized. Scholars have also examined exclusionary mechanisms triggered by digital technologies because of skill and access divides, which limit access to benefits and services for vulnerable populations and exacerbate unequal outcomes (Busuioc 2021; Moynihan et al 2025; Peeters & Widlak 2023; Young et al 2019). More recently, researchers have raised new concerns over complexities in terms of ownership, transparency, and accountability brought by the use of data-assisted technologies developed by third-party companies and used by the government, which might impact equity and inclusion and even justice in service provision (Ruijer et al 2023).
While the challenges and opportunities associated with digitalization for social equity and inclusion are increasingly on the public sector agenda, it is timely to take stock of our academic understanding of their implications and impacts, which is still fragmented, not in small part because of the variety of definitions and conceptual frameworks used. This panel aims to bring scholars together with empirical and conceptual papers examining the implementation of policies, programs, and initiatives that address the relationship between the digital transformation and social equity, inclusion, and/or investigating their impact and implications for public administration practice and research. The panel aims to map exclusionary mechanisms emerging in digital transformation, including but not limited to digital administrative burdens, gaps in data infrastructure and integration, data-assisted decision-making, and algorithmic bias (Moynihan et al 2025; Peeters, 2023). The panel also focuses on identifying mechanisms that can foster equity and inclusion efforts, such as open government and transparency programs, UX design, and data equity frameworks.
References
Bovens, M., & Zouridis, S. (2002). From street?level to system?level bureaucracies: How information and communication technology is transforming administrative discretion and constitutional control. Public administration review, 62(2), 174-184.
Busuioc, M. (2021). Accountable artificial intelligence: Holding algorithms to account. Public administration review, 81(5), 825-836.
Compton, M. E., Young, M. M., Bullock, J. B., & Greer, R. (2023). Administrative Errors and Race: Can technology mitigate inequitable administrative outcomes?. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 33(3), 512-528.
Dunleavy, P., & Margetts, H. (2025). Data science, artificial intelligence and the third wave of digital era governance. Public Policy and Administration, 40(2), 185-214.
Fusi, F., Zhang, F., & Liang, J. (2023). Unveiling environmental justice through open government data: Work in progress for most US states. Public Administration, 101(3), 1088-1114.
Gooden, Susan T. Race and social equity: A nervous area of government. Routledge, 2015.
Marienfeldt, J. (2024). Does digital government hollow out the essence of street?level bureaucracy? A systematic literature review of how digital tools’ foster curtailment, enablement and continuation of street?level decision?making. Social Policy & Administration, 58(5), 831-855.
Mergel, I., Edelmann, N., & Haug, N. (2019). Defining digital transformation: Results from expert interviews. Government information quarterly, 36(4), 101385.
Moynihan, D., Hybschmann, M., Gimborys, K., Loudin, S., & McClellan, W. (2025). Digital administrative burdens and clawback logics: the Australian Robodebt scheme. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, gvaf011.
Peeters, R., & Widlak, A. (2018). The digital cage: Administrative exclusion through information architecture–The case of the Dutch civil registry’s master data management system. Government Information Quarterly, 35(2), 175-183.
Peeters, R. (2023). Digital administrative burdens: An agenda for analyzing the citizen experience of digital bureaucratic encounters. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 6(1), 7-13.
Ruijer, E., Porumbescu, G., Porter, R., & Piotrowski, S. (2023). Social equity in the data era: A systematic literature review of data?driven public service research. Public Administration Review, 83(2), 316-332.
Ruijer, E., & Piotrowski, S. (2022). Introduction to the special issue on Inclusion and E-Government: Progress and Questions for Scholars of Social Equity. Information Polity, 27(4), 425-432.
Schwoerer, K. (2025). Designing with end-users in mind: principles and practices for accessible, usable, and inclusive open government platforms. In Research Handbook on Open Government (pp. 239-252). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Young, M. M., Bullock, J. B., & Lecy, J. D. (2019). Artificial discretion as a tool of governance: a framework for understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on public
administration. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2(4), 301-313.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
Specifically, our panel seeks high-quality papers that focus on topics such as:
• State-of-the-art academic thinking about the digital transformation and inclusion/exclusion of individuals and different groups in society;
• Equity, fairness, and inclusion in automated (AI) decision-making systems and underlying data infrastructures;
• Open (data) government programs and how they shape diverse participation in policymaking, particularly alignment with needs and preferences of underrepresented groups;
• Theoretical and practical explorations of the different types of equity (distributional, procedural fairness, process equity and outcomes; Gooden 2015) and how they relate to the digital transformation, public engagement, and service delivery;
• Critical analysis of the relations between the digital transformation and social equity, inclusion and justice, and service delivery and program implementation;
• Studies of the impact of digitalization on social equity and inclusion in different policy domains such as welfare, housing, education, health, criminal justice, environmental justice, and civic space;
• Organizational and institutional studies exploring more inclusive approaches to the design, deployment, and implementation of government digital technologies;
• Organization- and individual-level studies examining the integration of equity-oriented processes and procedures in government agencies as well as studies examining how public managers deal with equity
• Best practices of initiatives, policies, programs, and administrative processes that advance social equity, inclusion, and justice through digitalization;
• Mechanisms and measures for assessing digital transformation impacts on social equity and inclusion.
Chairs:
Carlos David Rivera-Chosco (University of Twente, The Netherlands) c.d.rivera-chosco@utwente.nl
Iris van Dongen (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands) i.j.a.vandongen@essb.eur.nl
Language: English
Key words: cross-sectoral collaboration, integrative approached, integrative governance
Description of the panel and themes
Governance of the built environment is becoming increasingly complex as society faces multiple, overlapping transitions, such as the energy transition, climate adaptation and the move towards a circular economy. As climate change pushes global temperatures beyond the 1.5-degree limit (C3s, 2025), the urgency of pursuing sustainable futures in an integrative manner continues to grow. Hitherto, these transitions have been studied and governed in a relatively siloed way. There is abundant governance literature on the energy transition, water management, climate adaptation, circular economy, and so on, while governments lay out policy ambitions that recognize the interdependencies between these domains to a limited extent. As a result, competing spatial demands in the built environment often force trade offs rather than enabling cross sector synergies, a dynamic reinforced by fragmented financing and administrative cycles (Kuitert, 2021). Construction activities linked to the energy transition could, in principle, be leveraged to improve climate resilience—such as by integrating blue green infrastructure—while the material intensity of low carbon technologies ties energy policy directly to circular economy challenges. Despite these overlaps, policy and implementation remain largely siloed.
