Kris Hartley

City University of Hong Kong | CityU · Department of Asian and International Studies

The regionalization and integration of the circular economy is an important and exciting moment for ASEAN, and will be watched by observers of both industrial activity and policymaking. As home to numerous thriving industries but also a site of potential vulnerability to the impacts of climate change, Southeast Asia has an opportunity to be a 21st...

This report outlines how cities and the private sector can collaborate on and magnify sustainability efforts that enable broad systemic change. Sustainability efforts require not only public policy interventions and resources but also the initiative and innovation of the private sector. These are systematized through the UN Sustainable Development...

Action to pursue the circular economy (CE) transition is burgeoning in the government and the private sector. Does this action signal that CE is a distinct field of research with a unique disciplinary identity? This article argues that CE has reached field status, through its own epistemic communities characterized by increasingly shared methodolog...

As sites of economic, political, and social convergence, cities absorb the earliest effects of global crises. These dynamics are observable also in environmental crises and resilience – longer-running challenges to legacy models of urban governance. Shifting epistemic and practical contexts invite scholarship to more thoroughly examine the dynamics...

Emerging in scholarly discussions about political discourse over the past decade, the terms ‘post-truth’ and ‘denialism’ refer to disagreement not on public policy strategies but on the nature of truth itself. Policy facts are now contested in ways that disrupt mainstream political narratives and weaken institutional legitimacy. In turn, the techno...

This study analyzes public perceptions about the impact of 'smart cities' programs on governance and quality-of-life. With smart city scholarship focusing primarily on technical and managerial issues, political legitimacy remains relatively underexplored-particularly in non-Western contexts. Drawing on a Hong Kong-based survey of over 800 residents...

Government efforts to confront complex crises, such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, have elicited populist antipathy toward scientific and technical input in policymaking. These affronts to expertise and knowledge institutions have congealed into a ‘post-truth’ rhetoric that reflects deep political rifts concerning state-society relati...

Asia’s global rise highlights a host of policy opportunities and challenges. Historically, the region’s developmentalist governments were single-minded of purpose, aiming principally for rapid economic growth. As growth stabilized and economies matured, a variety of other concerns – environmental, social, and political, among others – began to warr...

A country's diplomatic and external engagement can be modeled as equilibrium-based choices made by its leadership, whose utility is determined not only by cost-benefit considerations but also by uncommon beliefs and assumptions. Factors influencing these choices include internal and external economic, political, and social dynamics, and in some cas...

This study examines patterns and sources of growth in the transport sector's labor productivity across 13 industrialized countries over the period 2000-2015. Through decomposition analysis-specifically, the growth accounting method and industry origin analysis-the study makes three principal findings. First, total factor productivity growth plays a...

What is the relationship between political stability, trust, and source effects on support for public policies? In this article, we examine how source type (and the trust respondents have in different sources) impacts support for new policies and the degree to which this impact is moderated by political stability. This article reports the results o...

Because a city is inseparable from its economic context, its analysis must be positioned in relation to the current and future forms of capitalism that define it. Examining the commonly deployed “sustainable” and “smart” narratives of city visioning, this chapter argues that the seemingly revolutionary tone of such narratives belies the fact that t...

The chapter discusses the impact of social change on how society views governance quality in the era of complex and interconnected policy problems. This era presents a valuable opportunity to revisit tensions between the deepening technocratic logic of formal policymaking and the social change implied by and reflected in the rise of alternative pol...

Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) survey data and government economic data from Vietnam are used to examine the relationship between economic growth and two indicators of governance effectiveness: efficacy at working with central law and creativity in solving business problems. Examining all of Vietnam's 63 provinces over 11 years (2007 to 201...

This study examines the state and development of public policy education in Thailand, including its dynamics over time, its institutional setting, and emerging forces acting upon it. It focuses on policy educational institutions, policy courses offered in universities, and national socio-political contexts that shape the academic profession. Policy...

This Element explores the uncertain future of public policy practice and scholarship in an age of radical disruption. Building on foundational ideas in policy sciences, we argue that an anachronistic instrumental rationalism underlies contemporary policy logic and limits efforts to understand new policy challenges. We consider whether the policy sc...

This study examines growth patterns and sources of labour productivity growth and catch-up in the electricity sector. The study uses decomposition analysis to examine 13 industrialized economies from 2000 to 2015, a period of high growth in the sector. The study finds that total factor productivity and digital assets are the most powerful drivers o...

This chapter examines how the issue of trust is reflected in the longstanding pragmatic perspective of the policy sciences and how it offers a pathway by which to ‘politicize’ understandings of policy capacity (including that used by Government Competitiveness). It proceeds with a discussion about the roots of epistemic instability, including the i...

