Highlights
IBEI hosted the 5th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP5) in Barcelona in 2021. Organized jointly with the International Public Policy Association (IPPA), the conference took place in July 2021 at the Ciutadella Campus of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra with simultaneous online access. The Universitat de Barcelona (UB), the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) also collaborated in organizing this edition of the conference. Eminent researchers presented their work during plenary sessions and parallel sessions. In the evenings, participants enjoyed social events at world-class cultural venues, including a welcome drink on the terrace of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) and a gala dinner at the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site gardens.
IBEI predoctoral fellows received outstanding awards and grants in 2021. Lewin Schmitt won the Global Challenges Talent Award of the "Talent Global Programme", jointly organized by CIDOB and Banco Sabadell Foundation, for his work What's in a tweet? Twitter's impact on public opinion and EU foreign affairs. Guillem Amatller was awarded a research grant from the Banco Sabadell Foundation to advance his PhD research on technological change and state power. Adrià Rivera Escartín won the 2021 Manuel Castillo Award, organized by the Universitat de València, for his scientific article Populist challenges to EU foreign policy in the Southern Neighbourhood: an informal and illiberal Europeanisation?, published in the Journal of European Public Policy.
IBEI and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding that allows IBEI master’s students to carry out professional internships both at IICA’s headquarters in Costa Rica and at any of the institute’s 35 locations in Latin America, the Caribbean and Spain. These internships provide an exceptional opportunity for those students interested in developing professional experience in an international organization specialized in agricultural development and rural well-being.
IBEI spearheaded the IDEES magazine special issue “China Before a World in Crisis”, edited by the Centre d’Estudis de Temes Contemporanis. It is an in-depth analysis of Chinese reality from different angles and perspectives based on existing debates on the transformation and consolidation of China as a superpower. The special issue was coordinated by Pablo Pareja, Academic Co-coordinator of the Master's in Public Policy (Mundus MAPP), and Jacint Jordana, Director of IBEI.
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IBEI organized several webinar series in partnership with other leading institutions. In collaboration with the Barcelona City Council, IBEI coordinated a webinar series on the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) contribution to global governance. Leading scholars discussed how SDGs could be understood as a new mode of global governance and what lessons they could offer to improve it. IBEI also coordinated an online seminar series on US Foreign Policy as part of the joint programme on American politics and international security co-organised with the Institut d’Estudis Nord-americans (IEN).
IBEI welcomed Professor Anthony Bertelli as Senior Research Associate to run a research project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. The REPGOV project focusses on the relationship between democracy and administrative policymaking and aims to illustrate how the democratic value trade-offs made by public administrators are an important missing link in contemporary discussions about the quality, and the nature, of representative government. Bertelli is Sherwin-Whitmore Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Pennsylvania State University.