These trade offs and missed opportunities are not confined to physical space; they also emerge across life cycle and supply chain systems. Nitrogen emissions from livestock manure, for example, undermine nature conservation objectives and simultaneously constrain biogas development intended to support the energy transition. Such cases illustrate how environmental pressures and resource flows are deeply interconnected, making integrated approaches across physical, ecological, and operational domains essential. Still, actors from different sectors such as national, regional and local governments, private companies, knowledge institutes, NGOs and local grassroots are crucial for safeguarding integrative, sustainable outcomes but remain embedded in hierarchical and fragmented structures.
In response, “integration” has gained traction in research and practice, invoked to capture efforts to increasingly align actors, sectors, scales and values when deemed appropriate. However, while public actors typically adopt structured, goal oriented approaches such as policies and regulations that fit within bureaucratic structures (Williams et al., 2020), the notion of what exactly should be integrated (and how), often remains underspecified and differs across disciplines (Trein et al., 2021; Tosun & Lang, 2017; Candel & Biesbroek, 2016; Briassoulis, 2004). These traditionally sector-based approaches assume a solid knowledge base and measurability of values, suitable for many technical (e.g. physical infrastructure) and spatial (e.g. housing) issues (Kuitert & van Buuren, 2022). They are commonly embedded in linear decision making sequences: identifying the problem, formulating objectives, planning, implementing, and evaluating (De Bruijn & Herder, 2009). Yet, in the face of climate related uncertainties and interdependencies, such conventional strategies increasingly fall short (Ansell et al., 2023) and result in bounded rationality that can derail long term, adaptive, integrative governance efforts because appropriate governance mechanisms and policy instruments are lacking.
Further, varying theoretical conceptualizations around integration and integrative governance limit cross-sectoral conversations and complicate practically shaping integration for implementation (Runhaar, 2016). It remains especially unclear whether integration refers to combining policy domains, aligning instruments, coordinating across government levels, reconciling values, synchronizing time horizons, etc. Moreover, it is rarely addressed when integration is deemed sufficient and/or under what conditions it may be appropriate. While the literature addresses topics such as policy integration (Candel & Biesbroek, 2016), administrative coordination reforms (Trein et al., 2021) or integrated spatial planning and multifunctional assets (Vigar, 2009; Pozoukidou, 2020), a critical discussion on alternative forms of integration such as notions related to stakeholder, scalar, temporal and value integration receive less attention.
Building on last year’s edition of the Integrative Governance for Sustainable Futures panel, this year’s edition will further the debate on what exactly integrative governance entails – conceptually, empirically and methodologically. The understanding of integrative governance put forward in this panel is rooted in the debates around policy integration in public administration. The concept initially emerged in marine policy (Underdal, 1980) and has since expanded to cover topics related to (environmental) concerns across sectors such as housing, water management, environmental policy and food production (see Biesbroek, 2021; Candel & Biesbroek, 2016; Lafferty & Hovden, 2003). Related ideas, such as boundary judgements and boundary spanning (Williams, 2002; Bressers & Lulofs, 2010) and mainstreaming (Uittenbroek et al., 2013; Baack et al., 2024), highlight the multidimensional nature of such an integrative approach. This suggests that integration is not limited to policies, but also involves actors, institutions and practices. As multiple actors and sectors need to collaborate beyond their institutional domains, questions arise about how different institutional boundaries converge (Klijn & Koppenjan, 2016; Vandenbussche et al., 2025). While this has led some to portray integration as a kind of ‘holy grail’ in public decision-making (Keast et al., 2007; Biesbroek, 2021), the proliferation of different definitions and understandings across disciplines has made the concept elusive and contested, complicating a clear understanding of what integration entails and how it should be pursued in practice (e.g. Trein et al., 2021; Tosun & Lang, 2017; Runhaar, 2016).
Ultimately, this panel edition will not only discuss individual papers but aims to synthesize the discussion surrounding integrative governance into a perspective paper that presents a shared definition of integrative governance, including a workable categorization of its key components and dimensions.
Types of papers and topics expected as submissions to the panel:
In this panel, we aim to foster a debate around what exactly integrative governance entails. We therefore invite papers that explicitly unpack the different forms of integration, practical (design) solutions, and innovative methods to capture understandings.
To facilitate the discussion, we welcome papers on:
– Exploring the interplay between fragmentation and integration in governance paradigms and identify key factors influencing integrative outcomes in spatial and infrastructure planning and policy;
– Developing research methodologies and indicators to track (successful or failed) integrative governance across domains, including scalar, temporal and functional dimensions;
– Analysing the influence of formal (e.g. regulations and organizational structures) and informal (e.g. professional cultures, routines) institutional boundaries shaping cross-sectoral policy integration and goal prioritization with spatial implications;
– Investigating the role of ambidexterity and boundary-spanning activities in designing integrative governance arrangements;
– Examining how friction, dialogue and learning are organized (or suppressed) in integrative governance contexts;
– Developing solutions for integrative actor interaction processes across domains, levels of implementation and over time;
– And others ….
This panel seeks to foster a deeper understanding of integration challenges and opportunities, encouraging contributions that offer theoretical insights and practical applications in the built environment. By addressing these sub-objectives and topics, we aim to enhance the effectiveness of policy-making, implementation and interaction processes pursuing an integrative approach.
Chairs:
Wouter de Rijk (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) w.k.j.derijk@uu.nl
Simone van de Wetering (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) S.A.L.vdWetering@tilburguniversity.edu
Language: English
Key words: critical public administration, interpretive research, reflexive governance
Description of the panel and themes
This recurring panel provides a home for scholars employing critical and interpretive approaches to public administration. Building on previous editions, this year’s panel explores the increased relevance of these traditions in a period of profound political, institutional and epistemic transformation.
