The Covid-19 pandemic has severely disrupted almost all aspects of human society, including public health, economic growth, and national and global politics. In seeking to learn from the crisis and offer advice, the academic field of public policy has rapidly mobilized with a wave of publications, media engagements, and research initiatives. Against this backdrop, we call for abstract submissions to the 6th AP-PPN Annual Conference, to be held from March 3 to 5, 2021 at The Education University of Hong Kong. We are sensitive to the seismic shift this rare crisis has visited upon our field. Accordingly, we will hold a conference that is thematically fluid and flexible, under the broader theme of “resilient and inclusive governance in the age of crisis”. We invite scholars from across all policy subfields to contemplate how the crisis reshapes their work and how their work can in turn reshape the crisis. Rarely is there an opportunity to examine our work in the context of an evolving crisis – and in a world that, more than ever, needs guidance from experts from all fields. Regarding submission, we are flexible within this theme, so we expect to receive abstracts across the typical range of topical subfields (e.g., public health, urban policy, social policy, climate policy, migration, international relations, and others) and theoretical subfields (e.g., policy process theories, tools and instruments, actors-ideas-institutions, collaboration and participation, knowledge-policy interface, epistemics, wicked problems, and others). We recognize that this is a broad call, but indeed these unique times call for broad thinking. There is no more urgent time to bring the field’s wide-ranging interests into one forum around the issue of crisis mitigation (however broadly one chooses to define that). We expect that participants would thirst for an opportunity to balance their research focus with its application to the macro-crisis context. Thus, we invite submissions that either look to the future or extend existing lines of inquiry to this novel context. Join us for this profoundly important sharing of ideas!

Dates

The main conference will take place on March 4 and 5, 2021, while a pre-conference workshop tailor-made for research students will be held on March 3.

The workshop seeks to offer a range of useful training/sharing sessions on academic writing, job-seeking, career planning, and how to get published. Student applicants should indicate the intent of joining this workshop when submitting their abstracts. Abstracts should be submitted online to https://anonmachg2.eduhk.hk/machform/view.php?id=29691086 no later than November 1 2020. Selection result will be announced on December 1 2020. Full-paper submission is not mandatory, but we highly encourage participants to do so on or before February 15 2021.

All conference papers submitted will be shared among participants.

Registration fee HK$700 (Fees for postgraduate students will be waived).

Logistics Participants are responsible for arranging their travels to Hong Kong as well as local accommodation. The host will recommend hotels which offer corporate discount. A shuttle bus will be provided between the hotel and conference venue.

Enquiry Should you have any enquiries, please free feel to contact the conference secretariat at apppn2021@eduhk.hk.