Meng-Hsuan Chou

• PhD Politics and International Studies
• Associate Professor at NTU Singapore

This video explains the main ideas in the book ”Public Policies for Hybrid Governance” in four or so minutes. On the right hand side select MORE and DOWNLOAD. Should work fine.

See linked data for a short video intro. This authoritative book examines the complex interplay between government, business, and civil society through the lens of public policy. It analyzes the role of hybridity in policy formation and diffusion, drawing on in-depth theoretical discussions alongside diverse case studies.

In this chapter, I examine the challenges and opportunities confronting contemporary governance of hybridity through the case study of on-demand food delivery. As a service built on algorithm-based technology, on-demand food delivery is also known for its prominent precarity and physical risks for couriers. To delineate the challenges and opportuni...

Regional cooperation in higher education has grown in recent decades due to political drivers and the increasingly salient role of knowledge in economies and societies. The term ‘regional cooperation’ in this chapter signifies the multi-directional and multi-level coordination of higher education collaborations that are mediated through the regiona...

Introducing the concept of 'knowledge alchemy' as the formulation of global standards through the use of indicators and algorithms, this book explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional policies and practices on economic performance, higher education, research and innovation.

Interview for SciencesPo LIEPP: https://www.sciencespo.fr/liepp/fr/node/5990.htm

In this chapter, we examine the knowledge alchemy involved in transforming academic mobility as a familiar act of academic travel to a commodified activity in today’s global competition for talent. In contemporary policy making, the assumed practices of the medieval scholar often inform the common image of an academic today. A visual that emerges i...

This chapter turns to the scripts and imaginaries of knowledge governance. To become effective, numerical knowledge needs to be narrated and communicated. We see actors referring to different imaginaries of knowledge governance that are linked to grand narratives of global megatrends, pointing to intensifying global economic competition through dig...

In our conclusions, we discuss how knowledge alchemy is embedded in transnational administration and global policy making through numerical tools, imaginaries and narratives used across multiple policy domains and sectors. To further understand conventional power in contemporary national and transnational governance, this book has uncovered the mec...

In this chapter, we discuss innovation rankings and city-level measurements of competitiveness that draw heavily from other indicators, hence echoing the hegemonic views and ideological undercurrents already present in the ranking field. The sharing of data is part of the evolving conventional power of data production on a global level. Empirically...

This chapter describes how policy makers and decision-makers developed and implemented strategies and policies based on the ‘talent’ imaginary and bring knowledge alchemy to life. By reviewing how the presuppositions revolving around the global competition for talent became integrated in higher education and university policies, migration policies,...

This chapter provides an overview of the development of global rankings in good governance and higher education. Initially, the metrics dealt with good governance and competitiveness of countries, but since the 2000s the global rankings on higher education and innovation have emerged. Recently, city rankings have highlighted the importance of asses...

This book introduces the concept of ‘knowledge alchemy’ to capture the generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards. Using examples from North America, Europe and Asia, it explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional poli...

Introducing the concept of 'knowledge alchemy' as the formulation of global standards through the use of indicators and algorithms, this book explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional policies and practices on economic performance, higher education, research and innovation.

Introduction In the previous chapter, we discussed the field development in global ranking concerning good governance indicators and university rankings. In this chapter, we turn to discuss innovation rankings and city-level measurements of competitiveness that emerged a few years later. As our discussion will show, they have come to draw heavily f...

Introduction In this chapter, we examine the knowledge alchemy involved in transforming academic mobility as a familiar act of academic travel to a commodified activity in today's global competition for talent. In contemporary policy making, the assumed practices of the medieval scholar often inform the common image of an academic today. This schol...

Introduction This chapter provides an overview of the development of global rankings in good governance and higher education. This also serves as a background for Chapter 3, where the metrics in city competition, talent and AI-readiness are discussed at the cusp of automation. Indicators and rankings are outputs of algorithmic reasoning; often, the...

Introduction This chapter begins the second part of our book and turns to the scripts and imaginaries of knowledge governance to show how they shape diverse sectoral policies and institutional practices through numerical global scripts and formulas. As discussed in Chapter 3, global indicators bring coherence to transnational governance by providin...

