From the Editors

We begin our editorial for 2026 offering our sincere appreciation to PAR's outstanding Associate Editors (AEs). Given the volume of manuscripts submitted in 2025 (an all-time high of 1103 that is double the number from a decade ago of 539), we lean heavily on our AE team to move manuscripts through the editorial system, quickly, seamlessly, and expertly. This year, it was not unusual for any given AE to be managing upwards of 10 manuscripts at a time. Heaped upon that work was Wiley's transition of PAR's online editorial platform from Editorial Manager to Research Exchange in November 2025. Currently, our AEs are following through with management of manuscripts to completion in Editorial Manager as they take on new submissions in Research Exchange. Every single AE has been gracious and patient throughout this transition despite numerous hiccups along the way. We applaud PAR's AEs and look forward to another productive year because of their efforts. Effective January 1, 2026, we are pleased to welcome Jason Anastasopoulos as our new AE. We also extend our sincere appreciation to Justin Stritch for his outstanding service and contributions during his term as AE with PAR. We also give thanks to our Editorial Board members. Board members are invaluable to the work of PAR as their support fosters the dissemination of critical knowledge necessary for the advancement by governments, of those working in the public service, and the scholars studying both. We appreciate that each board member stands ready to review from four to six, sometimes more, manuscripts per year. Also, members serve as champions of PAR's mission to bridge theory and practice, help strengthen collaborations between practitioners and scholars, and foster the strength and resiliency of governments around the world through knowledge development. We extend special thanks to those who are leaving PAR's Editorial Board after 3 or more years of wonderful service: Karissa Bergene (George Mason University), Michael Dunaway (National Institute of Standards), Carolyn J. Heinrich (Vanderbilt University), Alexander Kroll (Florida International University), and Mohammad Azfar Nisar (Lahore University, Pakistan). We welcome 7 new Editorial Board members, appointed for 2026–2028: Kate Yang (George Washington University), Jeongyoon Lee (University of Kentucky), Benjamin Brunjes (University of Washington), William Resh (Georgia State University), Weijie Wang (Texas A Tatyana Guzman (Cleveland State), Qiushi Wang (Sun Yat-Sen University, China), and Einat Lavee (University of Haifa, Israel) with the Mosher David Lewis (Vanderbilt University, USA), Johan Christensen (University of Leiden, Netherlands), and Diego Barria (University of Valparaiso, Chile) with the Newland award that recognizes the best Practically Speaking (PS) article; and Tian Tang (Florida State University, USA), Tim Mau (Guelph University, Ontario), and Steven van de Walle (University of Leuven, Belgium) with the Burchfield award for the best book review. This work requires keen eyes on the substantial and excellent work that has appeared in the journal this past year, requiring committee members to put in many hours of reading, sifting, and discussing to settle on the best. The 2025 issues of PAR yielded 3 country studies, 6 conceptual articles, 89 research articles (including 12 Early Career pieces), 24 book reviews, and 7 PS articles. When introducing our vision as new editors for PAR in the first issue of 2024, we noted the discipline of public administration as informed by the experiences of public office holders in political (appointee) and career civil service positions and the research of scholars in their efforts to develop new knowledge of the position and role of citizens and of government in society. To advance the journal as the preeminent bond between theory and practice in the discipline, and to more strongly engage academics with practitioners for solving modern public problems, we developed the PS section of PAR. We hoped that this section would better connect practitioners and academics “to start conversations, investigate modern practices in government and the approaches to collective problems, integrate with relevant scholarship, and, possibly, develop such conversations into articles that would appear in the journal.” Together with Shelley Metzenbaum (PAR's Associate Editor for PS), we are gratified that our vision is coming to fruition. The seven PS articles published in PAR throughout 2025 represent exceptionally strong collaborative work of practitioners, pracademics and scholars covering evidence-based decision making, data use and evidence engines in government, crowdsourcing and government problem solving, tackling homelessness, cybersecurity during wartime, and the evolving executive role of government ministers. Collectively, these works regard a wide swath of public policy and administration concepts, including dynamism, complexity, leadership, priority setting, planning and strategic direction, resourcing, integration, and problem prevention and mitigation. Each illuminates the necessity for data and the criticality of its management and application to solve problems. These pieces provide an exceptional assessment of how government organizations evolve and change to solve modern acute and chronic public problems. Each exposes public organizational change in real time, further informing several theories that nourish our understanding of the role of public managers in advancing