Contenu du sommaire

The European Investment Bank (EIB) proclaimed its metamorphosis into a climate bank in 2019. As the financing body of the European Union, the political context surrounding the bank's announcement has garnered significant academic interest. Despite its dual nature as both a Union body and a financial entity, the business rationale behind EIB's shift has remained underexplored. To narrow this research gap, this paper addresses two research questions: Did business interests, in addition to political motivations, influence the EIB's pivot to climate? And was this change truly transformational? Examining lending metrics and the business model, it argues that the rapid shift to climate, although not supported by prior strategy, provided the EIB with positioning and operational opportunities. The paper finds that the pivot, while rhetorically bold, entailed limited structural changes.JEL CLASSIFICATION: L20, L31, M10, G31, G21

Hybrid democratic innovations, typically introduced in democratic contexts to enhance citizen engagement and address democratic “malaise,” combine deliberative “talking” among smaller groups with broader “voting” by the public. In recent years, authoritarian regimes have also begun adopting such democratic innovations, including participatory budgeting (PB). This paper investigates whether such mechanisms serve merely as tools to reinforce authoritarian rule or whether they can genuinely empower citizens and function as hybrid democratic innovations that foster inclusion, deliberation, and impact. Drawing on 36 in-depth interviews and secondary sources, the study identifies two key mechanisms in PB cases in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan: wide programmatic scope and local-level incentives that can foster partial empowerment. These empirical cases are assessed against three dimensions of hybrid democratic innovation: inclusion, deliberation, and impact. While PB in both countries remains shaped by top-down control and limited deliberative engagement, the findings suggest that under specific conditions such reforms can generate modest forms of citizen empowerment rather than serve solely as instruments of regime legitimation. The paper contributes to the literature on deliberative practices and comparative public administration in authoritarian settings with broader implications for understanding citizen empowerment across the Global South.

Facial recognition technologies (FRTs) crystallize tensions between security, innovation, and fundamental rights, as their implementation follows markedly different policy arrangements across states and geopolitical blocs. This article explores how policy implementation arrangements for FRTs shape models of digital sovereignty in the European Union (EU), the United States (US), and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Through a comparative, most-different systems design, and structured content analysis of secondary sources (laws; guidance; enforcement; grey literature), this investigation operationalizes four dimensions: regulatory frameworks; actor networks; implementation and enforcement mechanisms; and sovereignty implications. Three distinctive pathways emerge, namely, the EU's rule-and-regulator, the US's liability-and-localism, and the PRC's command-and-integration, which shape digital sovereignty attributes by reflecting broader security-related strategies. The article advances a mechanism-based account linking policy implementation to sovereignty claims and offers policy recommendations for aligning policy instruments with regulatory oversight capacity.

Following extreme climate events and the onset of armed conflict, countries have adopted a diverse mix of policies regarding the evacuation and repatriation of their nationals. What conceptual insights does this mix of policies offer to policy scholarship on the transnational policy process? Are all policies equally transnational? This article presents the first comprehensive review of repatriation and international evacuation policies of 45 countries, addressing issues of policy features and international norms. Building on this extensive empirical dataset, it introduces the concepts of transnational density and of transnational intensity, borrowing from the terminology used in concepts by Bauer and Knill (2012) and allowing for the exploration of variation in the transnational policy process.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, both academic advisors and bureaucrats were involved in Scientific Advisory Committees (SACs) or Policy Advisory Systems (PASs) in Kenya and South Africa. Despite the involvement of stakeholders, including community members, interest groups, think tanks, donors, and development partners, the academic advisors and bureaucrats were central – to varying degrees – to the policy design in each country. This study analyzed the nature and scope of the interaction between academic advisors and bureaucrats in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the two countries. The comparative case analysis of Kenya and South Africa revealed significant bureaucratic control over the roles of SACs/PASs', demonstrating that the extent of government control can greatly influence the nature and scope of engagement between academic advisors and bureaucrats in research, policy analysis, consultancy, and as seconded experts in emergency situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. Generally, being internal to the government, bureaucrats dominated the policy processes and invited academic advisors as needed, largely based on an authoritative form of PAS management. There is still much ground to cover regarding the role of academic advisors in the transitional democracies policy process.