Tero Erkkilä

• Professor
• Professor at University of Helsinki

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.

Welcome to our VIRTUAL conference panel on Public policies for Hybrid Governance 2-4 July, 2025 in ICPP 7 By submitting an Abstract by 31 January 2025 Panel investigates the dynamic and intricate relationships, rationalities, tensions and dilemmas among public, private and civic domains contributing to policy outcomes. Papers may address (among...

We analyze challenges and adaptation strategies of Nordic legal overseers, the Parliamentary Ombudsmen and Chancellors of Justice in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, amid the COVID‐19 crisis. We study how the accountability capacities of the legal overseers were affected when standard practices of inclusive decision‐making were severed, and how...

Expertly navigating the complex relationships between accounting and the development of hybridized public governance, this erudite Handbook critically analyses the most pressing challenges and limitations currently facing accounting and public governance research. Comprehensively drawing intricate links between accounting, public governance and hyb...

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.

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...

While recent discussions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of the most powerful technologies of our times tend to portray it as a predominantly technical issue, it also has major social, political and cultural implications. So far these have been mostly studied from ethical, legal and economic perspectives, while politics and policy have re...

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 local scientific committee for IRSPM Tampere edition 16-18 April 2024 in Finland invites panel proposals for the upcoming conference. In addition to the numerous questions of general relevance for the field of public management the conference welcomes panels investigating various forms of hybridity. https://events.tuni.fi/irspm2024/ https://w...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a global policy issue that is actively governed by international actors producing governance indicators. This article argues that despite the arguments about disruptions to governance and policy due to AI, the global rankings increasingly constitute a strong path dependence on AI policy, leading to conformity...

This panel invites both conceptual and empirical contributions that explore various facets of the policies on hybridity and hybridization of societies, in view of their implications on public policy analysis. Many ideas of governance acknowledge the variety of public, private and community actors in policy networks, but the significance and implic...

CALL FOR PAPERS

This article examines selected system-level variables. Its premise is that a better understanding of how and why scholars may, or may not, choose an international orientation in their career requires taking into account factors beyond personal preferences or constraints. We suggest that characteristics of national systems shape prospects and strate...

Over three days, attendants will participate in a workshop to discuss Public policies for hybrid governance. Papers may address (among other possibilities) the following issues and questions: What is the impact of public policies on hybridity? Do public policies increase hybrid forms of governance? Why? How? Empirical approaches to assessing the w...

Suomalaisen hallinnon kehittämisen uranuurtaja, professori Markku Temmes kuoli Helsingissä 5.12.2020. Markku Temmes oli harvinainen hallinnon kehittäjä, sillä akateemisen uransa lisäksi hän oli luonut pitkän uran johtavana virkamiehenä niin valtiovarainministeriössä kuin Valtion-hallinnon kehittämiskeskuksen johtajana. Juuri tämä teorian ja käytänn...

The call for papers for International Public Policy Association ICPP5 (Barcelona 2021) is now open until 29 January 2021. Consider submitting a paper for this panel on Hybrid Governance (details on attached document)

This article uses a theoretical and methodological framework derived from the political theorist Quentin Skinner and the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck to examine ideational and conceptual tensions and shifts related to the transparency of algorithmic and other automatic governmental decision-making in Finland. Most of the research materia...

This chapter focuses on the institutional development of the Finnish Parliamentary Ombudsman and its peer institution, the Chancellor of Justice. Adopted in 1919 from Sweden, the Finnish Ombudsman has evolved over time with its institutional rival also relying on transnational ideational shifts, which have had a major impact on how the institution...

This chapter analyses the institutional development of the European Ombudsman and the attendant role of transnational norms, policy discourses and actors. The European Ombudsman is interesting as a rare instance of a supranational ombudsman institution. But it is also worth examining because it has profiled itself as an institution of good governan...

The Lisbon Treaty and the Charter of Fundamental Rights acknowledge the right to “good administration” as a fundamental right of EU citizens. This has led to the reinterpretation of the mandate of the European Ombudsman, as it has actively sought to extend its competencies to promote good governance, instead of solely investigating possible acts of...

This chapter explores the process of diffusion and transnational governance concerning the ombudsman institution. In identifying different phases in the global spreading of the institution, this chapter explores the evolution of the transnational policy model and discusses the role of transnational organizations that facilitate its global spread. I...

