ICPP7 - Chiang_Mai 2025

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a systematic approach to understanding the role of narratives in the policy process. Narrative text and images are ever-present in our political and social spheres, and they effectively shape the thinking and preferences of the public and decision makers. This all-day workshop will comprise of a morning session devoted to an introduction to the NPF, operational definitions of key NPF concepts, some methods, and ethical issues. Whether you are new to the NPF or a seasoned NPF scholar, the afternoon session will be devoted to your NPF research (or potential research). We will have practice exercises and consultations/brainstorming about NPF research questions, data, and methods.  

Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers transformative potential for public policy research, enabling innovative analysis of large volumes of textual data from news, official documents, social media, and other sources. This full-day introductory course provides a comprehensive overview of NLP techniques, including rule-based approaches, unsupervised and supervised learning, and the emerging capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

Through real-world examples and interactive hands-on exercises, participants will learn how NLP can be applied to key areas of public policy research, including understanding policy processes, analyzing policy design, and evaluating policy outcomes. For example, attendees will explore how sentiment analysis can reveal public opinion towards a new policy and how topic modeling can uncover trends in ongoing policy debates.

While this course is designed for researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds, a basic working knowledge of Python or R would be helpful for participating in the hands-on coding exercises. Participants with limited programming experience can leverage pre-written code templates and practical tools to implement NLP techniques, enabling them to apply these methods to their own research.

Attendees will leave the course with a strong foundational understanding of NLP techniques, diverse applications across geographies and domains, and actionable insights for leveraging NLP to address complex policy challenges.

Social equity was adopted as the fourth pillar of public administration, along with economy, efficiency, and effectiveness. Johnson and Savara (2011) defined social equity as the active commitment to fairness, justice, and equality in the formulation of public policy, and management of all institutions serving the public directly of by contract. Public administrators, including all persons involved in public governance should seek to prevent and reduce inequality and injustice based on significant social characteristics and to promote greater equality in access to services, procedural fairness, quality of services and social outcomes. This demonstrates a unique set of opportunities and challenges to public policy study in defining, measuring and evaluating social equity in public policy.

The purpose of this course is to provide participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to critically think, understand and analyze social equity and public policy. This course will introduce students to a wide range of public policy areas along with the core dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and economy. More specifically, this course advances the participants’ understanding about social equity and its relationship to public policy both from conceptual and practical perspectives.

Upon the successful completion of this pre-conference course, participants will be able to:

1) Compare and analyze the conceptual underpinnings of social equity

2) Critically apply the importance of social equity within public administration/public policy

3) Discuss measurement approaches relating to social equity analysis of public policies and

4) Engage in constructive dialogues on critical concepts related to social inequities in our society.

Join this half-day course to gain the knowledge and skills to conduct ethical, culturally sensitive, and theoretically and methodologically rigorous policy research. Students will learn to:

- Understand the ethics and logic of the scientific method

- Make appropriate decisions regarding theory and methods

- Design a rigorous policy study

- Assess the quality of policy research designed by others.

Students will submit a one-page design summary of their own project prior to the start of the course to be discussed during class.

This course explores Critical Policy Analysis (CPA), a research orientation that bridges contemporary theoretical and methodological discussions—both normative and empirical—on the analysis of public policy at local, national, and global levels. Emphasizing socially inclusive values, CPA seeks to bring social meaning back into the understanding of policy through analytical approaches like framing, narrative analysis, argumentation, reflexive critique, and the role of emotions.

Rather than adhering to a single method, critical policy analysis tailors its approach to the nature of the policy being analyzed, the site of its production, the purpose of the research, and the positionality of the researcher. Grounded in  interpretive social science and critical theory,  CPA rejects the positivist notion of neutrality, instead focusing on understanding policymaking processes not only in terms of inputs and outputs but also through the lenses of interests, meanings, normative assumptions, and values. At its core, this approach is committed to the promotion of democratic governance and social justice.

Throughout the course, participants will engage with various key frameworks and critical methodologies—such as framing, using them to interrogate and analyze public policies through a lens of social justice, equity, and democratic values.

TBC

The course will provide students with conceptual lenses and methodological insights for the study of the governing of sustainable transitions processes from a public policy research perspective.

This course examines the challenges posed by the governing of ecological transition processes for public policy research. By contrast to public policy

developments in well-defined domains of state intervention, it is characterized by overlapping policy frontiers, transversal public policy issues and ambiguous policy goals. 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 draw 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.

Dr. Charlotte Halpern holds a PhD in political science. She is FNSP Senior research fellow with tenure at Sciences Po, Centre for European studies and

comparative politics (CEE), CNRS, France. She has done extensive teaching and research on state restructuring, comparative climate governance and the selection of policy instruments. Her current research focuses on the politics and policies of ecological transitions, with a focus on sustainable mobility transitions and carbon measurement in Europe, South East Asia and South America. She has co-edited Policy analysis in France, Policy press, 2018 (with P. Hassenteufel and P. Zittoun); Policy instrumentation, Presses de Sciences Po, 2014 (with P. Lascoumes and P. Le Galès), special issues and articles in academic journals (Comparative European Politics; West European Politics; Politique européenne; Espacestemps.net) and chapters in peer-reviewed books. She is the co-director of the LIEPP (Laboratory for interdisciplinary evaluation of public policies) environmental policy research group and the director of the Sciences Po Institute for environmental transformations. She also heads the Sciences Po executive master programme “Regional governance and urban development”.

The course proposes to examine the main research question, concepts, and theory elements of a constructivist and pragmatist approach to study the Policy Process empirically. Inspired by Pragmatist Philosophy (Dewey, James), by Pragmatist Sociology (Boltanski, Latour) and by the linguistic Turn in Social Sciences, this approach proposes to observe the policymakers "in action" involved in the policy process to impose a policy solution in the policy process and to understand it as a political activity. This approach proposes to take into account the cognitive skill and the discursive capacity of the stakeholders and the policymakers not only to define a wicked problem but also to transform it as a treatable problem that can be solved and to match it to a policy solution. 

Ref. P. Zittoun, "The political process of Policymaking, a pragmatist approach on public policy

This workshop proposes to discuss and train participants in the art and craft of qualitative interviews of Policymakers. After discussing the qualitative interview's epistemological and methodological biases, the workshop proposes different practical exercises for participants to learn how to proceed. 

Ref. Becker Howard, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You're Doing It, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998

Recently, the role of emotions in defining or influencing behaviour, including political behaviour, has been acknowledged, and research is increasingly addressing how affective processes shape our attitudes, actions, and decision-making. Policy studies have also started to analyse how emotions are reflected in policy discourses and how they influence policy change and support for policies. However, we lack solid empirical evidence as well as widely accepted theoretical models on the role of emotions in almost all aspects of politics. Conceptual and methodological problems abound, e.g., How to define, categorise and measure political emotions? How do we analyse the interplay of emotions with other political variables, like ideology, values and identity? What is the analytical model that best grasps the role of emotions in political action: should we consider them dependent, independent or mediating variables? The above questions are even more pressing in the field of policy studies and most of the empirical papers on the role of emotions in policy are seriously under-theorised. With some exceptions empirical studies don’t relate to the theories of the policy process. The course aims at presenting some conceptual as well as methodological challenges concerning the research on the role of emotions in the policy process, thus contributing to the research agenda of this emerging field. The course builds on the research being done in the framework of the EU Horizon project MORES – Moral emotions in politics: how they unite, how they divide, led by Zsolt Boda.