Gwen Arnold
University of California, Davis
gbarnold@ucdavis.edu

doi: 10.18278/cpj.4.1.2

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Abstract
Public policy scholarship is increasingly flourishing in China, opening up possibilities for understanding governance dynamics in a cultural context and political system too long overlooked by western scholars. There are rich opportunities for exploring the extent to which policy theories crafted in developed democracies apply or should be changed to have relevance in developing countries and non-Western political systems. Science advances when the generalizability of theories and findings can be tested across diverse contexts; thus, scholars in China and around the world gain from the flourishing of Chinese policy scholarship. Here, I elaborate on three theoretical and methodological priorities that appear increasingly pressing as our field of study deepens and broadens: The importance of centering human agency in public policy scholarship, the value of studying and learning from negative policy outcomes, and the need to move beyond diagnosing public problems to investigating how people collectively solve such problems. Along the way, I highlight works from Chinese policy scholars that address these priorities and ways in which scholarship on China is uniquely posited to tackle them.

Keywords: human agency, negative cases, policy process, qualitative
research