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Public Policy and Institutions (SPS-REIMM-INS-24)

SPS-REIMM-INS-24

Purpose

It is fair to say that, since the new millennium, we’ve been living in a period of “structural reform” accelerated by intrusive shocks, such as the Great Recession and, more recently, the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Significant changes in pensions, labour markets, education, health, macroeconomic policy, and environmental regulation have swept the European continent. In some cases, intrusive policy reform was accompanied by profound social and political conflict, while in other instances, unpopular reforms eventually received broad societal and political consent. Alongside significant retrenchment, there have been deliberate attempts – often given impetus by intensified European economic integration – to rebuild health and welfare programs and industrial and environmental policies in sync with the new economic, technological, demographic, and climate realities of the 21^st century.  Policy reform and institutional change, inescapably building on extant policy legacies across countries, is a work in progress, leading to patchwork mixes of old and new policies and institutions on the lookout, perhaps, for greater coherence. Unsurprisingly, this political “search process” remains incomplete, resulting from the institutionally bounded and contingent adaptation to the challenges of the aftershocks of the global financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic against the background of adverse demography, economic (de-)globalization, accelerating digital innovation, and climate change.
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