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Abstract
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 amid global systemic disruptions, raising questions about the effectiveness of differing diplomatic styles across cities but also the prospect of a new generational shift. This essay traces the history of generations in city diplomacy, examines prospects for novel ways of understanding city diplomacy, and contemplates how the pandemic's impact heralds not the demise of internationalization in urban governance but an era in which city diplomacy is even more crucial amid fundamental limitations.

AbstractThe 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 methodology contributes to deeper understandings about COVID‐19 as a policy issue, beyond the contributions of current and conventional perspectives. The discussion outlines implications for practice and places them within broader debates about tensions between scientific facts and political values.

ABSTRACT
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 resources and coordination capabilities but also on the cooperation and buy-in of civil society. Political and institutional legitimacy are crucial determinants of effective crisis management, and low-trust states lacking such legitimacy suffer a profound disadvantage. Social and economic crises attending the COVID-19 pandemic thus invite scholarly reflection about public attitudes, social leadership, and the role of social and institutional memory in the context of systemic disruption. This article examines Hong Kong as a case where failure to respond effectively could have been expected due to low levels of public trust and political legitimacy, but where, in fact, crisis response was unexpectedly successful. The case exposes underdevelopment in scholarly assumptions about the connections among political legitimacy, societal capacity, and crisis response capabilities. As such, this calls for a more nuanced understanding of how social behaviours and norms are structured and reproduced amidst existential uncertainties and policy ambiguities caused by sudden and convergent crises, and how these can themselves generate resources that bolster societal capacity in the fight against pandemics.

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 at hand utilizes data from semi-structured interviews with 47 public and private sector circular economy experts from the European Union to explore expectations regarding circular economy policies, with expectations possibly going beyond existing policies. Expectations identified via this work include more robust standards and norms in production, expansion of circular procurement, tax relief for circular products, liberalization of waste trading and its facilitation through virtual platforms, support for eco-industrial parks, and awareness campaigns. The set of policy recommendations is presented from a life-cycle perspective that is necessary for a transition towards a circular economy. The study aims to contribute to the nascent body of circular economy literature concerning policies and may be of particular interest to practitioners.

Abstract
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 of a survey experiment administered simultaneously in Australia and Hong Kong in late 2020 examining source effects on public attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination and testing policies. For each case, the analyses compare source effects between a lesser trusted source (government) and a more trusted source (medical scientists). The study also compares these effects between cases, contrasting an environment of continuing political stability (Australia) with one of decreasing political stability (Hong Kong). Australian respondents tended to have similar attitudes toward policies regardless of the source, while Hong Kong respondents looked significantly more favorably on policies put forward by medical scientists than those put forward by the government. The results show that source effects can be moderated by political context—a finding that holds implications for the design of comparative studies about public trust and political legitimacy in settings where policy development relies on scientific input.

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 old developmentalism by incentivising innovation and structural adaptability. In practice, although developmentalism once focused on infrastructure and industrial policy, softer strategies such as attracting educated millennials through urban amenities and creative clustering mimic those of the postindustrial West. Either this trend represents the end of developmentalism or top‐down industrial policy is being rebranded to embrace knowledge and service industries. This article examines this issue at the urban scale, examining policies used by Singapore and Seoul to encourage start‐ups and entrepreneurship in the context of innovation. Government documents are examined and findings compared. ; Published version

AbstractThis 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 old developmentalism by incentivising innovation and structural adaptability. In practice, although developmentalism once focused on infrastructure and industrial policy, softer strategies such as attracting educated millennials through urban amenities and creative clustering mimic those of the postindustrial West. Either this trend represents the end of developmentalism or top‐down industrial policy is being rebranded to embrace knowledge and service industries. This article examines this issue at the urban scale, examining policies used by Singapore and Seoul to encourage start‐ups and entrepreneurship in the context of innovation. Government documents are examined and findings compared.