Understanding Macron’s political leadership and his impact on French politics

Emmanuel Macron won reelection as French President on 24 April, but what do the next five years have in store for French politics? Alistair Cole assesses Macron’s leadership, his wider impact on politics in France, and the prospects for his second presidency

Trust and the Smart City

Hong Kong, consistently ranked as one of the world’s leading smart cities, is undergoing a period of disruptive change. While still shaped fundamentally by the “one country, two systems” arrangement, Hong Kong is increasingly integrated into the political (Liaison Office) and economic (Greater Bay Area, GBA) logics of mainland China (Ho and Tran 2019). The “dynamic zero-Covid approach” has also significantly impeded Hong Kong’s place branding as “Asia’s World City,” with the relocation of cor..

The French state and its territorial challenges

This article focuses upon the territorial challenges to the French state. There is a genuine policy puzzle in terms of how to join up separate agencies of the state that is far from unique to France. Introducing new evidence based on interviews with high ranking officials, politicians and representatives of territorial policy communities in 2010, the main body of the article focuses upon the two main territorial reforms of the Sarkozy presidency, the reform of the territorial state, and the local government reform. These cases reveal an original attempt to craft a political discourse based on public sector productivity and state puissance. The article explores the tension between synoptic models of reform, focused on the expectation of rapid and quantifiable macro-level change that suits the short-term returns of the political cycle; and institutionalized processes of meso-level implementation, with different timescales, logics of appropriateness and configurations of actors