There is an increased interest in integrating insights from the complexity sciences to studies of governance and policy. While the issue has been debated, and the term of ‘complexity’ has multiple and sometimes contested interpretations, it is also clear the field has spurred a number of interesting theoretical and empirical efforts. The book includes key thinkers in the field, elaborates on different analytical approaches in studying governance, institutions and policy in the face of complexity, and showcases empirical applications and insights.

Peter Ho, former Head of the Singapore Civil Service, was the Institute of Policy Studies' 2016/17 S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore.This book collects the four IPS-Nathan Lectures that he delivered between April and May 2017, and gathers highlights of his dialogues with the audience.Ho surveys the increasingly complex world, and suggests what governments can do to prepare for the future — even as no one can predict it. He uses metaphors such as the 'black elephant' and concepts like the 'dialectic of governance' to explain how a systematic approach to thinking about the future can help countries in general — and Singapore in particular — build resilience and develop a comparative advantage in the face of uncertainty and rapid change.The IPS-Nathan Lectures series was launched in 2014 as part of the S R Nathan Fellowship for the Study of Singapore. Its primary goal is to promote public understanding and discourse of issues of critical national interest.

Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.

Examines current and prospective challenges surrounding global challenges of education, energy, healthcare, security, and resilience This book discusses issues in large-scale systems in the United States and around the world. The authors examine the challenges of education, energy, healthcare, national security, and urban resilience. The book covers challenges in education including America's use of educational funds, standardized testing, and the use of classroom technology. On the topic of energy, this book examines debates on climate, the current and future developments of the nuclear power industry, the benefits and cost decline of natural gases, and the promise of renewable energy. The authors also discuss national security, focusing on the issues of nuclear weapons, terrorism and cyber security. Urban resilience is addressed in the context of natural threats such as hurricanes and floods. Studies the usage of a globalized benchmark for both student and pedagogical performance Covers topics such as surveillance, operational capabilities, movement of resources, and the pros and cons of globalization Examines big data, evolving medical methodologies and effects on the medical educational curriculum, and the positive effects of electronic records in healthcare data Perspectives on Complex Global Challenges: Education, Energy Healthcare, Security, and Resilience serves as a reference for government officials, personnel in security, business executives and system engineers.

Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Resilience has become a central concept in government policy understandings over the last decade. In our complex, global and interconnected world, resilience appears to be the policy ‘buzzword’ of choice, alleged to be the solution to a wide and ever-growing range of policy issues. This book analyses the key aspects of resilience-thinking and highlights how resilience impacts upon traditional conceptions of governance. This concise and accessible book investigates how resilience-thinking adds new insights into how politics (both domestically and internationally) is understood to work and how problems are perceived and addressed; from educational training in schools to global ethics and from responses to shock events and natural disasters to long-term international policies to promote peace and development. This book also raises searching questions about how resilience-thinking influences the types of knowledge and understanding we value and challenges traditional conceptions of social and political processes. It sets forward a new and clear conceptualisation of resilience, of use to students, academics and policy-makers, emphasising the links between the rise of resilience and awareness of the complex nature of problems and policy-making.

This book delivers new IMD insights on an emerging challenge - how to deal with overwhelming complexity. Global organizations face a complex decision-making environment. On one side, diversity of cultures, customers, competitors and regulations creates complexity; on the other, competitive pressures cause expanding countries to extract more synergies across products and regions. In such a climate, a new way of thinking, acting and organizing is needed beyond the familiar ‘control’ mindset. Drawing together insights from across the expert faculty, Managing Complexity in the Global Organization presents IMD’s framework on how to understand complexity and its four key drivers (diversity; interdependence; ambiguity and flux), along with solutions on specific issues in a variety of functions, industries and markets. The focus is on providing practical solutions based on real-life examples.