Critical and interpretive public administration offers a distinctive way of studying governance. Rather than treating policies, institutions and administrative practices as self-evident and ‘out-there’, critical and interpretive approaches examine how these are produced, negotiated and contested in practice. Think about, for instance, an ethnographic account of front-liners’ everyday practices or a Foucauldian discourse analysis of climate policy. Although critical and interpretive traditions differ in important respects, they share a commitment to reflexive scholarship that questions taken-for-granted assumptions about governance and public administration.
Critical and interpretive approaches have only gained relevance as across many liberal-democratic societies, longstanding assumptions about expertise, public institutions and the role of universities are increasingly contested. Political polarisation, democratic backsliding, geopolitical conflict, and technological transformation are reshaping the environments in which both public administration and academic research operate. These developments challenge long-standing assumptions about the relationship between science, expertise, governance and democracy. They invite scholars not only to analyse changing policy processes, but also to critically examine the university itself as a governance actor and to reflect on the role of researchers within the worlds they study.
The panel therefore welcomes contributions that examine changing relationships between:
– Governance in a changing political landscape;
– The science-policy relationship;
– Universities, knowledge production and public administration;
– Reflexivity in interpretive research.
This includes both empirical analyses and conceptual or methodological reflections. Possible entry points include debates around academic freedom, societal engagement, institutional racism, activist scholarship, knowledge co-production, civil service protest and the governance of emerging technologies.
As in previous years, this panel aims to provide a dedicated space for dialogue among scholars employing critical and interpretive approaches. Such scholarship is often dispersed across substantive conference themes, despite sharing common theoretical, methodological and epistemological concerns. By bringing these contributions together, the panel seeks to foster intellectual exchange across empirical domains and further strengthen critical and interpretive public administration as a vibrant research community.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
We welcome a diverse range of contributions – including, but not limited to, traditional academic papers, work-in-progress, methodological reflections, research proposals and other innovative formats – that engage with critical and/or interpretive approaches to public administration. Contributions may address a wide variety of empirical settings, conceptual debates or methodological questions. In particular, we invite submissions that explore one or more of the following themes:
Governance in a changing political landscape. We welcome contributions examining how contemporary political transformations are reshaping public administration, including challenges to technocratic governance, democratic contestation, geopolitical conflict, civil service protest, and the influence of emerging institutional actors such as large technology companies. We are particularly interested in work that critically examines how changing political contexts affect governance practices, institutions and public values.
The science-policy relationship. We invite abstracts that investigate the changing role of expertise in policymaking and governance. Relevant topics include science-policy interfaces, the relationships between universities and governments, knowledge co-production, reciprocal and community-engaged research, as well as the ethical and political dimensions of knowledge production and engaged scholarship.
Universities, knowledge production and public administration. We encourage contributions that treat universities themselves as objects of critical inquiry. This may include studies of universities as governance actors, their role in contemporary political and societal debates, questions of inclusion, exclusion and institutional racism, or broader analyses of the politics of academic institutions and knowledge production.
Reflexivity in interpretive research. Finally, we welcome conceptual and methodological contributions that reflect on the practice of critical and interpretive public administration itself. Such papers might examine the researcher’s role in policy processes, the normative commitments of critical scholarship, reflexive methodologies, or the epistemological and ethical challenges of conducting interpretive research in politically contested settings.
Chairs:
Johanna Koehler (Public Administration & Policy, Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands) johanna.koehler@wur.nl
Merel Laauwen (Public Administration & Policy, Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands) merel.laauwen@wur.nl
Language: English
Key words: slow-onset environmental crises, crisis framing, system transformation
Description of the panel and themes
Slow-onset environmental crises
Slow-onset environmental crises, such as drought, water quality decline, heatwaves, and energy shortages, share a common temporal and political structure despite substantial physical differences. Such crises have also been referred to by scholars as “creeping environmental problems” (Glantz, 2008), “creeping crises” (Boin et al., 2020; Boin et al., 2021), and “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011). Unlike sudden-onset disasters, these crises build gradually, often remaining latent or politically contested until a critical threshold is crossed: a reservoir falling below a critical level, a heat-mortality spike, a wildfire season overwhelming suppression capacity, or an energy grid facing extreme pressure. Furthermore, these types of crises often exhibit similar risk dynamics, where delayed political or public recognition paired with governance systems built for stability, are ill equipped to deal with unpredictability, or in some cases, scarcity of resources.
Across these crisis types, a recurring governance cycle can be observed. Initially, a certain risk image, frame, or narrative takes hold; for instance, a crisis can be constructed as a climate emergency demanding urgent departure from business-as-usual, or alternatively, a slow-onset crisis can be downplayed as an anomaly requiring incremental adjustment or no change at all. This framing shapes the policy responses that follow, whether temporary emergency measures or more durable institutional change. In some cases the crisis becomes a genuine inflection point, catalyzing transformation in how a sector, city, or region is governed; in many others, response reverts to pre-crisis governance once acute pressures subside. This panel explores this governance cycle, from framing, contestation, policy response, to potential for transformation, across a diverse set of environmental crisis types.
Why this, why now?
The past decade has seen a marked rise in slow-onset environmental crises across various domains: high-profile “Day Zero” water supply crises (e.g. Cape Town 2018, Chennai 2019), increasingly severe and frequent heatwaves (e.g. Central Asia 2025, Sahel 2024), and longer and more destructive wildfire seasons (e.g. France & Spain 2026, Canada in 2023 and 2025, South American Rainforest in 2024), amongst other crises. These events are not always one-off shocks; in many cases they recur, which further reinforces the need for proactive, transformative, or radical shifts in environmental governance. This trajectory poses a pressing challenge for public administration and policy: governance systems designed around assumptions of environmental stability are increasingly required to manage volatility and unpredictability. A shift from reactive crisis response toward transformative governance is widely called for, yet remains only partially understood empirically and theoretically, particularly across crisis domains and institutional contexts.
In this panel, we welcome research examining the following:
• Crisis framing. How are slow-onset environmental crises initially constructed, problematized, and communicated? We welcome analyses of (dominant) storylines and risk narratives, media coverage and agenda-setting, political and administrative discourse, and the gap between elite messaging and public perception. We are also interested in work comparing framing dynamics across crisis types (e.g. water scarcity, heatwaves, wildfires, and energy shortages) to explore whether they are framed through similar or divergent logics. In this line of thought, we welcome research that traces how framing choices shape which responses become politically and administratively conceivable and ultimately viable.
