Based on the case of Bulgarian policy advice system the advantages and disadvantages of external expertise are analysed. Depending of peculiarities of the governance, in the presence of specific cultural characteristics of the social environment, the policy advice system based oh the external ezpertise tends to monopolisation and politisation. Moreover, it is doubtful that the cost of knowledge for policy production decreases when the process is run by external organisations and individuals.

This situation is not a result of corrupt practices. It is more a spontaneous consequence of the use of public procurementt and project financing of knowledge producers.

The purpose of this contribution is to attempt to grasp the effects of the covid19 crisis on cultural policies and the creative industries sector in France and Slovakia by taking the analytical approach of working on the role played by budget advisors. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods and disciplinary perspectives from political science and economics, this reading through the prism of budgetary entourages makes it possible to objectify and reveal, in practice, the transformations of public action that are taking place in the two countries in the fields of cultural policies.

From ‘images’ to ‘bargains’, the heuristic tools employed by academics to make sense of political-administrative relations (PARs) are numerous. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about ministerial advisers. In an attempt to bridge this theoretical lacuna, in this chapter we present seminal PAR theoretical frameworks and examine the extent to which they anticipate(d) and/or accommodate(d) the ministerial adviser. We identify two distinct scholarly waves, in the first of which the PAR literature foresaw a potential merger between politics and administration before, in the second, grounding itself in the stance that a merger between the two had taken place. Within both, the adviser can be perceived but is not yet clearly drawn. Finally, we reflect on the role of subjectivity in the creation and use of ideal-typical heuristics, and on how these can theoretically position the ministerial adviser in future research.

The Faroe Islands are a very small archipelago located in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, between Iceland and Norway, and has a population of 53.000 inhabitants. The Faroes is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark but has a very high degree of political autonomy. The political system is based on a parliamentary system, proportional election system, and its administration is based on a ministerial system that was introduced in the 1990s. Even though security policy (defence) is Danish, the responsibility to deal with poly-crisis and megatrends, rests to a very large degree with the Faroese political and administrative authorities.

Many of these challenges come from the outside as external (exogenous) factors. For example, digitalisation, migration, climate change, changes in the Arctic, Covid-19, increased complexity and ever-increasing expectations to the public administration. At the same time the Faroe Islands has some particular (endogenous) characteristics as a small society, e.g. close social networks, overlap of social roles, relative little administration (compared to other countries), limited possibilities for specialisation within the different fields and therefore also necessary multifunctionality within public and private organisations. Characteristics that give advantages and challenges in connection with these poly-crisis and megatrends.

The purpose of this article is to describe some of the megatrends and poly-crisis affecting the Faroese society, and to elucidate the particular endogenous conditions affecting the possibilities a very small island society has to meet these challenges.

The article builds on the growing body of small state and micro-state literature (i.e. Baldacchino, Bailes, Chittoo and others), megatrends (Lustig & Ringrand, Naisbit), poly-crisis (Morin), resilience and on empirical research in the Faroe Islands conducted by a research team at the University of the Faroe Islands. The project is also a part of a larger research project on COVID-19 handling in the Nordic Countries (see polygov.org).