Changing Institutions

Course goals

After completing this course, students are able to:

• understand and critically reflect on the roles of state, market and societal stakeholders in dealing with specific societal problems;
• identify characteristics of contemporary grand challenges and the key institutional actors that could address them: state, market, civil society stakeholders;
• comprehend and explain the importance and challenges of collaboration between various institutional actors in a networked and multi-level governance to create public value;
• critically reflect on key governance theories in the context of social change and apply these theories to specific cases;
• critically reflect on the role of organisational dynamics when dealing with a specific societal problem;
• identify, reflect and communicate on new and alternative ways to organise societal change.

Content

In this course you will explore how key actors, like the state, market and civil society stakeholders, try to tackle important societal challenges. You will get acquainted with theoretical perspectives that can be used to analyse why their attempts fail or succeed. You will learn to reflect on alternative ways to organise societal change.
Throughout the course you will apply and critically reflect on various theories in relation to contemporary problems, in individual and group assignments. In addition you will identify, reflect and communicate about challenges and action perspectives of key actors involved in organising societal change around specific societal problems.

The course consists of three main parts:

• Societal problems as wicked issues

Various economic, political and societal challenges arise in our increasingly complex society. These are often understood as ‘wicked issues’. We will identify important societal problems and reflect on them, while using and critically reflecting on the lens of ‘wicked issues’.

• Actors involved in tackling societal problems

Three actors are typically seen as important in tackling societal problems and creating public value: the state, the market and civil society stakeholders. The role of these actors and how they try to face societal problems will be analysed by means of three theoretical perspectives: Public Value Management (focusing on the question ‘What do we aim for?’), New Public Governance (zooming out on the role of networks) and Neo-institutional theory (zooming in on the role of organisations and institutional logics). We will critically reflect on the promises and challenges of these theoretical perspectives in the context of social change.

• Three alternative approaches for organising social change

Complex, multi-level, collaborative and networked governance processes often fail to tackle grand societal issues and to create public value, which fosters the emergence of alternative approaches. We will discuss the role of policy innovation labs, social entrepreneurs and grassroots organisations as ways to stimulate bottom-up social change.

The teaching methods to be used in this course are interactive (guest) lectures, group discussions and feedback sessions.