This chapter tracks the recent institutional development of the Ombudsman in relation to the Chancellor of Justice. Over time, there has been an institutional differentiation between the two legal overseers, where the Ombudsman now focuses on individual rights and increasingly on social matters, while the Chancellor of Justice is more concerned wit...

This chapter concludes my observations that point to an emerging global organizational model or set of ideas that now frame the activities of the ombudsman. Though not always coherent, these ideational influences are accommodated by an institutional context and carried by individual actors, whose role is often decisive in the development of the ins...

This chapter examines the ombudsman as a global institution and presents the theory, methodology and research design of the book. The ombudsman institution has spread globally, covering all regions and most independent states. The chapter outlines the existing literature on the ombudsman institution concerning the institution’s development and patt...

This book explores the ombudsman as a global institution. It has spread all over the world and its institutional development is increasingly being governed transnationally. Initially an institution of administrative law, the ombudsman has become a human rights institution and institution of good governance. These ideational shifts have influenced t...

Global university rankings have emerged as a benchmark of institutional success, setting standards for higher education policymaking and institutional practices. Nevertheless, only a marginal share of higher education institutions (HEI) are in a realistic position to be ranked as a ‘world-class’ institutions. In the European context, the global ran...

For over a decade, global university rankings have played a growing role in the status competition in higher education. More recently, we have seen a proliferation in rankings of innovation and urbanization. In this article, we argue that while these new measurements bring with them some conceptual adjustments, they draw heavily on existing ranking...

This chapter discusses the recent tendency to localize the rankings and indicators on competitiveness, innovation, and higher education. The localization of ranking comes in the form of regional and city rankings, challenging the dominant imaginary assuming global comparability of similar units or the state-centric understanding of world order. Nev...

In this chapter, we look closely at the fragmentation of rankings and indicators relevant to knowledge governance in higher education, economic competitiveness, innovation, and good governance that has challenged the established producers of numeric knowledge. Not only have the amount of international datasets multiplied, but the varieties of measu...

This chapter tracks the ideational landscape in which the global ranking in knowledge governance operate, focusing on the development and convergence of different policy-specific ideas that are, on the one hand, captured by and, on the other hand, affected by global rankings. We view global knowledge governance as based on an atomistic ontology tha...

Rankings are influential policy instruments, creating calculable social objects or “facts” that become governable. At present, different aspects of states’ knowledge production are being governed through external assessments and comparisons. Building on new institutionalism, Foucauldian governmentality, and political sociology, we provide a theoret...

The development of the numbers-based knowledge governance framework is a relatively recent undertaking, but much has happened over the last 20 years. This chapter explores the rankings landscape as it was at the beginning of the 2000s, focusing on the most prominent “first generation” of measures of good governance, competition, and academic perfor...

Though the new indicators that are entering the field propose new methodological and conceptual openings, they instead offer mild contrasts to the previous figures and do not challenge the epistemic knowledge and practices of the field. In making these connections and their consequences visible through our analysis, we propose that rankings are a c...

Higher education and innovation policies are today seen as central elements in national economic competitiveness, increasingly measured by global rankings. The book analyses the evolution of indicator-based global knowledge governance, where various national attributes have been evaluated under international comparative assessment. Reflecting this...

Global country rankings have faced criticism for their normative character and methodology. Because of this, there have been attempts at creating so-called actionable governance indicators that provide more detailed and reform-oriented measurements of governance. This article analyzes the policy process behind the rise of actionable governance indi...

Academic identity is continually being formed and reformed by the institutional, socio-cultural and political contexts within which academic practitioners operate. In Europe the impact of the 2008 economic crisis and its continuing aftermath accounts for many of these changes, but the diverse cultures and histories of different regions are also sig...

The 'open society' has become a watchword of liberal democracy and the market system in the modern globalized world. Openness stands for individual opportunity and collective reason, as well as bottom-up empower-ment and top-down transparency. It has become a cherished value, despite its vagueness and the connotation of vulnerability that surrounds...

Since the early 1990s there has been a surge in international efforts to calculate the comparative performance of states in terms of various characteristics of governance. In this article we show how numerical objectification of social phenomena can function to depoliticize potentially political issues. As a case of example we examine the evolving...

This article explores the multilingual and multicultural aspects of community-building, networking and communication in the European Union’s (EU) political and administrative system. We investigated the networking and communicative preferences of EU civil servants and lobbyists using survey data and thematic interviews. Our aim was to gain a deeper...

