Much has been written about the changing role of unelected public servants in Westminster systems of government and their relationship with elected officials and the public. However, there are no studies comparing how these three groups perceive the role, and what they expect from public servants. This article provides the findings from three surveys of public servants, politicians and the public in Canada to assess how they view the role of the public servant and how this compares to different conceptions in the academic literature. The study finds that all three groups support the principles of ministerial responsibility and non-partisanship but do not believe that public servants should be anonymous and free from public scrutiny. This raises the question of whether some aspects of the traditional public servant role can be altered while keeping others in place and suggests that advocates for altering the role of the public servant will be most successful if they focus on certain aspects while preserving others.

Although science diplomacy has been gaining relevance in foreign policy to solve environmental challenges, critical questions concerning what different instruments mean under the term 'science diplomacy' and whether science diplomacy does contribute to the progress in solving environmental issues remain unanswered. We explore those questions by linking science diplomacy salient features through documentary analysis of international instruments addressing the plastics pollution in the ocean. We find that from a science diplomacy and multi-level governance perspective, the responsibilities and capabilities of emergent actors of cross-level governance are also important, leading to more attention being paid to changes in the role of national authorities, away from passive leadership to cross-cutting coalitions supported by the salient features of science diplomacy, and redefining dominant discursive approaches that have framed plastics waste.

Digital government has been an evolving topic in research and practice, and during the COVID-19 crisis, different tools emerged as crucial elements in tackling the crisis. Comparing the federal level in the United States (Anglo-Saxon public interest culture) and in Austria (continental European rule-of-law culture), this article looks at how different barriers to digital government were affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Fourteen semi-structured interviews with experts in United States departments and their Austrian counterparts are conducted. The results show strong similarities between the United States and Austria in cultural barriers (bureaucratic culture, resistance to change, risk aversion) but also in structural barriers (political commitment and resources, workforce) to digital government. The main difference lies in laws and regulations as structural barriers, stemming from the different administrative traditions. Furthermore, the study highlights the dynamic nature of barriers. It shows that a crisis can result in the lowering of both structural as well as cultural barriers. Deliberate removal of structural barriers in experimentation spaces may therefore enhance digital government in 'orderly' times as well.

Many countries have adopted various measures to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The regulation measures of lockdown have triggered changes in public political trust in the government (including in its competence, benevolence and integrity). Information shapes the attitudes and values of residents; this paper aims to study the effect of a lockdown on political trust and the moderating effect from quality of government shared information. From 12 March to 31 May 2022, Shanghai implemented strict lockdown measures. In this study, we randomly sampled the participation information of 1063 participants. Data-based regression analysis shows that lockdown has had a negative impact on all subcategories of political trust. However, timely and accuracy information weakens its negative effect. The accuracy of information moderates the relationship between lockdown and political trust in competence and integrity, while a sufficient supply of information moderates the relationship between lockdown and political trust in benevolence.

It is important to understand the public's trust in the government's ability to handle crisis events. Based on China Family Panel Studies data in 2018 and 2020, this paper explores the interaction between government trust and life satisfaction during the pandemic. It is found that with the increase in public trust in government officials, individual life satisfaction has been significantly improved. The main mechanism is that government trust enhances people's confidence in the future and promotes the government's investment in the livelihood fields. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, individual life satisfaction suffered a negative impact. Individuals with high trust in the government before the pandemic had a small decrease in life satisfaction. At the same time, when faced with the pandemic, individuals were more willing to trust the government due to the desire to overcome common threats, which will alleviate the negative impact of the pandemic on individual life satisfaction. The research reported in this paper helps to explain the role of government in the crisis period from the perspective of public trust and provides useful information for the government to formulate and adjust policies to mitigate the impact of the crisis events. In China, trust in local governments is related to public satisfaction.People are more willing to increase trust in the government to overcome a common crisis, thus reducing the negative impact of the crisis on individual life satisfaction.Perhaps more important is to promote the public service motivation of government officials through government trust.Providing public services, increasing accountability and transparency in society, and increasing citizen engagement are all effective ways to foster institutional trust.

Within only 10 days of March 2020, the Swiss administration had designed and implemented a loan guarantee scheme for enterprises. The implementation phase was also short: it lasted less than five months. This article examines how that was possible, considering the complexity of the institutional setting and the scheme's innovative form, especially in terms of IT, including breakthroughs for the Swiss e-administrative practice: the scheme used algorithms to verify clients' applications, a unique identification number for companies was implemented on a large scale, Swiss banks were integrated into the project's preparation and implementation, and some of their client operations were centralised on a government e-platform. The salient features of the process are identified through an analysis of the unfolding of operations during those ten days. The circumstances and context leading to radically new forms of public governance are also identified. Besides, an output analysis was undertaken to single out the innovative features of the deliverable. The case under consideration was short, and came unpredictably, so that no data or observations could be collected before or during the case. Accordingly, the study is by and large based on ex-post enquiries. With no explicitly formalised mandates, structures, or roles, the project participants came up with an informal organisation system. A well-defined deliverable was a powerful driver of the process. Several characteristics of the project, such as efficient networks, real-time information flow, flexible roles, flat hierarchy, and swift iterative subprocesses were akin to those of 'agile organisations'. Tasks were performed concomitantly instead of sequentially.

Co-production was vital to support public services provision during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the main challenges for service providers is to make co-production sustainable. There are few empirical studies on the sustainability of co-production from a long-term perspective. This study aims to contribute to this topic by exploring the micro-level foundations of co-production persistence through a longitudinal qualitative study in three public service organizations providing developmental services for youth with disabilities. Co-production is analyzed along the service provision process before, during and after the first COVID-19 lockdown, with specific attention on exploring how the conditions for sustainable co-production - mutual commitment, complementarities and institutional arrangements - occur and reinforce one another after an external shock. The findings suggest that the persistence of co-production is a result of a process in which experimentation with new complementarities can enhance previous co-production experiences and generate a context of mutual commitment that facilitates future co-production initiatives and their institutionalization.

Korea and Japan, neighboring democratic countries in Northeast Asia, announced their first COVID-19 cases in January 2020 and witnessed similar patterns of disease spread but adopted different policy approaches to address the pandemic (agile and proactive approach versus cautious and restraint-based approach). Applying the political nexus triad model, this study analyzes and compares institutional contexts and governance structures of Korea and Japan, then examines the differences in policy responses of the two Asian countries. This study first reviews the state of COVID-19 and examines changes in the conventional president-led political nexus triad in Korea and the bureaucracy-led political nexus triad in Japan. Then, this study examines how the differences in institutional contexts and governance structures shaped policy responses and policy outcomes of the two countries in managing the COVID-19 crisis.