This Element explores the uncertain future of public policy practice and scholarship in an age of radical disruption. Building on foundational ideas in policy sciences, we argue that an anachronistic instrumental rationalism underlies contemporary policy logic and limits efforts to understand new policy challenges. We consider whether the policy sciences framework can be reframed to facilitate deeper understandings of this anachronistic epistemic, in anticipation of a research agenda about epistemic destabilization and contestation. The Element applies this theoretical provocation to environmental policy and sustainability, issues about which policymaking proceeds amid unpredictable contexts and rising sociopolitical turbulence that portend a liminal state in the transition from one way of thinking to another. The Element concludes by contemplating the fate of policy's epistemic instability, anticipating what policy understandings will emerge in a new system, and questioning the degree to which either presages a seismic shift in the relationship between policy and society.

Mapping the Megalopolis: Order and Disorder in Mexico City brings the humanities and the social sciences into a conversation about Mexico City in its social, political, and aesthetic manifestations. Through a shared exploration of the order and disorder that mutually constitute the city, contributing authors engage topics such as the privatization of public space, challenges to existing conceptualizations of the urban form, and variations on the flaneur and other urban actors. Mexico City is truly a city of versions, and Mapping the Megalopolis celebrates the intersection of the image of the city and the lived experience of it. Readers will find substantive entries on a great variety of Mexico City's monumental and counter-monumental spaces, as well as some of its pivotal contemporary debates and cultural products. The volume serves both as supplemental reading on the world city or the Latin American city, and as a central text in a multidisciplinary study of Mexico City.