This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

This course is now POLS3102. Interest in 'governance' has increased in the last decade or so as governments have searched for new ways to deal with problems which confront society. Governance strategies have increasingly tended to deploy the authority of the state through mechanisms such as markets and through devolving functions to business or perhaps 'third sector' community organisations. This course explores such experiments in governance and relates these to more traditional public policy questions relating to rationality in policy and governance systems, and how power, institutional arrangements and ideas and discourse shape the world of policy and governance. The course explores some of these issues through a specific case study on contemporary water governance in Australia.