Introduction In this chapter, we describe how policy makers and decision-makers developed and implemented strategies and policies based on the ‘talent’ imaginary and bring knowledge alchemy to life. By reviewing how the presuppositions revolving around the global competition for talent became integrated in higher education and university policies,...

Today, we continue to live in magic. Scientific and technological advancement have indeed lifted our everyday lives to wonderment, but these advances have also introduced magical practices to governance. Our book has been about the magic taking place in knowledge governance, the processes of steering and governing state information, and has been th...

Governments around the world have instrumentalised the idea of cities as innovation hubs in the drive for economic competitiveness and governance of anticipated futures. Producers of global indicators have identified cities as key actors in the global competition for talent – a race for human capital taking place against rapid technological changes...

The growing importance of China as a major actor in international order has generated tremendous interest among social scientists, but scholarly debates remain in their disciplinary confines. Our study connects existing international relations research on China and the Belt and Road Initiative with two concepts in higher education studies—knowledge...

This paper outlines an agenda for overcoming methodological nationalism in contemporary public administration studies. Our agenda reflects an acknowledgement of diverse lived administrative experiences around the world. Such experiences are the results of local administrative conditions and their interaction with transnational pressures and cross-b...

This chapter contributes to our understanding of the transformation sweeping the higher education sector in the last 50 years by examining how higher education policy has been framed and reframed since the 1970s in Western Europe. How policies are framed and reframed is important because it helps us make sense of higher education policy reforms aro...

Research on return migration has tended to focus their analyses on two imagined places: a host country where they used to live, and an origin country where they must reintegrate after a long period of being away. This paper reveals how spaces within the city can undermine the reintegration of former migrants seeking to reestablish themselves in the...

In this article, we examine the politics of on-demand food delivery using insights from the theory of social construction and policy design. On-demand food delivery is a service built on algorithm-based technology known for its precarity and physical risks for couriers. We compare how the on-demand food delivery sector is regulated and its observab...

We compare Germany and Singapore to see how their approaches towards talent migration governance have evolved in the last decade and whether and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected these developments. Building on the Highly-Skilled Immigration Index (HSII) (Cerna & Chou, 2014), our discussions show Germany becoming very welcoming of high-skilled...

In this article, we introduce the concept of methodological Americanism to describe and explain the epistemological problem plaguing the public administration discipline. We argue that the discipline, dominated by US-focused analyses, is methodologically nationalist and White and represents a hegemonic intellectualism that limits what is “knowable....

Around the world, ‘higher education regionalism’ has become one accepted way to organise policy cooperation and reform efforts in the higher education sector. Higher education regionalism can manifest in two forms: intra-regional (dominant) and inter-regional (less common). Using the case of ‘European Union Support to Higher Education in the ASEAN...

Taking the migration-higher education nexus as an analytical entry point, we address the question: How can we account for different internationalisation outcomes? We focus on three actors involved in the global race to internationalise higher education activities: higher education institutions (HEIs), states, and migrants. We argue that the migrati...

This article seeks to contribute to the existing scholarship on academic mobility in two ways. First, it brings together insights on academic mobility (aspirations, desperations) and higher education internationalisation to show how we may analytically organise these insights to shed light on the shifting global higher education landscape from an e...

US universities continue to loom large in the worlds of higher education today. They consistently top many global university rankings and attract international students and faculty from around the world. In Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary, Isaac Kamola tells a compelling story about how US univers...

Increasing competition among research universities has spurred a race to recruit academic labor to staff research teams, graduate programs, and laboratories. Yet, often ignored is how such efforts entail negotiating a pervasive hierarchy of universities, where elite institutions in the West continue to attract the best students and researchers acro...

The Lisbon Treaty is an international agreement that organizes cooperation between the member states of the European Union (EU) across multiple policy fields. It lays the legal foundation for European integration, identifying which issue areas are for supranational policy cooperation and which areas are excluded. Signed on December 13, 2007, the Li...

This Call seeks conceptual or theory-driven empirical scholarship that questions the assumed 'administrative sovereignty' of public administration and the object of public service delivery, offers unique transnational perspectives, and, where relevant, engages multiple levels of governance (from local to regional to global). See attached for furthe...

