College of Arts and Sciences 2022 Speaker Series, Friday, April 22
Join the College of Arts and Sciences for the 2022 Speaker Series, Friday, April 22 at 9:30 a.m. via Zoom. The speakers will be:
- Multi-Level Governance and Policy Coordination in COVID-19 Responses: China and the US Compared
Dr. Zhilin Liu, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
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COVID-19 and post-pandemic data governance: A case analysis of contact tracing applications in East Asia
Dr. Xun Wu, Division of Public Policy and Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Join on Zoom
(Meeting ID: 946 0597 2727, Passcode: 475533)
The COVID-19 crisis poses unprecedented challenges to national and subnational governments. This study adopts the multi-level governance theory for China-US comparative analysis of how policy responses were coordinated at subnational and community levels during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Despite different political systems, both China and the US showed a hybrid structure of vertical and horizontal coordination in COVID-19 responses, though substantial differences also exist with respect to specific modes of coordination across levels of government, jurisdictions, and sectors. The talk will also discuss recent policy responses in light of recent COVID-19 trends.
Dr. Liu's Bio
Zhilin LIU is an Associate Professor and the Director of Public Policy Institute in the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She received her PhD in city and regional planning from Cornell University, USA, as well as her master degree in urban geography(2002) and bachelor degree in urban and regional planning (1999) from Peking University, China. Her main research interests are in urban governance, housing policy, sustainable urbanization, rural-to-urban migration, institutional theory and multi-level governance. She has published widely in English peer-review journals, including Urban Studies, Cities, Urban Affairs Review, Housing Studies, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Policy Sciences, and numerous Chinese academic journals. She currently serves as a co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis and a member of the Board of Directors for the International Association of China Planning.
In an era of digitalization, governments often turn to digital solutions for pressing policy issues, and the use of digital contact tracing and quarantine enforcement for COVID-19 is no exception. The long-term impacts of the digital solutions, however, cannot be taken for granted. The development and use of data tools for pandemic control, for example, may have potentially detrimental and irreversible impacts on data governance and, more broadly, society, in the long run. In this paper, we aim to explore the extent to which COVID-19 and digital contact tracing have led to policy change in data governance, if at all, and what the implications of such change would be for a post-COVID world. We compare the use of contact tracing and monitoring applications across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore to illustrate both the enormous benefits and potential risks arising from the design of contact tracing applications and the involvement of stakeholders in the various stages of the policy cycle to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. Wu's Bio
Professor Xun WU is a professor at the Division of Public Policy, the Division of Social Science and the Division of Environment and Sustainability. Dr. Wu is a policy scientist with a strong interest in the linkage between policy analysis and public management. Trained in engineering, economics, public administration, and policy analysis, his research seeks to make a contribution to the design of effective public policies in dealing with emerging policy challenges across Asian countries. His research interests include policy innovations, water resource management, health policy reform, and anti-corruption, and his work has been published in top journals in his fields of study, such as Policy Sciences, Public Administration Review, Governance, Social Sciences & Medicine, and Water Resources Research. He is a co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Public Policy and Cambridge Elements in Public Policy.