Call for Participants:
Expressions of interest close: 16 January 2026
The seminar series is funded through a USF Seminar Series Award, and the USF is a charitable organisation that provides grant funding to advance academic research and education in the field of urban studies. This seminar series is convened by Dr Napong Tao Rugkhapan, Dr Tan Wenn Er, Dr Priza Marendraputra, and supported by Dr Galuh Syahbana Indraprahasta and Dr Chieh-Ming Lai. More information about the seminar series is available: https://www.urbanstudiesfoundation.org/funding/grantees/tensions-in-policy-learning- grounding-learning-practices-in-urban-southeast-asia
The practice of urban policy learning in Southeast Asia has become increasingly common amid inter-city competition, geopolitical shifts, social polarisation, and climate-related challenges. Cities in the region are keen to “learn from abroad,” looking towards ostensibly successful cases, best practices, and exemplars from elsewhere. Unlike many parts of the Global North, however, urban development in Southeast Asia is closely tied to national agendas and elite visions. Foreign ideas are introduced not just to address technical challenges but also to reinforce or shape national images and political narratives. Yet policy learning in the region is not new. Historically, Southeast Asia’s port cities were deeply embedded in colonial trade networks, and their elites often aligned with foreign powers, adopting foreign tastes and values. Today, this legacy is palpable in the cultural mimicry and aesthetic preferences shaping development projects. The interplay between national interests and local development creates a complex vortex of policy mobility, where cities become arenas for experimentation, redevelopment, and the contested reimagining of global concepts.
We situate our Seminar Series within the broader literature on policy mobilities (McCann, 2011; McCann & Ward, 2011), urban modelling, worlding, and inter-referencing (Roy & Ong, 2011; Bunnell, 2015), as well as Asian urbanisms (Shin, 2021; Hogan et al., 2012). We build on burgeoning work theorising from alternative geographical sites, focusing specifically on Southeast Asia as a site of learning and knowledge production. In particular, the state’s dominance in Southeast Asian city politics is worth unpacking, in part in response to calls for a move beyond the urban to the interscalar (Silva and Ward, 2024). We draw on efforts to decentre global urbanism, recognising that “the act of theorising from outside the North Atlantic or the West is not to involve a mere academic exercise of testing the applicability of concepts and ideas generated in the West” (Shin, 2021: 68). Asian urbanisms highlight “intra-regional diversity within the context of global flows, regional policies, technology transfers, and inter-urban cultural traffic” (Hogan et al., 2012).
Contemporary policy mobility efforts, however, are marked by tensions. On one hand, learning, in its broader sense, is liberal by nature: open exchange, constant innovation, boundary-crossing, challenging conventions. On the other hand, these liberal ideals come into conflict with dominant regional ideologies—developmentalism, authoritarianism, and hierarchical governance structures that favour top-down decision-making. Still, despite strong national 1 agendas, local actors can contest and access global resource circuits (Miller & Bunnell, 2014; Lai, 2025), thereby rendering policy mobility nonlinear, contested, and multi-scalar (Indraprahasta et al., 2022; Rugkhapan, 2021).
Tension as an analytic underpins our Seminar Series in three ways: theoretical, methodological, and practical. At a theoretical level, we explore the theoretical tensions inherent in “theorising from elsewhere” by treating Southeast Asia as a knowledge producer rather than just a case study. Key questions emerge: How can we engage global north references while keeping them under erasure? Can we move past the global north as the default point of departure? How might references from the global north and south interact—generatively or contentiously—when refracted through Southeast Asian knowledge practices? Moreover, we seek to expand methodological advances in conscious response to the preceding Environment and Planning A Special Issue on the methodological challenges of policy mobility (Cochrane & Ward, 2012). Finally, we consider the practical tensions of policy learning—its messy implementation, inflected by national politics, local ground sentiment, and contestations over knowledge claims.
Underpinning these discussion points are the spatialities of tensions, where friction points emerge in the learning process (e.g. when implemented in parts, when ideas are encountered in convention centres, over informal discussions and coffee). To understand how these tensions manifest in practice requires examining how different Southeast Asian cities adapt foreign frameworks to local socio-political conditions. Through comparative case studies, the Seminar Series invites participants to assess how cities balance global best practices with domestic pressures, cultural factors, and institutional constraints. Whether in urban design, economic strategies, technological deployment, or sustainability measures, policy transfer outcomes hinge largely on a delicate process of negotiation— one that ultimately shapes how “learning from abroad” is realised and resisted in the region.
We invite original, theoretically informed papers that engage broadly with the aforementioned themes, but also more specifically:
- Tension as an analytic
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- Understanding Southeast Asia as a knowledge producer: How can we engage Global North references while keeping them under erasure? Can we (have we?) move past the Global North as the default point of departure
- Methodological tensions when engaging in policy mobilities studies: How can we engage a myriad of methods when thinking about policy mobilities? How can we unmoor assemblages of learning?
- Practical tensions evinced in the process of policy learning or (un)learning, e.g. ‘Singapore model’ as site of aspiration, but tracing the friction(s) that emerge where policy actors are unable to translate or implement parts of the model elsewhere
- Spatialities of tension: Where do friction points emerge in the learning process? At what scales and in what arenas (e.g., during implementation, conceptualisation, in convention centres, over coffee chats)?
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- What does a regional focus on the socio-historical practices of policy learning within Southeast Asia offer the broader subfield? How would (post)colonial histories interact with contemporary policy mobilities in Southeast Asia?
- How does the often contentious role played by the state and, in particular, large private developers, factor into considerations of intra-regional or international learning?
- How do urban ‘models’ of specific cities and sites in Southeast Asia feed into city aspirations and cooperative forums (e.g. sister-city agreements, or inter-city forums like C40)? Does this feed into emerging intra-regional circuits of policy learning within Southeast Asia itself (South-south circuits), which may constitute a vortex of experimentation and a distinct site of theorisation in itself?
Submission of proposals
Paper proposals should include:
- An extended abstract (maximum of 500 words)
- Short author bio (200 words)
- Expression of interest (300 words)
Proposed papers should be the author’s original work, not committed elsewhere, and will be considered for potential inclusion in a journal special issue. There will be two workshops held in 2026: the first hosted by the Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII) in Depok, Indonesia (3 to 5 June 2026 tentatively) and the second hosted by Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand (30 Nov to 3 Dec 2026 tentatively). In the first workshop, we will present and discuss in-progress paper presentations, with the expectation that papers will be revised for submission by the second workshop.
These two workshops will be held in person, and attendance is compulsory at both. We are able to offer at least partial airfare funding for overseas participants, as well as accommodation in Depok and Bangkok.
This seminar series is funded by the Urban Studies Foundation and convened by Dr Napong Tao Rugkhapan (napong.r@chula.ac.th), Dr Tan Wenn Er (wenner@nus.edu.sg), and Dr Priza Marendraputra (priza@nus.edu.sg). Please feel free to contact us should questions arise.
The deadline to apply is 16 January 2026, and we aim to notify selected authors by the end of March 2026. We look forward to hearing from you!