Charlotte Halpern (Sciences Po, Center for European Studies, France)

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”.

Course:  Policy Coordination for Sustainable Transitions

Objective of the course: The course will provide students with conceptual lenses and methodological insights for the study and practice of policy coordination for sustainable transitions, across sectors and levels of government.

Course description : Sustainable transitions constitute a major challenge for the study and practice of public policies and governance. 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 focus on policy coordination for sustainable transitions. Policy coordination provides useful insights to addressing this major contemporary public policy issue, which cuts across organizational boundaries and is characterized by complexity, high uncertainty and controversies about problems definitions as well as selecting a course for action. Drawing on the public policy literature and specific case studies, this course will focus on policy coordination for sustainable transitions. It aims 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 the study and practice of governing ecological transition processes.

During the course, students will be encouraged to draw on the concepts, analytical tools and methods in order make sense of their own research and professional experience. They will develop conceptual / operational proposals that will be examined and discussed together.