Making Policy Work

Course goals

After completing this course, students will have:

• understanding;
• perspectives;
• skills.

Content

The implementation of public policy may well be the most important step of the policy cycle. Public policy becomes real only when implemented. It is when the state meets the street, that citizens experience the effects of governments’ awesome powers. How are great visions by politicians and policy makers in Paris, Brussels, or The Hague, eventually realised in Bruges, Aix-en-Provence, or Gouda? Service providers, such as the tax office, and individual public service employees, such as police officers, teachers, and nurses, eventually form the linking pin between public policy and citizens.

The ways in which governments and non-governmental organisations put their plans into practice determines their public value. And what looks great on paper, may end up totally different or even disastrous. Unintended consequences surface only when the machinery of government is set into motion. Similarly, bad policy may be compensated for by frontline workers’ relentless efforts. Yet, increasingly public services are provided by automated services and algorithms, with little human involvement.

In this course we will study the triangle of politics, public policy, and implementation. Our focus is on the wicked issues of making policy work in practice. The course provides an academic perspective on everyday government practice. We seek to analyse the promises and pitfalls of policy implementation.
We will read and discuss state-of-the-art literature on political-professional relationships, autonomous agencies, public management, and policy implementation theory and have a look at concrete real-life cases from around Europe and beyond.