Taking the case of defining “talent,” a term that has been widely used but its definitions differ by discipline, organization, policy sector, as well as over time, we demonstrate how the basic definition of a policy subject may affect policy design and the assessment of policy outcomes. We review how “talent” is defined in two sets of literature, t...

The Transnational Administration and Global Policy Series explains and contributes to theorizing the institutionalization of global governance structures and processes by examining actors and ideas permeating, shaping, and critically engaging in these developments.

How do governments in the Global South, with abundant supply of labor, reconcile the positive utility of promoting labor migration and the wider effects that emigration has on the families left behind? Taking the case of the Philippines, the world’s largest exporter of nurses (a female-dominated profession), this chapter shows how the public policy...

The rise of global initiatives in many policy sectors is an emerging phenomenon that deserves the attention of scholars interested in international relations, regional integration, and policy sciences, as well as practitioners seeking comparative examples beyond their national and regional borders. This chapter demonstrates the value-added of the d...

2018 Excellent Paper from an Emerging Scholar Call for Nominations The ECPR Standing Group on Knowledge Politics and Policies announces the third call for an Excellent Paper from an Emerging Scholar. The winner of the 2018 Excellent Paper Award will be announced before the Standing Group meeting at the 2019 annual ECPR general conference in Wrocl...

Countries have developed a variety of policies to attract and retain foreign talents who bring multiple benefits to the host country, including knowledge assets and international network. It is in their interest if the talents contribute both to the development of local research community while continuing the connection with international community...

Studies of regionalism – intra and comparative regionalism – have often used the European experience to explain the emergence and evolution of regionalisms in other parts of the world. This tendency in approaching the European experience as explanatory has permeated sector-specific developments. In this article, we consider the developments in high...

We invite you to submit a paper proposal for the Third Annual Meeting of the Singapore-based Public Policy Network. The deadline has been extended to December 1, 2018. Based on the model of similar successful public policy networks around the world, the PPN based in Singapore provides a venue for faculty at Singapore’s post-secondary institutions i...

We invite you to submit proposals for the panel “Knowledge policy dynamics in the global context” (T02P01) at the upcoming 4th International Conference on Public Policy in Montreal, 26-28 June 2019. We invite papers that explore the framing of 'Multi-s' and focus on three inter-related phenomena: (1) the travelling, diffusion and translation of p...

In this chapter, three conceptually distinct dimensions of EHEA governance are presented. One, the multi-level dimension concerning the distribution of authority across governance levels (e.g. European, regional and national). Two, the multi-actor dimension reflecting the involvement of non-state actors (e.g. stakeholder organizations) and the ackn...

Policy studies has always been interested in analyzing and improving the sets of policy tools adopted by governments to correct policy problems and better understanding and improving processes of policy analysis and policy formulation in order to do so. Past studies have helped clarify the role of historical processes, policy capacities and design...

This paper investigates the migration of Asia-born academics from traditional centers in the West to Singapore, a rapidly developing education hub in Southeast Asia. We argue that such movement can be seen as a form of quasi-return, where migrant faculty look for places where they can be “close enough” to aging parents and family, while working in...

Founded in 1901, the Rhodes Scholarship scheme is one of the longest running programs of scholarly exchange still in existence. It has been the model for many schemes that have since emerged. As such it offers an ideal context for examining, as well as raising new questions about the organisation and overall efficacy of scholarly exchange across th...

This article investigates the factors that shape how migrant academics engage with fellow scholars within their countries of origin. We focus specifically on the mobility of Asian-born faculty between Singapore, a fast-developing education hub in Southeast Asia, and their " home " countries within the region. Based on qualitative interviews with 45...

Regional cooperation in the higher education policy sector has been on the rise throughout the last decades. In this article, we compare and analyse two instances of higher education regionalisms (i.e. political projects of higher education region creation) in Europe and South-East Asia from an ideational perspective. In so doing, we engage with an...

This thematic issue introduces the multifaceted nature of contemporary public policy—its multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-issue features—by using the case of higher education policies from around the world. To do so, this introduction first describes how higher education as a policy sector should be garnering far more attention from scholars int...

