Public policy in the Global South is often discussed in the register of “constraints,” like limited administrative capacity, fiscal fragility, territorial inequality, and exposure to global economic and ecological pressures. Yet the contributions gathered in this dossier insist on a more demanding premise; since development outcomes are not merely constrained by context, they are produced through governance design and institutional capacity. Across diverse cases from Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and East Asia, these articles converge on the idea that the most consequential development question is not whether policies exist, but whether they work through institutions that can translate goals into distributive and sustainable outcomes. Because of that, we are pleased to present this special dossier from Frontiers in Political Science entitled “Public Policy and Development in the Global South.”

A first theme cutting across the Topic is the persistent gap between formal policy expansion and substantive inclusion. The South African Special Economic Zone (SEZ) study confronts this tension directly by challenging the assumption that place-based industrial policy is inherently inclusive. It frames SEZs as development instruments that can generate investment and activity yet still fail to deliver broad-based benefits when participation and local linkages are weak, and when distributional goals are not embedded in governance (Muringa et al.).

A parallel concern appears in the Peruvian case on social programs and financial inclusion, where the authors place policy instruments inside a broader critical frame of biopolitics and financial governmentality. Their empirical strategy connects program execution and financial inclusion indicators to multiple human development outcomes over 2000–2024 and highlights a key asymmetry: expansion of instruments does not reliably translate into territorially equitable gains. The paper presented by seven Peruvian researchers underscores that only a narrow set of levers shows consistent explanatory power for several indicators while overall regional effectiveness is limited (Rocha et al.).

A second theme is that multi-level governance is considered a central determinant of policy success. The Indonesian study on regulatory governance and investment illustrates this sharply; the authors used a generalized difference-in-differences/event-study approach, showing that weakening governance conditions are associated with persistent negative effects on FDI inflows, evidence that the credibility and quality of local regulatory governance are not peripheral, but decisive for investment-led development strategies (Yuwono et al.).

The Brazilian analysis extends the multilevel message in a different domain (education policy) by arguing that formal federal rules and national ambitions are insufficient when intergovernmental coordination and capacity vary across territories. The paper frames education as a multilevel governance problem in which local institutional conditions shape whether policy translates into equalizing outcomes, highlighting that decentralization without effective coordination can reproduce territorial inequality (Marenco and Kern). This line of argument resonates with one of our dossier's recurring emphases on the focus of development policy as a tool ultimately tested where it is implemented (municipalities, provinces, school systems, and local bureaucracies).

A third theme is the role of democratic quality and participation in shaping welfare. The Indonesian village-level study operationalizes an interesting idea of “village democracy” and welfare using index-based measures to examine which democratic mechanisms are associated with welfare improvements. The authors report that deliberative processes are linked to gains in dimensions such as health and employment, while the relationship is weaker or absent in other dimensions like environmental conditions. Those findings suggest that even if participation matters, it only does it through specific channels and under specific constraints (Hakim et al.). This qualitative interpretation also draws attention to governance distortions, including a discussion on “elite capture and transactional politics,” showing why participation must be embedded in enforceable procedural and institutional safeguards.

A fourth theme concerns policy evaluation horizons and unintended distributional effects. The Chinese study on the National Innovative City pilot policy uses a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) design and explicitly asks whether innovation-led modernization reduces or worsens inequality between urban and rural residents. The results point to a distributional risk, where innovation policy, even when it accelerates modernization, can widen the urban–rural income gap through industrial structure dynamics. This happens specifically via upgrading and weakened rationalization, unless equity is built into the policy's governance and complementary measures (Zhang et al.). This contribution matters for our dossier because it moves beyond generic “pro-innovation” narratives and remind readers that growth strategies must be judged by distributive outcomes and aggregate performances.

The Chilean study on violence against women (VAW) treats VAW as a criminogenic phenomenon shaped by spatiotemporal conditions and uses official records to identify factors associated with incident distribution across urban areas and time periods. By emphasizing the relevance of time–space structures, it supports a policy approach that is targeted and adaptive, particularly important in contexts where state capacity and service coverage are uneven, a very common situation in Chile and the rest of Latin America. It also models an interesting methodological stance on development discussions. Policy gains traction when social problems are measured in ways that match their structure, enabling prevention and response to be planned with realistic resource constraints (Cadena-Urzúa et al.).

The final theme is the intersection between development policy and ecological constraints. The SAARC ecological footprint paper situates globalization and industrialization inside a sustainability problem and argues, through panel econometric modeling, that environmental pressure is not only a function of growth drivers but also of institutional quality and energy composition. It frames institutional quality and renewable energy as key levers for decoupling development from ecological degradation, shifting the development debate to questions of enforceable governance and energy transition capacity (Li and Zhang).

Taken together, our dossier advances a coherent agenda for public policy and development research in the Global South. First, inclusion must be engineered through governance design, whether in industrial policy (SEZs), welfare policy (social programs), or modernization strategies (innovation policy). Second, multilevel capacity on regulatory quality, coordination, and local implementation conditions shape policy effectiveness and investment, education, and welfare outcomes. Third, democratic practices matter, but through specific mechanisms, like deliberation and protection against capture, rather than through formal participation alone. Fourth and last, policy evaluation must include distributional and sustainability criteria, recognizing that modernization can widen inequalities and that growth pressures ecological systems unless institutions and energy systems actively steer trajectories.

This collaborative academic work involved the editorial efforts of researchers from Peru, South Africa, North Macedonia, Bangladesh, Colombia, Australia, Hong Kong, Spain, and Mexico, to whom we are very grateful for their valuable contributions. Today we present this new installment, which comprises these engaging articles. We want also like to thank the Universidad Católica Santa María de Arequipa (UCSM), in particular the Vice-Rector for Research, Máximo Rondón Rondón, and the Director of Research Management, Dr. Jaime Cárdenas García, who provided the necessary support for the research project that funded several activities related to this dossier (fieldwork, conference presentations, and working materials).¹ We believe that the work achieved will forge lasting academic connections that strengthen the development of academic ties between UCSM, Stellenbosch University, International Balkan University, and other universities in the Global South in the fields of political science, international relations, public policy, international law, and related disciplines.