This important new handbook provides a comprehensive assessment of contemporary public policy and governance in the Global South. It offers incisive comparative analyses and presents policy-specific case studies from across Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa. The aim is to inform future governance research, policy, and practice in these regions.

This book is timely as it responds to how governments in the Global South are dealing with recent complex series of challenges and crises of the 21st Century. These range from the pressures of a global pandemic to the impacts of climate change, democratic backsliding, deteriorating public services, and the realignments in the international political economy following the rise of China. In doing so, it reflects on the political transformations, global convergences, and underlying regional, as well as national, trajectories that have taken place recently, focusing on among others:

• Democratic governance and institutional trust

• Public service delivery, motivation, and governance outcomes

• Policy crises, disaster management, and climate change

• Policy successes and failures

• Policy innovations, digitalisation, and policy research in the Global South.

Different authors bring together varied and specialised perspectives and experiences, which are important for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers wishing to understand emerging governance models, innovations, and challenges within the Global South.

Gedion Onyango is a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa (FLIA). Gedion has over a decade of teaching experience and postgraduate student mentorship in higher education. He has taught at the University of Nairobi, where he was a senior lecturer, and at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Gedion’s research is highly interdisciplinary, covering legislative policy-making, public accountability reforms, anti-corruption and whistleblowing reforms, democratic innovation, and innovative technologies (digital technologies in designing public services). He has published extensively and has consulted in these areas.

Ishtiaq Jamil is a professor at the Department of Government, University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests include administrative culture, gender development, public policy, institutional trust, representative bureaucracy, and governance. He has co-edited and written several books, journal articles, chapters, and research reports. He has also organised and coordinated several international projects and conferences on governance, civil service, gender mainstreaming, service delivery, and public policy in South Asia.