This presentation explores the multilingual and multicultural aspects of community-building, networking and communication in the EU's political and administrative system with special attention to the effects of a multilingual and multicultural working environment on the actors’ identities. In order to track these aspects we investigated the network...

In the present study we provide an interpretation of a general narrative of transnational governance of higher education. All the elements of the narrative – competition, ranking autonomy and accountability – are visibly present in contemporary higher education policy agenda. We examine these not as separate ideas and practices but as an interlinke...

A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/jZDm8HrNLzw

Global university rankings have portrayed European higher education institutions in varying lights, leading to intense reflection on the figures on the EU and national levels alike. The rankings have helped to construct a policy problem of ‘European higher education’, framing higher education as an element of competitiveness in a global economy. Th...

Les auteurs analysent les listes de classement universitaires globales comme des instruments de régulation qui présentent l’enseignement supérieur comme un service. Les listes de classement des universités ont un pouvoir de création de la réalité sociale, dans laquelle les universités sont perçues comme engagées dans une concurrence globale pour le...

Over the last two decades, a new priority has come to define the agenda of European higher education policies: the need to make European universities more autonomous and competitive. While competitiveness is the end, competition is a means: compete internally and you will be sufficiently toughened up to meet your external competitive challenges. In...

Global university rankings have existed for only a decade and yet they have received unprecedented attention from higher education policy experts and scholars, as well as from politicians and the general public (Cheng and Liu, 2006, 2007; Erkkilä and Kauppi, 2010; Hazelkorn, 2008; Marginson and van der Wende, 2007; Salmi and Saroyan, 2007; Salmi, 2...

In the 1990s, data management in Europe was being, at least partly, subordinated to new market principles (see Chapter 4). The information of government agencies was framed as a market commodity, public sector information. The burst of the New Economy at the turn of the 2000s made this development seem like an encapsulated event that went by its ow...

Transparency has become one of the key concepts of contemporary politics. It is also a newcomer to the political language both in the Anglo-American world and outside. There are, in addition, liberal market notions bound up with the term that are making their way into national political contexts. This is perhaps most apparent in developing countrie...

The ideational changes discussed in the previous chapter have implications for institutional developments. This chapter discusses ideationally induced changes in institutions of public accountability (for the term see Bovens 2005) – that is, changes in the judiciary system on accessing government information and protecting privacy, the development...

New Public Management (NPM) reforms implemented in the Western-European context during the last two decades have coincided with the digitalization of public information. Digitalization made public information reusable and thus a potential resource for the information economy. At the same time, market-based steering mechanisms, such as budget transp...

Historically, states have differed from one another in terms of the scope of the information they have collected – and, more importantly, its allocation and publicity. There is now pressure for convergence in the standards of public access to government information. There is a new interest in making government information public, often debated unde...

This article examines the intensification, since the creation of the so-called Shanghai list of world universities in June 2003, of a political struggle in which a variety of actors, universities, national governments, and, more recently, supranational institutions have sought to define global higher education. This competition over global higher e...

Transparency has become one of the key concepts of contemporary politics. Yet, it is a newcomer to the political language both in the Anglo-American world and outside. Historically, states have differed with regard to their allocation of state information. At present, information access laws – often named „freedom of information acts“ after the US...

The study explores new ideational changes in the information strategy of the Finnish state between 1998 and 2007, after a juncture in Finnish governing in the early 1990s. The study scrutinizes the economic reframing of institutional openness in Finland that comes with significant and often unintended institutional consequences of transparency. Mos...

Europa ist in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem dominierenden Thema geworden. Verantwortlich dafür ist vor allem der Prozess der europäischen Einigung, der zunächst wirtschaftlich, zunehmend aber auch politisch gesehen wurde. Ein kulturell fundiertes Europa-Verständnis hingegen wird zwar rhetorisch immer wieder ins Spiel gebracht, bleibt aber eigenar...

Endast avhandlingens sammandrag. Pappersexemplaret av hela avhandlingen finns för läsesalsbruk i Statsvetenskapliga biblioteket (Unionsgatan 35). Dessa avhandlingar fjärrutlånas endast som microfiche. Abstract only. The paper copy of the whole thesis is available for reading room use at the Library of Social Sciences (Unioninkatu 35) . Microfiche c...