You can access the special issue here: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rpas20/36/1

Over the past decade, the EU and China have expanded their relations beyond a focus on economic and trade issues to the sphere of security. Taking a broad definition of security, a multidisciplinary approach, and a comparative perspective (including scholars from both Europe and China), this book provides an in-depth analysis of the extent to which...

States often pool their sovereignty, capacity and resources to provide regionally specific public goods, such as security or trade rules, and regional organisations play important roles in international relations as institutions that attempt to secure peace and contribute to achieving other similar global policy goals. We observe failures occurring...

The introduction of regional political initiatives in the higher education sector symbolizes one of the many aspects of the changing global higher education landscape. Remarkably, these processes have generally escaped comparative scrutiny by scholars researching higher education policy cooperation or regional integration. In this article, we demon...

This editorial introduces how we may begin to analytically study the shifting terrains of the Europe of Knowledge. Knowledge policies – higher education, research, and innovation – are integral to many sectors, and changes in the ways in which knowledge is governed will inevitably alter the shape and contents of other policy domains. The contributi...

This book identifies the transnational linkages and interconnections of this new world of higher education, but it recognises that frictions and contestations are also fundamental to it. By focusing on a variety of regions and actors, this book highlights the ways in which competing interests, asymmetrical power relations, and political contestatio...

This chapter examines the initiatives implemented through the OMC for achieving a key policy priority for the European Research Area—‘open, transparent and merit based recruitment practices with regard to research positions’ (Council of the European Union 2015, p. 6). Specifically, it looks at the implementation of the European Charter for Research...

How, if at all, does the Commission’s expertise inform intergovernmental decision-making within the EU? In this article, we aim to capture the relationship between the Commission’s expertise and its influence within intergovernmental policy-areas through a study of Commission influence in two least likely sectors: security and defence policies (mil...

This volume examines the effects of global university rankings on the development of European higher education at both the EU and national levels.

This editorial introduces the notion of the Europe of Knowledge and places it in the European integration research agenda. We first describe what the concept means before suggesting how to approach the Europe of Knowledge as a new case for investigating European integration dynamics. This discussion revolves around the evolution of policy developme...

Chou, M-H. and I.Ulnicane (2015), guest editors, a special issue “New Horizons in the Europe of Knowledge”, Journal of Contemporary European Research 11 (1): 1-152.

Nation states have traditionally played central roles in the governance of higher education policies, but in recent decades the world’s regions and organizations are seen to be increasingly involved in this process. The rise of this phenomenon that we depict as ‘higher education regionalism’ is related to two different dynamics: (1) the renewal of...

Building the Knowledge Economy in Europe investigates the integration of emerging knowledge policy domains on the European political agenda, and the dynamics of this in relation to knowledge policies. Professors Meng-Hsuan Chou and Åse Gornitzka bring together leading experts who address the two central pillars of the 'Europe of Knowledge', researc...

‘Research and innovation’ has recently been moved closer to the top of the political and legislative agenda of the European Union (EU) – the most advanced form of existing supranational cooperation. At the heart of these developments is the completion of the European Research Area (ERA) by 2014. According to Article 179 of the Lisbon Treaty, which...

Since the 1990s, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries have faced structural problems and unfavourable demographics. For instance, the European Union Commission’s Agenda for new skills and jobs estimates that by 2020 there will be a shortage of about one million professionals in the health sector. By 2015, shortages...

To examine the role of regional cooperation in the global race for top foreign talent, we study how the Lisbon Strategy’s implementation contributed to these efforts. Specifically, we analyse the Scientific Visa and the Blue Card, two EU legislations for attracting the ‘best-and-brightest’ from abroad. Official figures tell us that the number of hi...

This article focuses on the negotiations that the European Commission, with the formal support of France, Italy and Spain, opened with Senegal in 2008 for a mobility partnership agreement. Mobility partnerships, as defined by the Commission in 2007, are a new EU (multilateral) instrument for managing migratory flows into the Union. The negotiations...

This article explores how European research co-operation has evolved from being a ‘spending’ policy to one now focussed on establishing an ‘internal market for research’. It identifies how the Commission enabled adoption of reforms in this policy area when similar attempts earlier had been dismissed. By concentrating on one mode of institutional ch...