Complexity of Public Policy and Administration: Introduction to the Special Issue (Editorial‪)‬

That public policy and administration processes are complex is well known. Societies are multifaceted and dynamic; so should be the policies that are meant to govern them. This intuitive understanding makes complexity theory and related theoretical perspectives appealing to public policy and administration scholars and practitioners. The challenge is to develop meaningful and useful applications of seemingly "esoteric" and "distant" concepts and methods of complexity theory for public policy and administration. The papers in this special issue of Public Administration Quarterly take important steps in applying and refining those complexity theory concepts and methods that originated in fields as far away as thermodynamics, atmospheric science, biology, and mathematics. It should be noted here that these papers are not the first ones doing so. Since the 1990s, several researchers and theorists made contributions in books (Kiel, 1994; Kiel & Elliott, 1996; Elliott & Kiel, 1999; Morcol & Dennard, 2000; Morcol, 2002; Haynes, 2003; Dennard, Richardson, & Morcol, 2008) and symposium issues in this journal (Weber, 2005, 2006). The papers in this issue contribute to this literature.