Global Public Policy and Transnational Administration

There has been a proliferation of administrative practices and processes of policy-making and policy delivery beyond but often overlapping with traditional nation state policy processes. New formal and informal institutions and actors are behind these policy processes, often in cooperation with national public administrations but sometimes quite independently from them. These ‘multi-stakeholder initiatives’, ‘global public–private partnerships’ and ‘global commissions’ are creating or delivering global policies even though the geographic pattern of policy action can vary considerably. Implementation may occur at (trans)national or local levels in different regions more or less contemporaneously, or also in problem contexts that are cross-border and co-jurisdictional, hence our use of the term ‘transnational administration’. Traditional policy and public administration studies have tended to undertake analysis of the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies rather than to investigate transnational policy-making above and beyond the state. This article extends the ambit of public administration and policy studies into what has traditionally been considered the realm of International Relations scholarship to identify and map new modes of global (public) policy and transnational administration and prospects for ongoing conceptualization.