2017 International Conference Policy Areas

International Conference Policy Areas

• Education and Employment in a Global Market
  • Globalization and technological advances make labor markets more dynamic and increasingly globally integrated. The resulting global policy challenges and increasing policy interdependencies across borders will impact both local and global labor markets. Public policies need to address resulting growing inequalities to avoid stalling economic development and contributing to conflict. Submissions should focus on the role of education and employment in these processes and examine education and labor market policies to guide evidence-based policy making.
  • Education plays a central role as one of the main drivers for growth and development, particularly in conflict and crisis-affected areas. How should education and employment policies be tailored to prepare people to work and succeed in a rapidly changing global labor market or to foster living and working across borders? How can we promote adaptability and willingness for lifelong learning? How can public policies ensure appropriate education? What are the interrelations between education and conflict?
  • Employment and labor market policies and regulations can span cross-border, seasonal, and international work. Who are today’s global employees and what are the policies that limit, support or regulate their work? Is there are role for supranational polices and how are governments working with major multinational employers? How has digitalization impacted labor markets.

• Social Protection, Equity and Human Rights
  • Social protection features prominently in the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Universal social protection is considered to be a powerful tool to end poverty and to reach the SDGs by 2030. This presents a substantial global policy challenge given that social protection coverage is still limited in many countries. It will require efforts by national governments and international organizations alike to ensure that all those in need are reached. The challenges are manifold: how can we ensure that sufficient financial resources are available? How can resource-constrained countries increase their fiscal space? What is the role of functioning institutions and societies’ appetite for redistribution? What can we learn from past experience, or, do we actually know what works under what condition and as such should be promoted?
  • These are some of the issues that will guide the sessions on social protection in the context of the SDGs. Moreover, it includes questions related to poverty and social policy, family and child policy, and age-specific social policies within the context of a life-cycle approach to social protection.
  • Family and Child Policy includes vulnerable children and families, intergenerational mobility, childhood hunger, family resource and income management, familial immigration concerns, and family planning, to name a few.

• Poverty, Income and Impacts on Health
  • Poverty and Income Policy: issues include food insecurity, famine, poverty reduction programs, the intersection of government and poverty, NGO’s and their impact on communities battling poverty, opportunities for people to support themselves during conflict and migration, the availability and exchange of goods and services, etc.
  • Health: availability of health services and emergency care, barriers to health care, availability and access to medicine, vaccinations, clean water, disease prevention and treatment and long term sustainability.

• Global Politics and Foreign Policy
  • The main feature of global policy challenges such as poverty or climate change is that they affect all countries and societies in the world independently of their status and development level. The very nature of these challenges requires the coordination of numerous actors and bilateral and multilateral frameworks of global governance. Additionally, global policy challenges require integrated actions across different areas or sectors. The Sustainable Development Goals (September 2015) assumes that addressing global development priorities requires coordinated political, security, economic, social and environmental policies implemented at local, national, regional and global levels. The United Nations Climate Change Conference (2015) represents another example of concentrated efforts of different stakeholders to address the roots and consequences of global climate change. This theme shall explore the changing nature of global policy challenges affecting development prospects at the intersection of global, regional, national and local levels of governance. We invite submissions of panels and papers that address the following topics:
    • Global policy challenges: What is the nature of global policy challenges and what are the key debates? How has the understanding and policy response to such challenges evolved in last decades?
    • Actors: What is the role of different actors such as global and regional institutions, public and private donors, national governments, subnational authorities and NGOs in addressing global policy challenges? What is the role of national and transnational bureaucracies, experts, public intellectuals, policy? Do global policy challenges motivate more cooperation or completion among involved international actors?
    • Policies: How do global policy challenges affect policy agendas at international, national and local levels? What kinds of policies are implemented to tackle global policy challenges? Do we observe shifts of priorities and resources? Do global policy challenges stimulate reform or the diffusion and transfer of policy innovations?

• Conflict, Crisis, Community and Peacebuilding
  • Conflicts & Crisis: Complex processes or events (rooted in change or disruption), with political, economic, social, and environmental dimensions; they may be finite or ongoing, violent or non-violent, and can span a people or territory.
  • Peacebuilding: defined as support for basic safety and security, as well as reconstruction after a conflict or crisis, including the provision of basic services, the restoration of core government functions, and economic revitalization.
  • Community: without the benefit of basic infrastructure and supports, how do areas of conflict create community and how do these communities impact policy making and implementation?

• Population, Migration and Refugees
  • Migration: Migration governance, migration policy, evidence-based migration policy, break downs in migration governance, migration and social policy, effects of migration, migration drivers, patterns, and trends, as well as migration cultures, minority and immigrant integration, different channels and flows of ‘voluntary’ migration, including labor, education, family reunification, marriage, and lifestyle to name a few.
  • Forced Migration and Refugees: Migration governance, migration policy, evidence-based migration policy, break downs in migration governance, migration and social policy, effects of migration, Social, political, economic and health impacts of resettling and/or hosting displaced populations to new countries, how this is working now, how politics and elections are impacting the current refugee crisis, etc.; politics of asylum processing; differences in refugee and asylum processes across countries; integrating refugee development and service delivery with national policies.

• Multilevel Governance, Federalism, and Regional Cooperation
  • Multilevel Governance, Federalism, and Regional Cooperation: Local governance, national governance, supranational governance levels and their interactions, conflicts, and synergies. In Brussels, the EU will be an important topic, but also we would welcome submissions on ECOWAS, EAC, SADC, CELAC, to name a few.
  • Public and Nonprofit Management: includes how NGO’s, non-profits and other institutions create, influence and support migration, refugee and conflict policies.

• Entrepreneurship and Innovation
  • Entrepreneurship and Innovation: With markets declining and regular job activity disrupted, how do people cope with their situation, obtain main source of living and remain active on the labor market. Can public policy be a driver and in what ways can situations be supported; how do governments promote entrepreneurship and innovation; social entrepreneurship.

• Science, Technology and Methods
  • Innovation and economic development, infrastructure creation and upkeep, advancement of technological policy in nations plagued by conflict and how that impacts their ability to address basic issues, etc.
  • Tools of Analysis and Methods: data collection challenges in areas fraught by conflict, how to measure migration, how to apply traditional research methods to challenging populations, data gathering without infrastructure supports, research design and access to data sets, etc.