• Contested narratives. How are crisis frames and/or narratives contested? Relevant themes include the emergence of counter-narratives, disinformation and misinformation dynamics, the tension between marginalized and dominant perspectives on causes and responsibility, and the distributive and inequality dimensions of crises.
• Crisis response. How do administrations and institutions respond once a crisis is recognized? Themes include emergency policy-making and its institutional constraints, short-term versus long-term policy response strategies, institutional adaptation and learning, (mal)adaptive practices, and the coordination challenges facing multi-actor governance during crisis periods.
• Transformative governance. Do crises catalyze durable governance transformation? We welcome papers on systemic policy shifts, deliberative and participatory governance innovations, and efforts to build long-term resilience in response to crises. We are equally interested in papers examining incomplete, stalled, or contested transitions. Many, if not most, crises do not lead to lasting institutional change; therefore, this panel seeks to better understand why some crises act as inflection points for transformation, while others revert to pre-crisis modes of governance.
Scope
We invite research investigating cases in both the Global North and Global South, and are especially interested in comparative papers bridging the two, given that framing, contestation, and governance response dynamics may differ across development and institutional contexts.
The panel is methodologically open. We welcome qualitative case studies, discourse and narrative analysis, stakeholder mapping, mixed-methods designs, and quantitative research, provided the analysis speaks to the panel’s central concern with how slow-onset environmental crises move from framing through response to potential transformation.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
We welcome papers addressing any stage of the panel’s crisis governance cycle: from framing, contestation, policy response, to transformation. Research may be applied to any slow-onset environmental crisis, including but not limited to water stress, water quality and pollution, heatwaves, wildfires, and energy shortages.
Topics of particular interest include:
• Comparative framing analyses across crisis types or geographies (e.g., how “climate emergency” framing succeeds or fails to travel across domains: ranging from water, pollution, heat, and energy crises)
• Media, political, and administrative discourse analysis of crisis narratives
• Counter-narratives, (mis/dis)information, and contested responsibilities
• Distributive and inequality dimensions of crisis exposure and response
• Emergency and crisis policy-making, including institutional adaptation under acute pressure
• Multi-level and multi-actor coordination challenges during crisis response
• Deliberative, participatory, or resilience-oriented governance innovations
• Explanations for why some crises catalyze institutional transformation while others revert to pre-crisis modes of governance
• Urban-rural tensions in crisis governance (e.g., water allocation, land-use, or resource competition between cities and hinterlands)
• Comparative Global North-South analyses
We welcome both single-case and comparative studies, and are methodologically open to qualitative, discourse-analytic, mixed-methods, and quantitative contributions. Theoretical and conceptual papers engaging with risk governance, cultural theory, narrative policy frameworks, disaster and crisis management, or transformative/adaptive governance literatures are equally welcome, even where not anchored in a specific empirical case.
In line with NIG’s general encouragement, we particularly welcome submissions from early career scholars, including PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers.
Chairs:
Silke Herms (Leiden University, The Netherlands) s.b.herms@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Erik-Jan van Dorp (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) g.h.vandorp@uu.nl
Language: English
Key words: political-administrative relationships, bureaucratic resistance, democratic backsliding
Description of the panel and themes
Recent years have witnessed significant changes in the relationship between politics and the bureaucracy. Across Europe and beyond, governments increasingly operate in contexts characterized by political polarisation, populist contestation, democratic backsliding, and growing public scrutiny. These developments have sparked renewed debates about the role of civil servants, political neutrality, administrative responsiveness, bureaucratic autonomy, and democratic accountability. At the same time, civil servants themselves have become more visible actors in public debates, organising around issues such as climate change, the war in Gaza and Palestine, digital autonomy, artificial intelligence, and diversity and inclusion. Civil servants have signed open letters, voiced concerns through internal and external channels, participated in collective actions, and questioned organizational decisions on legal, professional, or moral grounds. At the same time, governments have responded in different ways, ranging from facilitating employee voice to emphasizing neutrality, discipline, and loyalty. Developments in the United States following the re-election of Donald Trump, including renewed debates about political loyalty, the independence of the civil service, and the dismissal or replacement of career officials, as well as increasing criticism of bureaucracies by populist parties across the continent further underscore the contemporary relevance of these questions.
For public administration scholars, these developments revisit longstanding questions about the role of civil servants in democratic governance. How are relationships between politicians and bureaucrats changing? How do political leaders seek to influence or challenge bureaucracies? When does employee voice strengthen public administration, and when does it undermine democratic accountability? When does loyalty to political or organizational leadership constitute professional responsibility, and when can loyalty itself become a form of complicity? How should public servants navigate competing obligations to elected officials, the law, professional ethics, colleagues, and the public interest? These questions emerge urgently not only in contexts of democratic erosion, but also in consolidated democracies where polarization and populist pressure create perceived tensions between political responsiveness and constitutional obligations.
This theme builds on a rich body of scholarship, both in the Netherlands as internationally. Hirschman’s classic framework of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty remains highly relevant for understanding the choices available to public servants confronted with disagreement or ethical concerns. Likewise, Rosemary O’Leary’s work on guerrilla government demonstrates that bureaucratic resistance and dissent are not new phenomena, but enduring features of public administration. More recently, Kucinskas’ The Loyalty Trap has renewed attention to the tensions between institutional loyalty, moral conviction, and democratic responsibility. At the same time, broader literatures on political-administrative relations, bureaucratic responsiveness, politicization, administrative neutrality, and public leadership provide important perspectives for understanding how changing political environments reshape the relationship between governments ad public servants.
By bringing together scholars working on political-administrative relations, civil servant activism, loyalty, dissent, public leadership, and democratic governance, this panel aims to advance our understanding of how relationships between politics and the bureaucracy are evolving at a time of increasing political polarization, democratic contestation, and institutional change. More broadly, the panel asks what it means to be a loyal and democratically responsible civil servant– and how politicians, managers and public organizations navigate these evolving expectations?
Types of papers and themes we welcome
We invite papers that examine contemporary developments in political-administrative relationships and their implications for democratic governance. This includes, but is not limited to, research on activism among civil servants and its implications for Public Administration theory and government practice. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore bureaucratic dissent, politicization, political responsiveness, public leadership, and changing expectations regarding the role of the bureaucracy.
