“Is this the new normal?” The frequency with which this question seems to have come up in the last several years is dizzying. When the editors of this journal’s previous volume, entitled ‘A New Policy Frontier: Navigating the Post-Pandemic Landscape,’ sent that edition to print, they probably did not expect that the global landscape would be transformed once again before this subsequent edition hit the presses. Since the Georgetown Public Policy Review was founded in 1995, how many ‘new normals’ have its authors and editors had to contend with?
In the course of shaping this edition, we have been reminded not only of the indispensability of evidence-based methods to understanding a landscape which never sits still, but also of the creativity, curiosity, and devotion of the scholars from all corners with whom we have had the privilege to work once again. The authors represented in this volume are only a small slice of a much larger community of individuals committed to building policy through rigorous and sustained inquiry. This collection of authors focused exhaustively on details which could easily have gone unnoticed—Medicare’s utility as a tool for fighting homelessness, the toll of long drives between prisoners and their loved ones, or the micro-level effects of redistricting on electoral turnout, to name only a few. No ‘new normal’ can retain its foreboding air of mystery under this level of scrutiny.
This may be the new normal—at least, until the next one. At this publication’s 30th anniversary, GPPR reminds us that no change is greater than the insight we gain and the relationships we build through working to understand it. Our most heartfelt thanks goes out to our tireless editorial team, our peer reviewers, and our authors. We hope the reader will be as illuminated by reading this volume as we were by preparing it.
John McCabe (MPP ‘26) and David Stout (MPP ‘26) Senior Editors, Spring 2025 Edition
Georgetown Public Policy Review