The demand for IPE and public policy in the governance of global policy design

The first decade of the 21st century recognised the growing salience of transnational or global governance as an analytical field of inquiry and as a normative project. In this introductory article, we argue that IPE offers a wider and deeper contextual understanding of the 'global' in a way that the scholarship of international relations, on the one hand, and that of international economics, on the other, have not done. IPE has been less strong in the context of global policy analysis that faut de mieux and, rather strangely, has been left largely to the economics discipline as other disciplines have slowly ceded the policy playing field to economics - at times with disastrous outcomes for policy. In light of these strengths and weaknesses of IPE as a framework for policy analysis, greater efforts at triangulating the insights of IPE and global public policy may help provide richer and more nuanced analyses of policy and politics.