ICPP6 - TORONTO 2023

This full-day workshop is designed to develop skills that faculty can use to develop interactive and participant-centered teaching styles and to help faculty develop a case library that they can use in their teaching programs. It combines asynchronous presentations that participants view in advance and with “hands-on” activities in case teaching. The in-person sessions involve "how to" lessons on case teaching and activities where the participants work in teams to do things like prepare case teaching plans and class openings that they present to all of the participants. These will be combined with discussions of several existing cases drawn from multiple countries, combined with a “post-mortem” of what worked and what did not in both the written case and the case discussion. We will discuss core teaching strategies including development of time management plans, whiteboard management plans, how to pose opening questions, “cold-calling” versus “warm calling,” use of brief role plays and extended simulations, and how to close a case-discussion class with “Take-Aways.” Participants will be expected to view several video presentations and read several cases before the workshop.

Critical Race Theory is a way to understand how racism has shaped public policy and to uncover histories of discrimination in education, health care, and the media, to name a few institutions. This course will present the fundamental tenets of critical race theory and how they inform policy analyses and policy change drawing on the work of seminal essential race theorists such as Kimberely Crenshaw, Ibram X, Kendi, and Robin D’Angelo. The course will engage with the merits of some emerging international debates relating to the efficacy of critical race theory from a policy perspective, including debates about the role of government in bringing about equity and critical race theory’s focus on racial outcomes rather than intentionality and equal opportunity. Examples of critical race theory policy initiatives will be integrated into the workshop. 

This workshop invites students and early career scholars to a dialogue considering how the decolonial turn in the Social Sciences impacts Policy Studies, if at all. The workshop will begin with an outline Indigenous perspectives on policy research, conceptualization, analysis and advocacy, with the Yellowhead Institute as a case study, followed by brief presentations on similar examples from workshop participants. Following presentations, there will be a facilitated dialogue with three broad goals: 1) to assess the degree to which those working in the discipline(s) of Policy Studies are engaging with "decolonization", 2) to draw out principles of a general approach and/or method to decolonial Policy Studies, and, 3) to reflect on the opportunities and challenges for solidarity between non-Indigenous Policy Studies scholars and Indigenous communities. The workshop invites short presentation proposals from conference attendees, especially Indigenous students and early career scholars. They can be emailed to icpublicpolicy@gmail.com. 

This course examines the challenges posed by the governing of ecological transition processes for public policy research. The multi-actors/cross-sectoral nature of these dynamics has led to diverse heuristics that analyze the multiple interactions and the way these processes are governed, each one with different assumptions on their influencing factors. In keeping with the multidisciplinary nature of ecological transitions and how they are addressed in comparative policy research, this course will aim at: conceptualizing the role of public policies in transition processes; including this perspective into research designs and applied research; Examining what resources and capacities are drawn upon in order to monitor and administer processes of change; incorporating conflicts, resistances, and mobilizations; applying these concepts and tools across a range of policy areas/political contexts in order to generate new assumptions and research agendas for studying the governing of ecological transition processes.

This session will give insights into the manifold ways in public policy to approach emotions while focusing in the second part of the course on the interpretive analysis of emotions as a tool to understand policy processes. The course will outline the theoretical framework that enables such analysis and give an overview of its analytical techniques. The theoretical framework shows that, in public policy scholarship, addressing emotions has been linked to the analysis of knowledge. While interpretive approaches to policy studies have been prominently placed within such analysis of knowledge through language - including its various uses and the structural and power biases that such use implies - they have omitted the role of emotions. Through various examples, the course will show how emotions can, and should, be included in the analysis of knowledge in public policy because they inform and structure policies through meanings actors accord them by expressing, e.g., fear, joy, anger, pride, shame, disgust, or rage. Through these meanings, emotions are categorized in ‘acceptable/legitimate’ or ‘unacceptable/illegitimate’ elements of concrete standpoints and actions and, thus, affect who has a voice and how that voice impacts particular policy debates/policy conflicts. This means interpreting (1) when ‘emotions’ are mentioned, (2) who mentioned them, and (3) what specific rhetorical devices are used to describe them. I will conclude by providing further illustrative examples of how such analysis of emotions can be designed and conducted as a part of research projects.

As policies travel beyond national borders, the public policy literature has sought to better understand the processes, motivations, obstacles, agents, and arenas involved in policy transfer. In Global South countries, policy transfer has been often intertwined with projects of international development cooperation, be it at the bilateral, multilateral, or civil society levels. Dynamics of solidarity and conditionality arouse, promoting policy circulation in different ways. Resistance to the adoption of imposed models was often used as a strategy by social movements. Often policies are labelled as ‘best practices’ and globalized as if one size fits all. Drawing on different cases of policies circulating from/to the Global South and a new generation of policy transfer studies, this course will engage participants with the growing debates over policy dynamics that constitute what the instructors have termed the “transnational policy process”. 

The fact that populist parties and leaders came into power both at the national and subnational levels even in established democracies offers a novel opportunity to study the practice of their governance and policy making in comparison to the business-as-usual of liberal democracies. Although populism scholars claim that there is no such thing as populist policy, given the malleable and ideologically multifaceted character of populism, it might be possible the reconstruct the ideal type of populist policy making even in terms of its substantive (content-related) components. Indeed, prioritizing some policy fields over others is not necessarily a characteristic feature of populist governance, but frequent policy innovations as well as large policy changes may be. Populism manifests itself even more clearly in terms of the procedures and the discourses of policy making.  The course aims at exploring the main patterns of populist policy making along the dimensions of policy content, policy procedures and policy discourses. This exercise helps also to reflect upon the sometime hidden assumptions concerning the mainstream models of policy making and their limitations explaining governance styles which differ from the policy making of liberal democracies. The course will adopt an ideal-typical approach, but will rely on empirical evidences concerning the governance of populist governments. Participants are welcome to bring in their own work as it bears on any of these themes.

Reference: Bartha, A.; Boda, Z.; Szikra, D. (2020). When Populist Leaders Govern. Conceptualizing Populism in Policy Making, Politics and Governance, 8 (3), 71-81. DOI: 10.17645/pag.v8i3.2922

Globalization is one of the defining features of the contemporary world, but there is considerable controversy regarding its nature, impact, and future trends. This workshop will seek to integrate debates about globalization and development at the onset of the 21st century. The course will be weaving in the sustainable development goals to contextualize and frame policy debate.  Our analytical approach will be to study globalization through the lens of diverse global regions and will explore models and cases of economic growth and development, North-South trade, economic stabilization, and development finance.

In addition, we overview emerging issues reshaping development on a global level and the changing patterns of global migration of labor and capital, trade flows, the influence of technology, the role of conflict in development, and global phenomena such as global warming.  There will be a particular reference to problems of debt and financial crisis, income inequality, peace economics, and the effects of globalization on prospects for stable development.

Decision-making relies on multiple sources of information and opinions that emanate both from public organizations at different levels of power and from civil society. This set of policy advice providers constitutes the policy advisory system (Halligan, 1995). Policy advice provides the merits of policy options and their potential to deliver the desired outcomes.

The lecture will present and establish a dialogue between four streams of literature which study of the relationships between advice-givers and the decision-makers in the policy process: Policy advisory systems (Craft and Wilder, 2017), knowledge utilization (Boswell, 2008), policy work (Colebatch and Hoppe, 2018) and ministerial advisors within the executive triangle (Shaw et Eichbaum, 2018). It will invite students to reflect on further theorization in this specific field of policy analysis.