Abstract
We introduce this thematic issue by exploring the role of leadership in social and political change. In current times, the importance of leadership and choice has proved as important as ever. Leadership is often the critical variable separating success or failure, legitimacy and sustainability or collapse. This thematic issue explores a range of in-depth case studies across the Asia-Pacific region that help illustrate the critical elements of leadership. Collectively they demonstrate that leadership is best understood as a collective process involving motivated agents overcoming barriers to cooperation to form coalitions that have enough power, legitimacy and influence to transform institutions. Five themes emerge from the thematic issue as a whole: leadership is political; the centrality of gender relations; the need for a more critical localism; scalar politics; and the importance of understanding informal processes of leadership and social change.
Highlights
Keywords Asia-Pacific region; China; Covid-19; developmental leadership; Fiji; India; Indonesia; Papua New Guinea; political will; Solomon Islands. Issue This editorial is part of the issue “Leadership and Political Change in Asia-Pacific” edited by David Hudson (University of Birmingham, UK), Nicolas Lemay-Hébert (Australian National University, Australia), Claire Mcloughlin (University of Birmingham, UK) and Chris Roche (La Trobe University, Australia). We introduce this thematic issue by exploring the role of leadership in social and political change
The seven articles help address the question of where ‘political will’ comes from, where political will is redefined as a process of contestation at the individual, collective and societal levels
By contestation we mean that motivations, interests, ideas, goals and plans need to be formulated, challenged, and compromised—and it is only through such a process that political will can be built
Summary
We introduce this thematic issue by exploring the role of leadership in social and political change. Leadership is a collective process where motivated agents must overcome barriers to cooperation to form coalitions that have enough power, legitimacy and influence to transform institutions in a positive (developmental) way. This thematic issue sheds light on how this process can unfold, using a range of in-depth case studies across the Asia-Pacific. As we have seen in the response to the global pandemic, leaders respond to crisis in ways that reflect the institutions and incentives in which they are embedded, constrained and enabled by. Understanding the dynamics of leadership is arguably more important than ever, if we want to understand what enables or constrains complex problem-solving in crisis, but more broadly, what can enable or constrain social change
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