Interview with Workshop Convenor, Prof. John Casey15th Annual JCPA and ICPA-Forum Workshop 1) Prof. Casey, on 20-21st November you hosted the 15th Annual JCPA and ICPA-Forum Workshop at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs in Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY). The JCPA and ICPA forum community is thankful to Baruch College for hosting this annual event and also very excited to be gathering in New York to discuss a very interesting topic. The workshop focused on analyzing the dynamics that drive third sector policy and practice in a country, a region or worldwide. Now, what would you say makes the theme of this workshop so special and interesting? Why is the third sector socially significant? The expansion of a third sector, between the state and market, has been a key dynamic in almost all societies since the final decades of the 20th Century. The sector has become more prominent in policy making, in the promotion of civic action, and the delivery of new quasi-public services in domestic and international arenas. Understanding the dynamics of this increasing salience of the third sector and its implication for the polities they operate in is key to understanding current and future policy processes. 2) And what do you think has been the added value of the workshop for the field of comparative policy analysis? We are have experts from around the world who have prepared papers with explicitly comparative perspectives. The two days of presentation and discussion should give significant insights into the similarities and differences in third sector dynamic around the world. I am particularly pleased that the papers address a wide range of organization, from foundations, to social enterprises and small volunteer-based international NGOs. 3) In the call for papers you asked for work that focuses on regions that have been less prominent in third sector scholarship, including Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, South East Asia, and countries with smaller populations. Why? What makes these cases interesting in terms of both research and impact? The reality is that the bulk of published research about the third sector comes from, and is about, high-income democratic countries. They are many reasons, but probably the two most important are: researchers are primarily based in these countries and so they write about what they are most familiar with; there is a dearth of data about the third sector in most low-income and authoritarian countries and so researchers are not able to quantify the changing dynamics. We decided to focus the call for papers on those regions with the specific intention of supporting comparative research efforts in under-researched regions. 4) Have the participants responded to your call? What should we expect to see and read during the workshop in New York? We had participants from Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the USA. We had established scholars as well as young faculty and a post doc all engaging in the comparative domain”. The papers presented addressed a wide range of issues impacting on the sector. And the two discussants for each paper did in-depth analyses of the contents and conclusions. All this augurs well for a very strong future Special Issue of JCPA title “Comparing Third Sector Expansions”. 5) And why New York? Why host the JCPA-ICPA annual workshop this year at Baruch? As these things often happen, it was a result of corridor conversations between myself and Iris Geva-May. We were lucky enough to have Iris here at Baruch as a Visiting Professor and we hosted JCPA during her time with us. I had just published my book The Nonprofit World: Civil Society and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector that explores the expanding global reach of nonprofit organizations, and we were discussing how I might collaborate with ICPA. New York is the home of a particularly high number of local and international NGOs who want to be close to UN and to the major foundations, and it seemed only natural to have the workshop here. It seemed almost a no-brainer we agreed that Third Sector Expansions would be a good topic for an annual workshop and a Special Edition of JCPA so we started the ball rolling. 6) It seems that New York has become the second home of JCPA after Vancouver, Canada. Could you perhaps say a few words on this cooperation? Iris was based at Baruch for a number of years and she continues to maintain close ties to higher education institutions here. We look forward to continuing our close cooperation. Comparative policy and politics have long been an important research focus, but in this new era of rising nationalisms and suspicion of cosmopolitanism it is becoming even more crucial to support global and comparative dialogues. At Baruch we recently moved from being a School of Public Affairs to be becoming a School of Public and International Affairs, joining the numerous other internationally-focused research and teaching institutions in New York City. We are a world city and home of the UN, and the locus of a significant concentration of scholars in this field. Perhaps we could say the Vancouver looks East and South, and New York looks West and South, so we are the perfect complement! Thank you and good luck with the workshop!