This article reviews how Singapore has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, from late-January to early May, 2020, through the three-phase approach to “learning”: in-between learning, trial-and-error learning, and contingency learning. Given its unique political system dominated by the People’s Action Party (PAP) and bureaucratic culture, the Singapore government has progressively implemented numerous control measures including strict travel bans, contact tracing, “Circuit Breaker,” compulsory mask-wearing, and social distancing policies, along with financial relief to businesses and workers, in a very top-down fashion. Although the health and treatment issues of foreign migrant workers in dormitories continue to be the subject of ongoing debate among many scholars, it should be noted that the mortality rate in Singapore still remains very low compared to that of many other countries. Singapore’s case points to an important lesson that learning-driven coordinated strategic approaches matter for effective crisis management in the long term.

Over the past few decades, research on policy adoption and diffusion has grown rapidly. Despite the relatively large number of publications, however, little attention has been paid to the important question of why a policy is differently implemented or diffused across governments. To answer this question and improve our understanding of local policy choice beyond widely cited neighboring influences, we closely examine the roles of three main policy actors-internal actors, external actors, and go-betweens-in the local policy diffusion process, drawing particularly upon property tax reassessment scenarios. In addition, we focus on nested institutional arrangements, including form of government and type of property tax assessor, that affect the policy decisions of internal actors. Using data on cities and towns in New York State for 1993-2010, we estimate event history models of property tax reassessment activities. Our findings reveal that regional interactions with neighbors that have already adopted the policy and top-down go-betweens through positive inducements can help facilitate property tax reassessment across municipalities. Reformed municipal governments in the council-manager form, along with appointed assessors, are also most likely to adopt reassessment policy frequently, compared with other institutional arrangements. Overall, this study advances the policy diffusion literature by exploring the roles of different influences through a more detailed, broader approach.

Citizen participation in budgeting can be a governmental mechanism to minimize organizational learning pathologies resulting from sole reliance on an administrative accountability model. This study analyzes case studies of Los Angeles and Bukgu, South Korea, to show how participative budgeting combines exploration and refinement strategies to create processes that foster information exchange between citizens and public officials. Although the analysis finds representativeness problems in both cases, scholars, administrators, and citizen advocates should have an interest in the narratives on how cities construct and refine processes that can improve citizen-administrator information exchange.

Despite its global popularity over the past few decades, the publicprivate partnership (PPP) has not always led to successful outcomes, due largely to a number of risk factors associated with the projects. To explain how and why PPPs sometimes fail, this study considers the success-failure continuum of Singapore's recent PPP experience from 2000 to 2019. After taking a critical, close look at the six failed cases, we identify the following latent risk factors: unstable financial capacity during the execution period of a project, force majeure unforeseen problems that arise, a lack of technical and/or financial foresight, poor corporate management (e.g. delays in construction and poor-quality service delivery), and an unfavourable investment environment stemming from the lack of a clear and supportive governance framework. In addition, we find that most risk factors tend to appear during the contract management (pre-operation) and project management (operation) phases. Such risks seem to drive the operational failure and subsequent contract termination of multiple unsuccessful PPPs, simultaneously (and sometimes sequentially) rather than in isolated fashion. All in all, this study offers for policymakers that better risk allocation and proper, mutual coordination between the public and private partners represent essential factors for PPP success.

This article examines the relationship between institutional differences embedded in local governance structures and government performance in the specific context of property assessment. In order to provide deeper insight into why certain governance structures perform better than others, we focus on the impact of nested levels of institutions-constitutional-level and substantive-level rules of governance-beyond the conventional perspective of the form of government. Based on panel data of cities and towns in New York State between 1993 and 2010, our analysis indicates that, among other institutional arrangements, municipalities employing the council-manager form with appointed assessors are most likely to achieve higher levels of assessment quality (uniformity) of the residential property. This indicates that having politically independent (more career-oriented), low-powered appointed governance structures rather than politically riskaverse (more voter-oriented), high-powered elected counterparts are more likely to be effective at reducing risk in tax equity issues, thus providing better financial performance.