Current course offerings

Please Note: Course profiles marked as not available may still be in development.

Course description

This course addresses a fundamental challenge in public policy making: the ability to formulate and carry out responses to complex problems and ensure effective delivery of core services. The course will begin with a focus on design. Students will be introduced to the range of policy tools that governments have at their disposal, including coercion, distributing resources and persuasion through public communication. We will also consider key contemporary challenges for policy designers. For instance, how can we maintain coherence in the face of competing demands from different groups of citizens? How can policy design contribute to resilience in times of uncertainty or crisis? Is it possible to make policy for the long-term, given the short-term nature of the political cycle? Can we adequately anticipate how citizens will respond to our chosen interventions? And what role should values play in our selection of policy instruments? However, it is not enough to formulate cleverly designed policies ¿ without clear strategies for implementation, governments risk policy failure. Students will encounter a wide range of actors involved in service provision, regulation, communication and law enforcement, and consider their capacity to shape outcomes on the ground. We will also pay close attention to the strategies available to government to mitigate implementation barriers, such as consultation and coordination with key stakeholders, empowering `street-level bureaucrats¿ and rebuilding state policy capacity. Across the course, students will critically analyse the design of policies across key domains, including health, environment, defence and social policy, and think about how the process of implementation may be improved when dealing with complex policy problems. Students will explore these practical and critical insights through case study analysis and practice-oriented assessment, in which they will use conceptual tools to untangle real-world policy challenges.