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) propose a vision for policymaking at all scales and an institutional platform for producing knowledge and sharing experiences. National governments have the prerogative to determine their SDG planning and implementation strategies, with 169 targets and 232 indicators guiding efforts to achieve...

The academic literature offers some insights about lagging progress on circular economy (CE) transition, including cultural, regulatory, market, and technical barriers. There is also an increasing body of knowledge about barriers to CE adoption that takes a macro-level perspective across industries. However, such studies have largely neglected the...

The call to feminize critiques of water recognizes the role of power and struggle not only in the mechanics of public management but also, more sublimely, in the political economy of knowledge and the process by which understandings about policy problems are framed to serve elite interests. The latter suggests a need to look beyond the tropes of in...

Covid-19 has resulted in loss of life and livelihoods while deepening political fault lines and exposing governance shortcomings. Emerging from the economic upheaval of the pandemic will be the next great policy challenge. Industries like tourism and education are among those affected most by the crisis.

Evolutionary governance theory (EGT) provides a basis for holistically analyzing the shifting contexts and dynamics of policymaking in settings with functional differentiation and complex subsystems. Policy assemblages, as mixes of policy tools and goals, are an appropriate unit of analysis for EGT because they embody the theory's emphasis on co-ev...

COVID-19 decimated global tourism. As governments and firms strategize the sector’s recovery, insights from the sector’s prepandemic period of high growth offer useful policy lessons. This study examines the drivers of the tourism sector’s growth and catch-up performance in 13 industrialized economies over the period 2000–2015, using data from the...

City diplomacy has a long history and has witnessed a clear sprawl over the last century. Successive “generations” of city diplomacy approaches have emerged over this period, with a heyday of networked urban governance in the last two decades. The covid -19 pandemic crisis presents a key opportunity to contemplate the direction of city diplomacy am...

Iran's policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates how countries with pre-existing challenges manage acute crises. Already economically weakened by international sanctions, Iran's government was forced to consider short-term tradeoffs between public health and social stability in pandemic response, with imminent unemployment and food insec...

China's pursuit of global superpower status compels the country to make coordinated efforts across numerous sectors. Global leadership in higher education is one example and provides a case study in how resource support and strategic vision can generate 'quick wins' in reputation and rankings. The ascendancy of Peking University, Tsinghua Universit...

Public participation is an increasingly common pathway for democratizing policymaking, but it is often executed in only symbolic and perfunctory ways. To reach its full potential as a method for empowering society in the policymaking process, public participation should foremost be viewed as legitimate by participants. This article empirically exam...

Cities are playing an increasingly prominent role on the global policy stage, and in the process have established moreformalised international engagements. However, there is an incomplete understanding about the types and levels of capacity needed for such engagement. This study offers an examination of the underpinnings of “city diplomacy”. It con...

The 2020 introduction by China's central government of a national security law in Hong Kong marked a watershed moment in the social and political history of the semi-autonomous city. The law emerged after months of street protests that reflected declining public trust in Hong Kong's government. Against this turbulent backdrop, Hong Kong's policy pr...

The global reach of COVID-19 presents opportunities to compare policy responses to the pandemic and the role of knowledge across political contexts. This article examines the case of Vietnam’s COVID-19 response. Recognized for its early effectiveness, Vietnam exhibits the standard characteristics of unitary states but has also engaged communities,...

Progress in water conservation is dependent as much on human behavior as on the promise of new technologies. Digital feedback-based interventions present an opportunity to bring these two factors together, as increasingly sophisticated technologies can help change behaviors rather than simply solving problems caused by those behaviors. This paper e...

The COVID‐19 pandemic is a crisis with high complexity and should be understood as such by scholarship. A complexity science approach situates increasingly divergent ideological and epistemological perspectives about the crisis within the practical exigencies of containment and mitigation measures. We ask which of the seven stages of soft systems m...

The impact of global challenges such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic manifests most acutely in urban settings, rendering cities essential players on the global stage. The individual stories of five cities whose officials participated in the study offer lessons for a variety of challenges and approaches to city diplomacy. Based on the su...

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed structural failures in governance and coordination on a global scale. With related policy interventions dependent on verifiable evidence, pandemics require governments to not only consider the input of experts but also ensure that science is translated for public understanding. However, misinformation and fake news,...

This essay examines epistemological tensions inherent in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) project. The clash between the totalizing logic of the SDGs and growing populist antipathy for expert governance can be better understood and potentially mediated through a critical pragmatist view. For the SDGs, technocratic fundamentalism not only...

Smart water management (SWM) brings technological sophistication to water governance by providing monitoring, operational and communications capacities through real-time information. SWM’s quantification appeals to metric-driven governance but, we argue, also perpetuates a technocratic and instrumental-rationalist mindset. The peril of this mindset...