Chairs:
Jeroen Candel (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) jeroen.candel@wur.nl
Robbert Biesbroek (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) robbert.biesbroek@wur.nl
Language: English and Dutch
Key words: policy integration, transformative change, public policy
Description of the panel and themes
Governments are increasingly expected to respond to problems that are chronic, interconnected and systemic. Climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequality, resource insecurity and geopolitical turbulence do not fit comfortably within established administrative boundaries or conventional policy sectors. Their interactions generate cascading effects, difficult trade-offs and profound uncertainty. Addressing such challenges therefore requires more than isolated interventions or marginal improvements. This has resulted in two strands of research: policy integration and transformative change.
Policy integration is commonly presented as an essential condition for governing these type of challenges. By coordinating objectives and instruments across policy domains, administrative levels and organizational boundaries, policy integration promises to reduce contradictions, exploit synergies and produce more coherent responses. Other research has called for transformative change: fundamental shifts in the institutions, structures, practices and power relations through which societies meet their needs.
The relationship between policy integration and transformative change remains surprisingly underdeveloped and may contain an important paradox. Established approaches to policy integration frequently begin from existing institutions, policy domains and governance arrangements. They seek to incorporate new concerns into established decision-making systems or optimize policy mixes by improving coordination, coherence and consistency. Although such processes may generate valuable change, there is the risk these changes remain incremental and bounded by prevailing objectives, administrative structures and distributions of authority. Integration can consequently become a means of accommodating new ambitions within existing systems rather than questioning the systems themselves.
Transformative change, by contrast, implies disruption rather than accommodation. Transformations are system-wide, contested and inherently uncertain. They involve non-linear processes through which existing institutions, interests and ideas may be destabilized, displaced or reconfigured. Transformative governance may require experimentation, the creation of alternatives, the dismantling of unsustainable arrangements and the redistribution of resources and authority. From this perspective, integration around existing priorities may constrain rather than enable transformation. Attempts to reconcile competing objectives can dilute transformative ambitions, protect incumbent interests or produce lowest-common-denominator solutions. Striving for policy coherence may even reinforce an established but unsustainable trajectory.
These possible tensions give rise to important theoretical and practical questions. Does policy integration indeed primarily optimize existing systems, while transformation requires breaking away from them? Can integration accommodate the conflict, uncertainty and disruption inherent in transformative change? When does policy integration build transformative capacity, and when does it stabilize the institutional arrangements that need to change? Must integration itself become transformative and, if so, what would distinguish transformative policy integration from conventional forms of coordination and coherence?
Policy integration and transformative change may also be mutually reinforcing. Transformations require connections across policy domains, levels of government, public and private actors, and different forms of knowledge. Integration may help align emerging innovations, build coalitions for change and connect experimentation to broader institutional reform. It may create the capacity needed to navigate trade-offs, coordinate interventions across systems and sustain long-term directionality. Conversely, a transformative perspective could enrich policy integration by directing greater attention to power, conflict, institutional dismantling, policy feedback, political contestation and the creation of new development pathways.
The panel welcomes theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contributions that investigate the foundations of policy integration and transformative change scholarship. Papers might examine whether these bodies of thought understand systems, institutions, agency, causality and change in compatible ways, or whether their underlying premises produce fundamentally different approaches to governance. We particularly invite contributions that develop new concepts or analytical frameworks or critically assess whether such a synthesis is theoretically possible and normatively desirable.
Empirical contributions may investigate how policy integration enables, redirects, dilutes or obstructs transformative ambitions in areas such as climate, energy, agriculture and food, biodiversity, mobility, the circular economy, health and social policy. Papers might examine integration across sectors, jurisdictions and levels of governance, as well as the administrative capacities, institutional arrangements and forms of leadership through which integrated transformations are pursued. Comparative and longitudinal studies can be particularly valuable for identifying the conditions under which different forms, degrees or sequences of integration contribute to transformative outcomes.
The panel also encourages research on the politics of this relationship. Integration is not a neutral or purely technical undertaking: decisions about which objectives should be integrated, whose knowledge counts and which trade-offs are acceptable are inherently political. Contributions may explore how power, incumbency, contestation and distributional conflict shape the integration of transformative objectives. Research on policy coherence and conflict, policy layering, policy mix development, institutional lock-in, destabilization, policy termination and deliberate dismantling can help clarify whether integration can facilitate not only the creation of new arrangements but also the phasing out of established ones. Analyses of unsuccessful, contested or incomplete transformations are especially encouraged, as these may expose dynamics obscured by a focus on apparent successes.
The panel is open to qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method research, including comparative case studies, interpretive analyses, process tracing and longitudinal designs. It also welcomes constructive critiques that question whether the proposed paradox exists.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
The panel welcomes theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contributions that investigate the foundations of policy integration and transformative change scholarship. Papers might examine whether these bodies of thought understand systems, institutions, agency, causality and change in compatible ways, or whether their underlying premises produce fundamentally different approaches to governance. We particularly invite contributions that develop new concepts or analytical frameworks or critically assess whether such a synthesis is theoretically possible and normatively desirable.
Empirical contributions may investigate how policy integration enables, redirects, dilutes or obstructs transformative ambitions in areas such as climate, energy, agriculture and food, biodiversity, mobility, the circular economy, health and social policy. Papers might examine integration across sectors, jurisdictions and levels of governance, as well as the administrative capacities, institutional arrangements and forms of leadership through which integrated transformations are pursued. Comparative and longitudinal studies can be particularly valuable for identifying the conditions under which different forms, degrees or sequences of integration contribute to transformative outcomes.
The panel also encourages research on the politics of this relationship. Integration is not a neutral or purely technical undertaking: decisions about which objectives should be integrated, whose knowledge counts and which trade-offs are acceptable are inherently political. Contributions may explore how power, incumbency, contestation and distributional conflict shape the integration of transformative objectives. Research on policy coherence and conflict, policy layering, policy mix development, institutional lock-in, destabilization, policy termination and deliberate dismantling can help clarify whether integration can facilitate not only the creation of new arrangements but also the phasing out of established ones. Analyses of unsuccessful, contested or incomplete transformations are especially encouraged, as these may expose dynamics obscured by a focus on apparent successes.