government and governance (Fernandez and Rainey 2006). For example, in a study of cyberattacks during the war in Ukraine, Fyshchuk et al. (2025) conducted interviews with Ukrainian authority representatives to uncover the unique challenges to managing cybersecurity during warfare. Findings highlight the tremendous tension of decision makers “forced to set tough economic priorities and to oscillate between allocating resources to physical assets (e.g., conventional military operations and rebuilding infrastructure devasted by bombing) and to cybersecurity.” As expected, attention to cybersecurity takes second place to the needs of war. The problem of recruiting IT and cyber personnel is virtually impossible, given the exodus of people during conflict as well as accentuated pay disparities between the public and private sectors. The authors find that during wartime “inappropriate human behaviors (clicking insecure links, poor password practices, using risky apps)” places the government at high risk of cyberattacks. Also, opaque cybersecurity regulations confuse cyberattack management. Probably the most exceptional aspect of this work regards the magnification of organizational change challenges in wartime that box in managers in their abilities to prevent and mitigate cyberattacks. The grit required of a public manager to navigate circumstances of conflict effectively recalls the ecological perspective of organizational change, given the dramatic ecosystem disruption of war. Callahan et al. (2025) present an expansive analysis of homelessness in the United States, concentrating on several localities that have evidenced some promise in combating the problem. Their consideration of efforts in Houston, Texas, Santa Clara County, California, and North Central Massachusetts region is a positive nod to many concepts foundational to organizational change: communicating the need for change and urgency for addressing the problem, developing a vision for change, generating management and employee support for change, pursuing external support for change, and providing resources to support change. The work cleverly integrates the experiences in the three locations, illustrating highly dynamic and complex systems of multiple actors and entities with significant financing and data needs that require strong leadership (individual and multiple) for managing to success. Critical tasks for a community involve self/community reflection and communication. This requires defining the problem of homelessness in the specific place (Santa Clara defines it as “a housing problem, not an individual failing”), educating the community on the focus for actions (North Central Massachusetts concentrates on individuals rather than families and a region-wide approach communicated to the public to generate collective commitment to goals), and explaining what is to be accomplished (Houston used data to communicate with the public about savings possible from focusing on housing the homeless over day-to-day service provision). The framework for success emphasizes vital mechanisms of shared goals, developing networks, integrating services, data sharing, and continuous attention to governing and funding structures. Importantly, this study is not a “how to” but an illumination of various types of success in battling homelessness as experienced in very different communities. The storytelling intertwined with essential tasks to apply are indispensable. This work reminds of the agency of managers to take on the organizational change paradigms of policy diffusion and innovation as well as dialectical and conflict—each portrays the manager as a change agent who can foster new ways of doing business and improving performance. Evolving roles of public managers are addressed by Andrews and Gilmore (2025) in their study of ministers in the United Kingdom. Presenting evidence going back to Former Prime Minister Tony Blair's decades long run in which he pressed a “delivery agenda,” the authors explain that such focus, brought forward by subsequent prime ministers in various ways, has fostered ministerial considerations of delivery and implementation when drafting policy. The work brings to the forefront the tension between “activist ministers” vis-à-vis civil servants' capacity for action. Andrews and Gilmore mine data from a collective of interviews of former ministers along with government document analysis to illustrate how these managers have “internalized” the delivery agenda. Golden nuggets of knowledge brought to bear with this work regard (1) the continuous learning of managers (necessary and in this case exhibited) to foster government improvement, and (2) transformational leadership possibilities that come with a rational adaptive orientation to organizational change. A collective of scholars and practitioners use mixed methods to uncover how civil servants engage evidence for decision making. Cheng et al. (2025) combine quantitative results from a survey experiment of over 300 state government policy makers with qualitative findings from three dozen interviews of these civil servants from selected states. Those interviewed indicate that most are familiar with evidence-based practices (EBPs) and over half share that EBPs support their decision making for budgeting, policy making, and contracting. Two thirds claim that their future work will benefit from EBPs. The experiment yields types of knowledge preferred by policy makers—these decision makers rank practical knowledge as most