European Political Economy and Economic Governance in an Age of Fragmentation: Comparative Perspectives

The return of geopolitical competition, heightened economic insecurity, and growing pressures on the liberal international order are reshaping economic governance across the world. Longstanding assumptions about openness, market integration, and rules-based governance are increasingly challenged by demands for resilience, economic security, strategic autonomy, social and environmental transformation, and new forms of public intervention. Across Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other regions, these pressures are prompting governments to reconsider established relationships between states and markets and to experiment with different institutions, policies, and instruments for governing economic change.
This panel invites comparative, theoretical, and empirical contributions examining how economic governance and the role of the state are evolving in response to these changing domestic and international conditions. It asks whether current transformations represent more than a series of discrete policy adjustments and instead point towards broader changes in the functions states perform, the objectives they pursue, and the instruments through which they seek to shape economic and social outcomes. Of particular interest is how these changes vary across political economies and regions, and how they are conditioned by different institutional legacies, development trajectories, productive structures, political coalitions, and positions within the global economy.
The panel welcomes contributions from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond, addressing areas including fiscal and monetary governance, financial regulation and public finance, trade and investment, industrial and development policy, welfare and social policy, green transitions, technological change, economic security, infrastructure, and the governance of strategic sectors and resources. Contributions may examine institutional change and state capacity, the emergence of new policy instruments and forms of coordination, changing relationships between public and private actors, and the interaction between national, regional, and international levels of governance.
By bringing together experiences from different regions and political-economic contexts, the panel aims to develop a comparative perspective on the transformation of economic governance in an era of heightened uncertainty and geopolitical fragmentation.