The panel is open to qualitative, quantitative and mixed-method research, including comparative case studies, interpretive analyses, process tracing and longitudinal designs. It also welcomes constructive critiques that question whether the proposed paradox exists.
Chairs:
Kelsey Wentling (University of Twente, The Netherlands) kelsey.wentling@utwente.nl
Maike Gebker (Leibniz University Hannover, Germany) gebker@umwelt.uni-hannover.de
Language: English
Key words: adaptive management, climate resilience, implementation processes
Description of the panel and themes
In response to the impacts of climate change on both urban and rural landscapes, projects are increasingly implemented to both sustain human development and enhance resilience to climate uncertainties. Often framed as green infrastructure or nature-based solutions, these initiatives aim to strengthen the adaptive capacity of landscapes by bringing together ecological processes, technical interventions, and social capacities to enable landscapes to better withstand and recover from climatic extremes. While both research and practice have focused on the implementation of such projects, less attention is given to the long-term ability of projects to meet climate resilience goals on the landscape scale. As a result, it remains uncertain to what extent projects deliver their intended long-term climate resilience outcomes beyond their initial implementation phase.
As projects move beyond their initial implementation phase, important questions arise about how they can remain effective once funding ends, project consortiums dissolve, unexpected events alter implementation trajectories, or policy priorities shift. Ensuring that climate adaptation measures continue to deliver long-term benefits under changing conditions requires adaptive governance approaches that support their ongoing implementation, maintenance, and adaptation over time.
This panel explores how adaptive governance can support the transition from project implementation to resilient landscape management. It focuses on the governance arrangements, institutional capacities, and collaborative mechanisms needed to embed climate adaptation measures into planning and management strategies. Rather than treating implementation as the final step, it is an ongoing process that requires continuous learning, monitoring, maintenance, and adaptation as environmental and societal conditions evolve.
The discussion will address key governance challenges associated with the long-term implementation of climate adaptation measures. It will address questions such as: How can planning processes account for climate uncertainties while supporting implementation over time? Who is responsible for monitoring, maintenance, and adaptive management once projects are completed? How are costs, benefits, and risks distributed among stakeholders, and who is empowered to make decisions as circumstances evolve? How can governance arrangements integrate justice in the long-term management of climate adaptation measures? Which governance models and planning frameworks are best suited to support long-term adaptation?
Particular attention will be given to the gap between ambitious project objectives and the realities of long-term implementation. While climate adaptation projects often introduce new approaches, their continued success depends on whether these practices can be integrated into existing institutional structures, operational routines, and decision-making processes. The panel will explore how governance mechanisms, financing arrangements, and institutional innovations can support the transition from temporary interventions to embedded landscape management practices that remain effective under changing conditions.
This panel contributes to ongoing debates on climate adaptation by shifting attention from the implementation of individual projects towards the governance conditions that enable their long-term continuation and transformation. It brings together perspectives that move beyond technical solutions to examine the social, institutional, and political dimensions of climate resilience. By exploring how responsibilities are negotiated, commitments are sustained, and practices are adapted under changing conditions, the panel aims to generate insights into how climate adaptation measures can become embedded within governance and landscape management. In doing so, it contributes to identifying practical governance approaches that support more resilient landscapes.
Types of papers and themes we welcome
The panel welcomes theoretical and empirical papers exploring how adaptive governance can support the long-term implementation and management of climate-resilient landscapes. Contributions from diverse landscape contexts, including urban, rural, and peri-urban areas, are encouraged.
We invite papers addressing how long-term commitment to climate adaptation can be fostered beyond temporary projects and funding cycles. Relevant topics include long-term financing strategies, maintenance and ownership arrangements, and the roles of stakeholders in sustaining climate adaptation measures. Contributions may explore pathways for institutionalising climate-resilient landscapes and other nature-based solutions, including the politics of long-term care, responsibility, and decision-making.
The panel also welcomes research on adaptive planning approaches that support decision-making under uncertainty, including futures-oriented methods such as backcasting and scenario planning. Papers may examine governance models, institutional arrangements, stakeholder engagement, and transdisciplinary approaches that enable climate adaptation measures to become embedded in everyday planning and management practices. Papers may further examine how adaptive governance approaches can promote justice by addressing inequalities in participation, resource allocation, and the distribution of risks and benefits associated with climate adaptation.
Relevant contributions may come from fields including futures studies, landscape planning, governance, public administration, stakeholder management, and transdisciplinary research. The panel seeks to bring together diverse perspectives on how landscapes can be governed, maintained, and adapted over time to support long-term climate resilience.
Chairs:
Jesse Ruwette (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) j.ruwette@vu.nl
Pascal Koenig (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) p.d.koenig@vu.nl
Language: English
Key words: AI, public values, public governance
Description of the panel and themes:
How can public organizations integrate AI while adequately balancing public values to solidly place humans at the center of bureaucracy? The panel brings together research that addresses this question from different perspectives. What ties them together is a central ambivalence and tension that arises with artificial governance. On the one hand, many governments begin or plan to widely adopt AI – including Generative AI – to modernize and to address, among other issues, budgetary and personnel constraints. The promise of AI for government is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the civil service. On the other hand, an increasingly artificial bureaucracy and governance can diminish the role of humans, to the extent that AI erodes human discretion and ways of knowing, thereby sidelining or undermining important public values that guide civil servants in their daily work.
Artificial intelligence is often introduced into public governance as a neutral efficiency tool, for instance as a faster way to detect fraud, predict risk, or a cheaper way to answer citizens’ questions. Yet, this framing obscures what is genuinely new about AI as a governance technology. AI systems arrive at outputs based on formal models (including very complex and opaque ones) which are non-deterministic in nature, whereas humans internalize rules, principles and values through training and learned experience, thereby enabling them to apply them on a case-by-case basis. AI’s core affordances are to enhance prediction and to automate what can be standardized, which requires flattening complex human situations into quantifiable inputs. Thereby, AI use systematically favors what can be easily measured (performance, effectiveness, efficiency) while distributing its costs across a much wider and less quantifiable space of values, including accountability, fairness, privacy and human dignity.
