Search results

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic is a crisis with high complexity and should be understood as such by scholarship. A complexity science approach situates increasingly divergent ideological and epistemological perspectives about the crisis within the practical exigencies of containment and mitigation measures. We ask which of the seven stages of soft systems methodology contributes to deeper understandings about COVID‐19 as a policy issue, beyond the contributions of current and conventional perspectives. The discussion outlines implications for practice and places them within broader debates about tensions between scientific facts and political values.

AbstractWhile the emergence of big data raises concerns regarding governance and public policy, it also creates opportunities for diversifying the toolkit for analysis for the policy sciences as a whole, i.e., research concerning policy analysis as well as policy studies. Further, it opens avenues for practice, which together with research requires adaptation in teaching curricula if policy education were to remain relevant. However, it is not clear to what extent this opportunity is being realized in public policy research and teaching. In this study, we examine the prevalence of big data analytics in public policy research and pedagogy using bibliometric analysis and topic modeling for the former, and content analysis of course titles and descriptions for the latter. We find that despite significant scope for application of various big data techniques, the use of these analytic techniques in public policy has been largely limited to select institutions in a few countries. Further, data science has received limited attention in policy pedagogy, once again with significant geographic variation in its prevalence. We conclude that, to stay relevant, the policy sciences need to pay more attention to the integration of big data techniques in policy research, pedagogy, and thereby practice.

AbstractPublic policy education in the Global South has mushroomed in the past 2 decades, concomitant with governance models that provide an alternative to liberal Western democracies. However, not much empirical evidence exists on the drivers and implications of this trend, with few exceptions that point toward a form of internationalization in the policy sciences. This study aims to fill this scholarly gap by comparing 46 public policy schools on various dimensions including degree offerings, institutional establishment and status, and mission. Further, to determine whether a unique model for public policy education is emerging that extends beyond mimicry of longstanding programs in the USA and Western Europe, we surveyed the senior management of the schools in our sample. We find that less than 25% have been directly modeled after a Western school. We discuss the implications of our findings for the practice and study of public policy education.