***UPDATED for 2024/25***
This course is a thorough introduction to the practice of international policy analysis, concentrating on the fundamental connection between theory and the everyday practice of the muddling through. The central aim is to provide critical building blocks of the discipline for understanding complex international processes, in this sense this course bridges the divide between abstract theoretical models, policy making analytical tools aimed at national policy analysis and international/transnational dynamics of power concentration and institutionalization of policy fields. The course will raise fundamental questions of authority, power, interests, and legitimacy of a rich set of international actors (IO, INGOs, Tech Platforms, Consulting Companies, philanthropic agents among others) but most importantly, will engage students into thinking like public-policy makers operating in complex multi-level environments. By questioning the very justification of public action, its relevance, motivations and apparent stability/disruption, the course will seek to transcend a common place understanding of a “disrupted world” or instability of the international system, by revealing a continuum of adaptation and transformation of international governance.
Learning Outcomes
1. Acquire a foundational understanding of the policy-making: the motivations of public action today, the challenge of coordination, interests and information overflow.
2. Thinking like a policy-maker: from method to design instruments to contingency.
3. Understand the motivations of policy stakeholders within policy sectors, accounting for stability and change
4. Understanding the challenge of landing international policy frameworks: the dynamics of policy transfers and implementation at the national and local level
5. Understand the array of policy resources available for policy makers today, their transformation
6- Acquiring critical thinking tools for interpreting evidence and its limitations.
Professional Skills
1. Learn how to formulate a policy research question
2. Learn how to map ideas and interests and to ponder their importance in the policy process
3. Learn how to characterize policy networks.
4. Learn how to map international organizations and the dynamics of policy regime transformation
5. Learn how to establish long time policy trajectories