Public administration: Context and innovation
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Author | Edoardo Ongaro,Ting Gong,Yijia Jing |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1904 |
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1904
EDITORIAL
Public administration: Context and innovation
This special issue collects articles presented at a workshop hosted by
the Global China Studies Project, City University of Hong Kong, and a
follow‐up conference hosted by the Institute for Global Public Policy,
Fudan University, in mid‐2019. Both the workshop and the confer-
ence had a theme of “Public Administration: Context and Innovation.”
Four articles presented at the workshop and the conference were
selected for inclusion into this special issue.
The articles in this special issue focus on contextual influences on
public administration innovation. The first one, by Edoardo Ongaro,
Ting Gong, and Yijia Jing, provides a conceptual framework to bring
the “context” back in for research on public administration innova-
tion. It delineates the concepts of innovation, public administration,
and context, elaborates the relationships among them, and explores
theoretical and methodological issues in pursuing contextual expla-
nations of innovation. Based on the conceptual framework, it further
proposes a research agenda, which consists of five sets of research
questions, to enhance comparative analyses of contextual influences
on public administration innovation. This article also introduces the
other three in this special issue.
The next three articles apply this framework to empirical studies
of public sector innovations in China. The article by Ian Scott in-
troduces innovations in Hong Kong's civil service, which is situated in
a traditional public administration context characterized by a hier-
archical bureaucratic culture. Through a historical review of in-
novations in the Hong Kong bureaucracy, the author argues that
political commitment and agency have pushed forward innovations
without introducing fundamental structural changes of the govern-
ment. The article by Yunxiang Zhang and Shichen Wang studies the
diffusion of River Chief Innovation (RCI) as an innovation in envi-
ronmental protection in China. Using qualitative comparative anal-
ysis, the authors find that local tournament, local learning, and their
conjunctures shape the adoption of RCI, showing the contextual in-
fluences of local conditions. The article by Lin Ye et al. discusses
urban renewal policies and innovations in China and the trans-
formation of policy rationales and goals in this area. Using Yongqing
Fang in Guangzhou as a case, they argue that there has been a shift in
urban policy from an economy‐oriented perspective to an emphasis
on sustainability and inclusiveness. The article explains the shift by
observing changing urban contexts in which new players gradually
entered the policy arena and had their values and voices reflected in
policy making and implementation.
Overall, this special issue provides a useful starting point to delve
into the complexity of contextual influences on public administration
innovation. It may contribute to a better understanding of contextual
dynamics of public administration and management.
Edoardo Ongaro
1
Ting Gong
2
Yijia Jing
3
1
Department of Public Leadership and Social Enterprise, The Open
University, UK
2
Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong &
Fudan University, China
3
Institute for Global Public Policy & School of International
Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, China
Correspondence
Yijia Jing,
Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Email: yijia_j@hotmail.com
ORCID
Edoardo Ongaro
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4431-1508
Ting Gong https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9927-886X
Yijia Jing https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4772-5482
Public Admin Dev. 2021;41:3. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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