With indiscriminate geographic and socio-economic reach, COVID-19 has visited destruction of life and livelihoods on a largely unprepared world and can arguably be declared the new millennium’s most trying test of state capacity. Governments are facing an urgent mandate to mobilize quickly and comprehensively in response, drawing not only on public...

Water resource management is a crucial issue in the rapidly urbanizing Pearl River Delta. Numerous studies have examined transboundary water management, but those focusing on Hong Kong are largely technical, with little consideration for political dynamics or collaboration. This study’s contribution is a systematic analysis of water governance in C...

COVID-19 crisis has focused global attention to respiratory health. In cities with chronic and severe air pollution, people may be more vulnerable to the virus. While the entire world’s attention at present is on crisis mitigation due to coronavirus, it is important not to lose sight of the health impacts of serious and chronic air pollution. Even...

The circular economy is a much discussed pathway towards sustainability. While some scholarly work has been carried out on barriers towards a circular economy, there are relatively few academic studies on policies that may accelerate a transition towards a circular economy. Those that focus on policies mostly scrutinize existing policies. The study...

Cloud computing (CC) has become a powerful driver of technological and economic transformation across nations. Yet levels of cloud service adoption vary, with limited adoption in many countries. For broader transformation, it is important to understand the predictors of CC adoption in order to design effective promotion policies. This study contrib...

A new model for development – based on synergy, vigour, and sustainability–may be key to addressing changing needs in an age of globalisation and digital revolution

In Shanghai and Singapore, the long-standing tradition of consumer thriftiness is fading away with rising incomes, but new regulations or self-reinforcing social norms have not been established to the degree that would facilitate transformational change in how individuals view their role in waste management. The argument is not that recycling in th...

The essays in this volume collectively illustrate the numerous policy challenges and opportunities facing Asia’s cities, as expressed through a variety of contexts, policy domains, and normative perspectives. A crucial issue raised throughout the volume is whether and to what extent urban policy solutions are outmatched by the gathering convergence...

Currently the world’s second most populous country, India is home to 1.3 billion people (15% of the world population) and its growth rate will make it the world’s most populous by 2050. The urgent need for quality healthcare is increasing at an even faster pace. India has one of the world’s largest public healthcare systems but has failed to provid...

Asia’s late-20th century economic surge has generated scholarly reflection about state-led growth amidst rapid globalization and domestic economic and political liberalization. Within this frame, a more focused literature has examined Asian cities as platforms of interaction between two contradictory forces: central planning and global capital (Car...

China’s Pearl River Delta region has a political and geographic setting that presents coordination challenges in the management of environmental resources, including water. Understanding these dynamics can provide lessons for policy interventions in similarly situated regions around the world. For a region with more than 45 million inhabitants and...

Nobel Prize winner Simon Kuznets, widely credited for proposing the idea of GDP decades ago, noted GDP considers only economic production and not human well-being. Sadly, people routinely conflate the two, with troubling consequences that focus on economic outputs to the detriment of social and environmental issues. Take United States. During 2008–...

Nobel Prize winner Simon Kuznets, widely credited for proposing the idea of GDP decades ago, noted GDP considers only economic production and not human well-being. Sadly, people routinely conflate the two, with troubling consequences that focus on economic outputs to the detriment of social and environmental issues. Take United States. During 2008–...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The missing acknowledgements of the original article is provided below: Acknowledgements This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A3A2044898).

In 2018, India had 22 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities and China five, with Bangladesh and Pakistan accounting for the other three. Which shows urban air pollution is primarily an Asian problem, and the challenges are regionally widespread.

In this article we ask why smart cities have emerged within the international development community as the normative urban logic for confronting systemic global crises. This phenomenon is exemplified by the embrace of smart cities as an implementation tool for UN Habitat’s aspirational New Urban Agenda. Our analysis deploys two theoretical approach...

The term ‘nation learning’ describes consistent and strategic cross-sector efforts to identify pathways towards economic catch-up. This chapter examines the global dynamics of national-level catch-up between 1995 and 2015 to gain insights into the relevance of nation-learning efforts. Over this period, most developing Asian countries made significa...

Urbanization cannot be stopped, but this does not excuse governments for failing to address air pollution. With considerable resources and capacity for nationwide policy coordination, China should be leading the way in developing a sustainable approach to urbanization that can serve as a regional and even global example.

Once the muse of oracles and soothsayers, global systemic instability is now increasingly plausible given the convergence of wicked, synchronous, and interconnected problems like climate change and socioeconomic inequality. International organizations have confronted such crises with policy platforms like the Sustainable Development Goals, New Urba...

National competitiveness indices are often theoretical underdeveloped, limiting their engagement with academic literature. Because many are based on neoliberal ideology, a new approach is needed to incorporate governance and administration theory, and to enhance relevance to developing countries. This article introduces government competitiveness,...

