Summer School - Brasilia edition 2023

This course aims to study how and why policy actors prioritize issues across time, countries, and policy venues. The course is structured into five sessions. The first session analyzes the main theoretical and conceptual frameworks, from John Kingdon's windows of opportunity conceptual framework to Baumgartner and Jones's Punctuated equilibrium theory. In the second session, we will study how and why interest groups (business groups, companies, trade unions, Non- governmental organizations, advocacy groups, and think tanks) mobilize to influence the political agenda. The third session focuses on framing strategies. We will learn how policy actors frame issues in ways that respond to their preferences and ways of thinking, how they try to influence the political agenda and eventually impose their views in the decision-making process. In the fourth session, we discuss how digital technologies affect agenda-setting and how members of parliaments prioritize issues on social media compared with other conventional venues like parliaments. The last session is devoted to studying the tools and methods available for agenda- setting research.

Policy coordination has drawn much attention by policy research as well as by practitioners in recent years. By contrast to concepts and theories examining public policy developments in well-defined domains of state intervention, policy coordination research tries to make sense of the conceptual and the practical challenges posed by policymaking across policy sectors, levels of government and beyond the public sector. In a classic perspective, it contributes to the understanding of the changes resulting from the blurring of policy frontiers and to the emergence of transversal public policy issues. It also provides useful insights to addressing contemporary public policy issues, which very often cut across organizational boundaries and are characterized by complexity, high uncertainty and controversies about problems definitions as well as selecting a course for action. Drawing on the public policy literature, as well as on specific case studies, this course will discuss the development of thinking about policy coordination, its various components in terms of problems, institutional arrangements, and evaluation. The course also aims at providing students with methodological insights for the study of policy coordination, including the governing of transversal issues (gender, digitization, climate change, etc.).

This course focuses on policy design intended an “realistic” approach through which policy-making (in all its stages, from agenda setting to evaluation) can be analyzed, understood, and explained, while also providing reasonable and feasible suggestions to the policymakers. Policy design, then, is conceived as an analytical framework that has the ambition to bridge the gap between policy analysis and governance, between theory and practice in the policy-making process. The course will focus on the following essential theoretical pillars of the policy design perspective: - Governance Modes and Policy Design - Policy Design Spaces - Policy Instruments - Policy Capacities - Policy Design, Policy Implementation, and Policy Evaluation - Policy Design as Cause and/or Effect: a mechanistic perspective The course is a mix of lectures and interactive activities. Lectures will be held in the mornings, while afternoons will be devoted to the discussion of the research projects of the students and also, according to the composition of the class, to working group exercises.

The goal of the course is to propose some theoretical perspectives and qualitative methodologies to study the policymaking process. Its main objective is to identify and discuss how we can empirically and methodologically grasp the policy process by observing the struggles around the problem and also around the meaning of proposed solutions developed by Politicians, Bureacrats and Experts. Special attention will be paid to the building of coalitions, existing powerful dimensions, and the different challenges and solutions encountered along their path. Why do some solutions manage to make it to the decision-making process whereas others fail? Under what conditions and at what price do solutions make it to the solution agenda? How do some actors succeed in "domesticating" "wicked" problems? First, this course will explore the career of a public problem, from emergence to agenda setting. Second, it will explore the career of the proposal as it passes through different arenas such as bureaucracy, the advice system, and the political arena. Policy problems and solutions will be observed on the basis of three games: the game of language where a statement takes on meaning and becomes a problem/solution, the game of actors where this definition is stabilized through coalition building, and the game of power through the formation of multiple levels of power. The course will draw on the studies undertaken by key authors in the field and will explore how they perceive the political dimension in the policy process. It will also propose different concepts and approaches to help grasp the policy process from a different perspective. It will also develop a methodological perspective about how to interview policymakers.