Department of Politics and Public Administration

This half-course explores the interplay between technology and politics. In an era of rapid technological advances (e.g., artificial intelligence, automation), technological change is poised to be a key catalyst for societal disruption and an avenue for intensifying geopolitical competition. This course examines these contemporary challenges by reviewing historical, theoretical, and empirical research in international and comparative political economy. Key topics include the impact of automation on labor markets and politics, the geopolitics of technology, and the gig economy. The course aims to enable students to critically analyze the drivers and consequences of technological change.

Professor Nicole Wu (nkwu@hku.hk)

This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the politics and theories related to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as the role of nuclear energy and technology. Core topics of this course include the basics of nuclear weapons, nuclear strategies, and deterrence theory. Students will examine these issues within historical and theoretical frameworks, drawing on both conceptual and empirical perspectives to better understand the evolution of nuclear politics and strategy.

The term “collaboration” is widely used in all sectors around the world—public, private, and nonprofit. Collaboration is the process of facilitating and interacting in multiorganizational and multijurisdictional contexts to solve problems that cannot be easily solved by single organizations. Several practical and theoretical reasons account for the increase in public and nonprofit collaboration both in the literature and in practice. On the practical side, most public challenges are larger than one organization. Think of any major public policy challenge: housing, poverty, education, climate change, to name a few. To address any one of these challenges effectively, collaboration across boundaries is necessary. Additionally, multiple organizations – public, nonprofit, and private – are engaged with the same problems. To improve the effectiveness and performance of programs offered by diverse organizations requires collaboration, which can result in innovative approaches to service delivery, including multi-sector partnerships. New technologies support organizations in sharing information and enabling collaboration. Finally, citizens often seek additional avenues for engaging in governance, which can result in new and different forms of collaborative problem-solving and decision making. On the theoretical side, organizations may invest in addressing collective action problems and engage in collaborative efforts despite the general scholarly consensus that they prefer autonomy over interdependence. Comparative institutional analysis literatures point to the larger institutional context as both enabling and hindering the emergence of collective action. In multi-level governmental settings populated by many overlapping organizations, individual organizations have no choice but to engage in competitive, conflictive, and collaborative relations. Whether conflict is managed and collaboration encouraged depends on the types of policy tools organizations have available to them. Institutional context matters. Organization theory literatures, in contrast, highlight resource dependency. The basic assumption is that individual organizations do not have all the resources they need to achieve their goals. Instead, organizations must rely on a variety of inputs from a collection of interacting organizations, groups, and persons in the external environment. Because of resource-dependent activities, exchange relationships develop. More than just a way to acquire needed resources, interactions based on exchange can stabilize interorganizational linkages by reducing uncertainty about the future provision of resources and by maintaining consistent interaction patterns. Although resource exchange theory is based on the notion of dependency, even relatively independent organizations may collaborate to take advantage of available resources. Organizations may actively seek out funds within existing network structures or seek to initiate collaboration to tap into funding sources, often because the institutional context requires or enables it. Comparative institutional analysis and organization theory share several concepts used to explain collaboration. One is common purpose. Organizations form network linkages in order to achieve similar, compatible, or congruous goals. Many groups of organizations have both partial and collective responsibility to address public challenges and are using collaboration to do so. Related to common purpose is the notion of shared beliefs. A similarity in norms, values, perceptions, and worldviews make the formation of interorganizational linkages more probable and tend to make these linkages more stable over time. In addition to shared beliefs, organizations also sometimes pursue their political interests through collaborative arrangements. Through participation in a policy network, for example, organizations may promote the views or desires of their members or constituency; gain access to political officials or decision processes and cultivate political alliances; gain political legitimacy or authority; and promote organizational policies or programs. Catalytic actors, or leaders, both within the organization and by network leaders or coordinators, can provide other important stimulants for the formation and maintenance of collaborative linkages. Building and maintaining trust among collaborators, encouraging organizations to follow through with their commitments, encouraging the resolution of conflicts, are all important leadership activities. In this course, comparative institutional analysis and organization theory are brought together to provide a more comprehensive exploration of collaboration. The course concludes with developing a contingent collaboration framework that practitioners may use to guide their decision making and strategies for engaging in collaborative governance. The learning outcomes for this course include: Analyzing complex multi-level governing arrangements and how they enable or inhibit the emergence of collaboration. Evaluating network governance structures and partnerships to determine appropriateness, fit, and how to address tensions Integrating institutional analysis and organization theory to develop contingent collaboration strategies that address real-world constraints while leveraging opportunities for cross-sector problem-solving. Developing practical collaborative leadership skills including trust-building, facilitation, and conflict management