This article identifies six factors that shaped Vietnam’s response to the pandemic: (i) command-and-control governance, (ii) extensive preparation, (iii) fostering cooperative sentiment and solidarity, (iv) political readiness and communication, (v) policy coordination, and (vi) adaptation….
This paper explores the various options and opportunities for adopting feedback-based interventions — those that communicate information for the purpose of encouraging individuals to alter water consumption habits. Lessons proposed are applicable to any realm in…
This study documents the degree to which a ‘design thinking’ approach for participatory mechanisms helps produce policy input that reflects the concerns and ambitions of local stakeholders. The findings offer lessons for how legitimacy can…
In embracing the ASEAN Development Consensus, ASEAN and similarly situated countries can empower themselves to transform their economies, societies, and environments, not merely “catching up” to highly developed countries but charting a new course beyond—one…
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…
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. Based on the survey results, we discuss the…
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…
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…
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…
Technology neither provides a conclusive fix for unsustainable behaviour nor excuses humanity from an inconvenient reckoning about the perils of greed and exploitation. Before embracing a post-pandemic smart city surge, policymakers must embrace this fundamental…