In the 21st century, governments cannot ignore how changes in technology will affect employment and political stability. The automation of work-principally through robotics, The automation of work – principally through robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of things (IoT), collectively known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution – w...

The development literature lacks consensus about the link between aid effectiveness and governance improvement. A basic rational actor model is introduced to clarify how donors can influence recipient behaviors and more broadly how foreign aid can support or impede governance quality improvement. Adopting the underutilized perspective of donor beha...

The transition from an industrial to knowledge-based economy is impacting urban growth across Asia. Many cities now seek to lure educated professionals through arts and cultural amenities, with a common focus on disinvested neighborhoods. The underlying planning tactics often favor top-down intervention over multi-sectoral collaboration, marginaliz...

Nation learning refers to consistent and strategic cross-sector efforts to identify pathways towards economic catch-up. This chapter examines the global dynamics of national-level catch-up between 1995 and 2015 to gain insights into the relevance of nation learning efforts. Over this period, most developing Asian countries made significant progress...

Management of environmental resources presents challenges across jurisdictional boundaries. In the case of river basins, multiple localities must coordinate water allocation, often across social, economic, and political contexts. As such, the scale of governance systems often fails to match that of environmental challenges or the reach of their imp...

This article examines the impact of policies for start‐up and entrepreneurship on the developmental model that remains a policy legacy in many Asian countries. The main argument is that the influence of central planning is deeply embedded in the institutions of the Four Asian Tigers, but globalisation and economic liberalisation are disrupting the...

Political will is inexcusably weak, and mere statistics are failing to prod governments beyond election-year soundbites and platitudes.

In the last 50 years, China has experienced rapid economic transformation. It is now poised to assume membership among the world’s most developed economies. Its strategies on issues like urbanisation and infrastructure are widely studied and occasionally copied.

Many developing nations have targeted poverty alleviation and improved living standards as ultimate policy goals. While China has achieved poverty alleviation on an historic scale, policy obstacles remain. These include bureaucratic inefficiency and failed policy implementation. India has likewise made progress in alleviating poverty though it lags...

Delhi’s smog crisis has shifted global attention away from Beijing, and rightly so, because China’s capital has taken long-term, fruitful measures to address the problem which have already yielded positive results.

Membaiknya kesejahteraan manusia adalah salah satu keberhasilan terbesar era modern. Zaman yang serba berkecukupan juga telah menyebabkan krisis kesehatan global yang tak terduga: dua miliar orang kini kelebihan berat badan (obesitas). Negara maju khususnya telah menjadi rentan terhadap berat badan yang tidak sehat, sebuah tren yang bisa dianggap s...

While the conceptualization of policy capacity and its application to governance performance have been addressed in the academic literature, existing governance indices appear not to consider policy capacity in its many nuanced forms. This shortcoming may be perpetuating incomplete accounts of governance quality within a diverse and growing group o...

Improved human well-being is one of the modern era’s greatest triumphs. The age of plenty has also led to an unexpected global health crisis: two billion people are either overweight or obese. Developed countries have been especially susceptible to unhealthy weight gain, a trend that could be considered the price of abundance. However, developing c...

Smart city initiatives have been researched primarily in the developed country context. In developing countries, however, emerging technologies are enabling progress on urban functionality, productivity, and livability. A deeper understanding of facilitative policy conditions unique to developing countries would be useful to both theory and practic...

Water resource management is a crucial issue in the rapidly urbanizing Pearl River Delta. Numerous studies have examined transboundary water management, but those focusing on Hong Kong are largely technical, with little consideration for political dynamics or collaboration. This study’s contribution is a systematic analysis of water governance in C...

Plastic bags and bottles are a global menace, but the emergence of microplastics will test the policy courage of governments in new ways, Asit K Biswas and Kris Hartley write.

Alarmingly, two out of five adults in the Asia-Pacific region are either overweight or obese. The World Heath Organisation (WHO) estimates that roughly half of the world’s share of adults with diabetes live in Asia.

From the staggering population migration to the multi-lane traffic jams, China's rapid urbanization has captured global attention. But much of what threatens the sustainability of China's urbanization is not above ground but under it.

Groundwater over-extraction, waterway degradation, and urban flooding are forcing China’s cities to address a vicious cycle. China’s “sponge city initiative” aims to arrest this cycle through the use of permeable surfaces and green infrastructures. However, the initiative faces two challenges: lack of expertise of local governments to effectively c...

Among the barrage of threats to human survival – economic crises, terrorism, inequality – perhaps the most urgent but least prioritized lies underfoot: groundwater. The World Economic Forum ranks water crises the world’s third greatest risk by impact, and extreme weather the top risk by likelihood. According to a 2016 study, aquifer depletion in ag...