Producing impactful research for enhancing public good is one of the core missions of our Data Science and Policy Studies (DSPS) Programme. In this connection, Professor Wilson Wong, our co-director, publishes two academic articles to find out the underlying factors of good government performance in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic.  

In “When the State Fails, Bureaucrats and Civil Society Step Up: Analysing Policy Capacity with Political Nexus Triads in the Policy Responses of Hong Kong to COVID-19” published by Journal of Asian Public Policy (Q1 in Sociology and Political Science), he examines the importance of an autonomous bureaucracy and a strong civil society in the combat against COVID-19 by analysing the policy responses of Hong Kong under the combined framework of policy capacity and Political Nexus Triads (PNT). He concludes that from the perspective of collaborative governance, it is crucial for citizens to be engaged as partners in public policies, highlighting the complementarity between state and non-state actors in the co-production of public policies.  

The second article “State or Civil Society – What Matters in Fighting COVID-19? A Comparative Analysis of Hong Kong and Singapore” co-authored with Professor Alfred Wu of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, is published by the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis (Q1 in Sociology and Political Science). It investigates the nuanced and disaggregated role of state and civil society in the fight against COVID-19 in Hong Kong and Singapore. Professor Wong and Professor Wu consider Hong Kong combats COVID-19 with greater dependence on its civil society and bureaucrats, while Singapore relies more on a state-centred approach. The two contrasting cases represent the diversity of state-society relations and multiple configurational causality in the COVID-19 responses. 

If you are interested in reading the two articles, please visit the links below. 

Journal of Asian Public Policy Article (Professor Wilson Wong):  

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17516234.2021.1894314 

Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis Article (Professor Wilson Wong and Professor Alfred Wu): 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13876988.2021.1978819