Crucially, much of what is lost when integrating AI in public organizations is difficult to detect, also because its consequences are of a systemic nature and concern the very nature of public organizations. The costs of new technologies are rarely distributed evenly. Those who benefit from efficiency gains are often visible and vocal, while those who lose – for instance through misclassification, loss of autonomy or the quiet erosion of professional judgment – often do not know they are losing until the consequences have already materialized. A host of recent scandals around the use of algorithms in public administration illustrate how this invisibility compounds harm. These cases illustrate how algorithms are used in ways that, through their scalability and rigidity, can produce massive harm to large groups of citizens.
In addition, while AI systems can function as a powerful an appealing heuristic for judgment, they invite organizations to outsource decisions that are moral and normative, even when those decisions are dressed in the technical language of accuracy and optimization. Outsourcing normative decisions to stochastic systems without preserving the discretion, accountability and tacit knowledge that bureaucratic deliberation has traditionally provided, risks hollowing out precisely the human-centered processes that give public governance its democratic legitimacy.
When public organizations adopt AI without properly aligning it with existing bureaucratic structures, they risk treating the widely documented preference for human involvement in high-stakes decisions as a friction to be optimized away, rather than as a signal about the democratic function that human judgment performs. To avoid this, it is imperative for public agencies to harmonize the strengths and weaknesses of AI and human workers, thereby enabling the careful balancing of important public values. Hence, this panel welcomes submissions that engage with value-based, human-centric approaches to AI integration in public governance.
Types of papers and themes we welcome:
This panel invites contributions that move the field from broadly identifying which values are at stake towards a more specific, situated and constructive engagement with AI’s value implications in public governance. These contributions can be categorized in three broader perspectives. First, we are particularly interested in papers that examine the contextual conditions under which AI applications generate distinct value trade-offs, moving beyond generic accounts of drivers and barriers of adoption toward granular analysis of specific cases, both cautionary and promising. We are also interested in contributions on value interdependencies: public values are interdependent, and co-sustaining. Where the introduction of AI sidelines a specific value (e.g. transparency), this can have a systemic domino effect for related ones that serve as prerequisite for the realization of others (think: transparency and accountability; or accountability and trust). Second, we welcome work exploring how AI can be deliberately designed and deployed toward values beyond efficiency and performance, for instance, using AI to detect discrimination, improve equality of treatment, or expand access to services through translation, transcription or proactive communication with citizens who might otherwise miss out on entitlements. Lastly, we welcome work that addresses questions around how existing power relations among policymakers, system developers, vendors and street-level bureaucrats shape how values are articulated and contested and which values are prioritized, protected or neglected as AI is adopted.
Chairs:
Luke van de Wouw (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) luke.vandewouw@wur.nl
Shira Huizing Lemstra (Delft University of Technology) s.k.huizinglemstra@tudelft.nl
Language: English
Key words: justice, governance
Description of the panel and themes:
Justice has become a central concern across governance research. Scholars increasingly examine issues such as climate justice, social justice, procedural fairness, democratic legitimacy, and equity in public policy. Yet these debates often develop in parallel. Some focus primarily on the justice of governance processes, how decisions are made – while others are concerned with whether governance ultimately produces just outcomes. These perspectives are typically understood as separating between procedural and substantive justice. Although both perspectives are fundamental to the study of governance, their relationship remains underexplored.
This panel proposes to approach ‘justice in governance’ (procedural) and ‘governance for justice’ (substantive) as two complementary but analytically distinct perspectives. Justice in governance refers to the fairness, legitimacy, and inclusiveness of governance processes, concerning questions of participation, accountability, transparency, representation, and procedural legitimacy. Governance for justice, by contrast, focuses on the capacity of governance arrangements to produce substantively just outcomes, including equitable distributions of resources, recognition of diverse groups, environmental sustainability, social inclusion, and intergenerational justice.
We believe that the frequently drawn distinction between procedural and substantive justice raises important theoretical, empirical, and methodological questions. Can governance be considered just when it follows fair procedures but consistently (re)produces unjust outcomes? Conversely, can governance that pursues fair outcomes be justified when it fails to follow just procedures? How should policymakers, street level bureaucrats, and practitioners navigate situations in which procedural and substantive justice appear to conflict? These tensions are increasingly visible in contemporary governance challenges, including in housing, food, migration, climate, sustainability, and spatial planning.
This panel invites scholars to critically examine the relationship between procedural and substantive justice and go beyond the dominant assumption that they naturally reinforce each other. In some contexts, procedural justice may enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of policies that promote substantive justice. In others, procedural requirements may slow or constrain urgent action, while outcome-oriented interventions may raise concerns about democratic accountability or fairness. Understanding these trade-offs is essential for both governance theory and public administration practice.
The panel welcomes contributions from diverse theoretical traditions and methodological approaches. We encourage conceptual, normative, empirical, historical, comparative, interpretive, and mixed-methods research. Relevant theoretical perspectives may include, but are not limited to, theories of justice, democratic governance, public administration, public policy, legal theory, political philosophy, institutional analysis, and critical governance studies.
By bringing together scholars working across different policy domains and disciplinary traditions, the panel aims to stimulate dialogue on how governance research conceptualizes justice and how justice can be better integrated into governance scholarship. We plan to do so through a panel that starts with short presentations, each followed by questions and feedback from a keynote listener, and finally an open discussion between presenters and the audience.
Types of papers and themes we welcome:
We welcome papers that explore the relationship between procedural and substantive justice in governance from theoretical, empirical, comparative, or methodological perspectives. Contributions may examine justice as a characteristic of governance processes (‘justice in governance’), governance as an instrument for achieving just outcomes (‘governance for justice’), or the tensions and synergies between these perspectives.
We welcome contributions that cover:
– Topics such as legitimacy, participation, transparency, accountability, democratic governance, equity, in/exclusion, and the rule of law;
– Across policy fields such as health, housing, food, migration, security, climate, sustainability, and spatial planning;
– In the form of theoretical and empirical analyses, normative and philosophical approaches, or methodological reflections on the relationship between justice and governance.
We encourage papers that critically examine the relationship between fair governance processes and just policy outcomes, identify trade-offs between procedural and substantive justice, or propose new conceptual frameworks for understanding justice in governance. Contributions from all methodological traditions, including qualitative, quantitative, interpretive, mixed-methods, and conceptual research, are welcome.
