Transnational Administration and Global Policy – serie

This book introduces the concept of ‘knowledge alchemy’ to capture the generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards. Using examples from North America, Europe and Asia, it explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional policies and practices on economic performance, higher education, research and innovation.The book examines how governments around the world have embraced global models of world-class university, human capital and talent competition as essential in ensuring national competitiveness. Through its analysis, the book shows how this strongly future-oriented and anticipatory knowledge governance is steered by a surge of global classifications, rankings and indicators, resulting in numerous comparisons of various domains that today form more constraining global policy scripts.

This volume analyses the impact of globalization on civil service systems across the Middle East and North Africa. A collaboration between practitioners and academic public policy experts, it presents an analytical model to assess how globalization influences civil servants, illustrated by case studies of countries where there have been increased engagement with international actors. It demonstrates how this increased interaction has altered the position of civil servants and traces the shifting patterns of power and accountability between civil servants, politicians and other actors. It is an original and important addition to the debate about globalization’s role in transnational public administration and governance.