Designing Beyond Capacity? Policy Complexity and Local Policy Capacity in the Global South

Public problems are often complex, but complexity is not only a characteristic of the problems governments face. It can also be produced by policy design itself. The accumulation of rules, imprecise instrument selection, and the absence of accountability mechanisms can make a policy progressively more difficult to interpret and, consequently, to implement. These demands become particularly relevant when policy designs are configured through successive layers without sufficient consideration of the capacities and institutional conditions of the governments responsible for putting them into practice.
This panel proposes to examine the relationship between policy design complexity and policy capacity at the subnational level in the Global South. Its central question is: what happens when the analytical, operational, and political demands embedded in policy design exceed the individual, organizational, or system-level capacities available for implementation?
The panel seeks to connect two debates that have often developed in parallel. The first concerns complex and wicked problems, characterized by uncertainty, interdependence, incomplete knowledge, and conflict among values and interests. The second concerns policy design and policy capacity: how instruments, rules, actors, and institutional arrangements generate particular implementation demands, and how governments mobilize the competences and resources required to address them. Rather than assuming that more complex problems necessarily require more complex designs, the panel proposes to examine mismatches between design and capacity, as well as the institutional and administrative conditions that create or deepen such mismatches.
The panel welcomes theoretically informed and empirically grounded papers on Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other Global South contexts, with particular interest in municipalities, states, provinces, and other subnational institutions. Papers may address electoral, social, urban, environmental, health, regulatory, digital, or other policy sectors.
Rather than using Global South cases simply to test theories developed elsewhere, the panel seeks to use these experiences to revisit and refine concepts of policy capacity, complexity, institutional fit, and policy design from the realities of local governance. The panel will also seek to develop a special issue or edited volume bringing together selected papers to advance comparative research on policy complexity and capacity in the Global South.