Chairs:
Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen (Public Administration and Policy Group, Wageningen University, The Netherlands) sylvia.karlsson-vinkhuyzen@wur.nl
Ina Lehmann (Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) i.m.lehmann@vu.nl
Language: English
Key words: international obligations, domestic implementation, accountability mechanisms
Description of the panel and themes:
The adoption of global goals and targets to be achieved for the period 2030-2050 for climate (in the Paris Agreement), biodiversity (in the strategic plans of the Convention on Biological Diversity) and sustainability (the Sustainable Development Goals-SDGs- in Agenda 2030) in the past decade means that the focus from both scholars and the policy community has now moved from analysing the design of the agreements to the implementation of states’ legal and non-legal obligations associated with these goals and the follow-up and review of implementation (Li et al., 2023; Raiser et al., 2022; Ulloa, 2022). States have a poor track record of reaching previously adopted environmental goals and holding each other to account for not doing so (Baste & Watson, 2022). Instead, they usually move on to setting new, even more aspirational goals. Also, for these latest agreements the implementation record is not encouraging, and goal achievement seems in most cases unlikely. Recent geopolitical developments and societal polarization have turned the tide further against multilateralism and created domestic backlashes against international commitments on environment and development. These contexts provide a particularly interesting window to examine the influence or ‘stickiness’ of international obligations. What role can or do they still play and how? And how does state accountability play out for international obligations in such contexts?
The literature has documented a number of national formal and informal accountability mechanisms that can be used to hold governments to account for failing on their international obligations (Barritt, 2020; Hafner-Burton et al., 2016; Steffek, 2010). These mechanisms may involve actors such as parliaments, audit agencies, courts, citizens (via elections), public servants, the media, civil society and the scientific community (Bovens et al., 2014; Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen et al., 2018). But much remains to be learned about how countries define the scope of what they consider themselves accountable for within bottom-up environmental governance frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and the GBF and how these accountability mechanisms play out in practice across different regimes and in different political-legal contexts. What are their dynamics and impact?
In particular, we know little about how countries engage with the more cyclical pledge and review architecture of the Paris Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity where countries collectively review progress towards global goals with regular intervals after which they are urged to increase their national pledges. Do governments take these procedural obligations seriously and if so, how? What standards do they use to identify their share of responsibility for achieving global goals and how do they organize evaluation of implementation? It is an open question if and how such globally prescribed national self-accountability mechanisms can be effective, particularly in different political-legal contexts. There is an abundance of studies on, for example, the content of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of the Paris Agreement (Hoffer, 2023; Mehrotra & Benjamin, 2022; Qiu et al., 2024), and some on the Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) of the SDGs (Besheim, 2018; Bickler et al., 2020; Elder & Ellis, 2022). However, there are only a few studies analysing the administrative and political processes through which these were formulated (Holz et al., 2023; Röser et al., 2020). Similarly for the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans (NBSAPs) required under the CBD there are only a few studies analysing primarily their content (Cardona Santos et al., 2023; Zinngrebe, 2023).
References
Baste, I. A., & Watson, R. T. (2022). Tackling the climate, biodiversity and pollution emergencies by making peace with nature 50 years after the Stockholm Conference. Global Environmental Change, 73, 102466.
Besheim, M. (2018). UN Reforms for the 2030 Agenda.
Bickler, G., Morton, S., & Menne, B. (2020). Health and sustainable development: an analysis of 20 European voluntary national reviews. Public health, 180, 180–184.
Bovens, M. et al (Eds.). (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability. Oxford University Press.
Cardona Santos, E. M. et al (2023). Mainstreaming revisited: Experiences from eight countries on the role of National Biodiversity Strategies in practice. Earth System Governance, 16.
Elder, M., & Ellis, G. (2022). ASEAN countries’ environmental policies for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Environment, Development and Sustainability, 1–19.
Hafner-Burton, E. M. et al (2016). How Activists Perceive the Utility of International Law. The Journal of Politics, 78(1), 167–180.
Hoffer, E. R. (2023). Content analysis of nationally determined contributions: Multi-level climate action to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. In Handbook of Multi-Level Climate Actions (pp. 80–100).
Holz, C. et al (2023). Tempering and enabling ambition: how equity is considered in domestic processes preparing NDCs [Article]. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 23(3), 271–292.
Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, S. et al (2018). Entry into force and then? The Paris agreement and state accountability. Climate Policy, 18(5), 593–599.
Li, Q., Ge, Y., & Sayer, J. A. (2023). Challenges to Implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework [Article]. Land, 12(12), Article 2166.
Mehrotra, N., & Benjamin, E. O. (2022). Evaluating the enhancement of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of developing countries: an international support programme perspective [Article]. Climate Policy, 22(6), 728–742.
Qiu, J., Seah, S., & Martinus, M. (2024). Examining climate ambition enhancement in ASEAN countries’ nationally determined contributions [Article]. Environmental Development, 49, Article 100945.
Raiser, K., Çal?, B., & Flachsland, C. (2022). Understanding pledge and review: learning from analogies to the Paris Agreement review mechanisms. Climate Policy, 22(6), 711–727.
Röser, F. et al (2020). Ambition in the making: analysing the preparation and implementation process of the Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement [Article]. Climate Policy, 20(4), 415–429.
Steffek, J. (2010). Public Accountability and the Public Sphere of International Governance. Ethics & International Affairs, 24(1), 45–68.
Ulloa, A. M. (2022). Accountability as Constructive Dialogue: Can NGOs Persuade States to Conserve Biodiversity? Global Environmental Politics, 23(1), 42–67.
Zinngrebe, Y. (2023). Planning for Implementation: Shifting the Focus of National Biodiversity Strategies to Local Narratives, Existing Institutional Settings and Social Capital. Sustainability, 15, 9774.
Types of papers and themes we welcome:
In this session we welcome papers that analyze the global, regional, national, local and transnational mechanisms through which international (environmental) obligations may influence domestic governance in a time when multilateralism and the rule of international law is increasingly questioned. We welcome papers that explore these mechanisms with respect to:
• The standards states use to determine their share of global responsibility and the logics through which these standards are set
• Examining different types of accountability mechanisms and their diverse impacts (regulatory, discursive etc.);
• The role of national and global monitoring, reporting and review of implementation including through using indicators
• How different domestic actors engage with international obligations to promote implementation and/or accountability
• How robust existing accountability mechanisms are in the face of a surge in populism