Governing Under Uncertainty: Institutional Resilience, Democratic Polarization and Artificial Intelligence in Public Policy Governance across the Global South

Public policy governance in the Global South is being reshaped by three simultaneous transformations whose combined effects remain insufficiently theorized. This open panel invites conceptual and empirical contributions on how developing countries respond to them across three core governmental functions — budgeting and public financial management; policy design, planning and strategic management; and policy monitoring and evaluation — and on the institutional innovations emerging from those responses.
The first axis concerns global turbulence. Overlapping shocks — climate disruption, supply-chain fragmentation, geopolitical conflict and pandemic risk — expose policy systems designed for stability to persistent uncertainty. How do budgetary institutions absorb recurrent emergencies without surrendering fiscal sustainability? Can planning become anticipatory rather than incremental, producing robust and resilient policies?
The second axis addresses the erosion of democratic governance under political and partisan polarization. Where populist and radicalizing movements consolidate, budgeting becomes an arena of distributive confrontation, planning horizons contract to the electoral cycle, and evaluation is contested or dismantled when evidence unsettles political narratives. We ask how bureaucracies, oversight institutions and civil-society coalitions preserve policy continuity, protect technical capacity and rebuild trust amid contested legitimacy.
The third axis examines technological innovation, particularly artificial intelligence, as both opportunity and constraint: the analytical capacity it offers these same functions, and its risks of opacity, algorithmic dependence, data asymmetries and weakened democratic control.
Across the three axes, our central interest lies in responses: institutional innovations — and the political processes that produce, sustain or defeat them — capable of strengthening the robustness and resilience of democratic governance. Applications of policy process theories, including the Advocacy Coalition Framework, the Narrative Policy Framework, Multiple Streams and the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, are particularly encouraged. Urban, housing, social, environmental and public security policies are arenas of special interest, though contributions from other sectors are equally welcome.
The panel is open to theoretical papers, comparative research and case studies, using qualitative, quantitative or mixed designs. By convening scholars working across contrasting Southern contexts — differing state capacities, regime trajectories and administrative traditions — it seeks to place their experiences in dialogue with, rather than subordination to, theory developed in the Global North