Lecture 1: Global Policy-Making and Transnational Administration by Diane Lesley Stone

Global policy making is unfurling in distinctive ways above traditional nation-state policy processes. New practices of transnational administration are emerging inside international organizations but also alongside the trans-governmental networks of regulators and inside global public private partnerships. Mainstream policy and public administration studies have tended to analyse the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies. By contrast, this session investigates new public spaces of transnational policy-making, the design, and delivery of global public goods and services, and the interdependent roles of transnational administrators who move between business bodies, government agencies, international organizations, and professional associations.  In order to get inside the black box of global governance, this session uses the concepts and theories of public administration and policy studies to address the ways in which global policy processes are a multi-actor and multi-scalar endeavour having manifestations, depending on the policy issue or problems, at the local, urban, sub-regional, sub-national, regional, national, supranational, supra-regional, transnational, international, and global scales. 

Lecture 2: Policy Design and the Integration of Tools in Policy Mixes by Michael Howlett 

Multifaceted problems involve complex arrangements of institutions and instruments to address them. As a result, the subject of ‘mixes’, ‘bundles’ or ‘portfolios’ of policy tools has a special place in considerations and studies of subjects such as policy integration. Since mixes come in different shapes and sizes, some are more difficult to design and operate than others. This presentation sets out a model of mix types that highlights the design problems associated with more complex arrangements, especially with ensuring a mix operates in a robust, resilient and integrated fashion. Examples and illustrations from areas such as marine parks and coastal zone management illustrate the issues faced in such complex areas and provide lessons about how problems of integrating such mixes can be overcome.

Lecture 3: Policy integration revisited by Jeroen Candel

Many of today’s most pressing societal challenges including terrorism, food security, climate change, involuntary migration, or underemployment are crosscutting the boundaries of established jurisdictions, governance levels, and policy domains. While it is recognized that these problems require some level of policy integration, severe integration challenges to policymakers and their institutional surroundings continue to exist. Moreover, from a scholarly perspective, the question of how to conceptualize and assess policy (dis)integration has, for a long time, remained remarkably under-theorized. In his lecture, dr. Jeroen Candel will give an overview of recent advances in policy integration and coordination scholarship, e.g., discussing: i) the pros and cons of various existing frameworks, ii) the merits of mechanism-based approaches for explaining shifts of policy integration over time, iii) normative questions of when pursuing policy integration is opportune. He will illustrate these themes using various examples from his research on food (security) and agricultural policy.

Lecture 4: Horizontal and Vertical Integration for Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals by Jale Tosun

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 represent an attempt to foster a coordinated policy approach by the individual countries around the world towards sustainability. The SDGs comprise 17 goals and associated targets and indicators that are meant to be implemented during the 15 years starting in January 2016. In this course, we are interested in the strategies adopted by the policymakers at the national and local level for putting the SDGs into place. To this end, we proceed in three steps. First, we will familiarize ourselves with the concept of horizontal and vertical policy integration. Second, we examine how national governments have reacted to the SDGs and what institutional arrangements they propose for delivering them. Third, we investigate approaches adopted by the local-level governments for implementing the SDGs. The latter perspective will provide a valuable complement to the analysis of the national level since local governments have gathered experienced in implementing the Local Agenda 21. We will discuss various measurements of the attempts to implement the SDGs as well as brainstorm on ways how we can evaluate the corresponding policy achievements. Students interested in this course should enjoy reflecting on measurement concepts and data analysis.