helpful, followed by scientific knowledge, with political knowledge ranked last after personal and client experience. Policy makers also give preference to research that identifies outcomes over outputs, research that uncovers program effectiveness for specific groups over average participant, research conducted independently from the agency, and recent research generated within state. Institutional and life cycle perspectives of organizational change seem appropriate here. Public agency managers are often hamstrung in their work and especially in collection of data and evaluation of ever-changing programming and service delivery. Close to one third of policy makers interviewed lamented limited access to scientific knowledge—one pointed out that “a huge barrier to me reading journal articles is I don't have access to them. No free access.”1 This research suggests that managers are relatively sophisticated in their understanding of EBPs and this, in turn, can promote managerial action in typically constrained environments to advance the generation and use of EBPs to improve government outcomes. Several PS pieces get into the weeds of EBPs, data collection options, and government analytics, or the leveraging of survey and administrative data available in governments for managing public performance improvements. Munteanu et al. (2025) use the case of the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) of the General Services Administration (GSA) given its development of an evidence engine to support decision making. Their model places a knowledge broker in the center of strategic management, data infrastructure, and an evidence ecosystem to “connect evidence needs to data architecture; provide a process that aligns the demand and supply of evidence, and support trained staff to take key roles for the development and sustainability of the engine.” Developing such an engine requires a strategy like that discussed earlier regarding solving homelessness—understanding and defining needs and assessing capacity for gathering, analyzing, and channeling evidence throughout the organization and beyond. The example of FAS presents how an evidence engine can “achieve economies of scale, reduce costs, and increase evidence-informed responsiveness to ever-changing needs.” Colovic et al. (2025) discuss how public managers can be more strategic and effective with data gathering through crowdsourcing, a tool popular with governments today for intel on problems of public concern. This research presents a typology of public problems based on scope and technicity and then proposes a suitable crowdsourcing strategy for each problem type. The critical task for government managers seeking information through crowdsourcing thus is mindfulness of problem type. Importantly, “for broad technical problems, crowdsourcing is not the appropriate problem-solving mechanism. To address these, governments should consider alternative strategies (e.g., traditional contracting or partnerships).” Similarly, Rogger and Schuster (2025) point to the ubiquity of digitization of administrative systems in governments around the world as a reason for celebration. Such records, termed administrative microdata, offer a treasure trove of information that can advance evidence-based decision making about government management and operations. However, most governments are underutilizing micro data for problem-solving. The authors conducted a review of almost 700 articles in two public administration journals from the last decade, finding that half of the studies are based on surveys of public employees, a quarter regard surveys of citizens or firms, and just 14% are based on administrative microdata. Rogger and Schuster present instance after instance of how public managers can make better use of microdata, alone or in conjunction with surveys, to bolster the public administration production function. They conclude by calling for strengthening collaborations of practitioners and scholars to exploit the expertise of each—practitioners with micro data and academics with surveys and research methods. Engaging together in government analytics has the potential to dramatically and immediately expand decision making and problem-solving capacities of governments. Each of these last works on evidence-building brings to mind public manager roles described in rational adaptive, institutional, and policy diffusion and innovation organizational change theories (Fernandez and Rainey 2006). Each recognizes the critical nature of data and its use for continuous improvement in government and provides specific and reasonable strategies for public managers to use for capturing, analyzing, and applying evidence for problem solving. Taken all together, PS in 2025 provides practitioners and scholars much food for and for action. forward we will to for advancing PAR to practitioners and to access to PS pieces for all We will offer first to collaborative works that a of practitioners and However, we also welcome research by with service in practice as well as in the this year of a on governance by (University of and Callahan (University of San in this will appear in several issues throughout on the We also have a of country studies in the of the state of public administration in governments around the We will to out to scholars for work that provides and new Finally, we will with the transition from Editorial Manager to Research Exchange. This transition has not been with each our work on the platform along more The of