Professor (Dr.) Naresh SINGH (Jindal School of Government and Public Policy)

Dr Singh Is Professor and Executive Dean, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy; Director of the Centre for Complexity Economics, Applied Spirituality and Public Policy (CEASP), Co-Director of the Centre for Legal Empowerment of the Poor and Senior Fellow at the Jindal India Institute. He has a transdisciplinary PhD in Environmental Sciences, with more than three decades of public policy experience in senior positions in the United Nations Development Program (New York) and the Federal Government of Canada. He does research and teaches in areas of Complexity Sciences, Systems Thinking and Applied Spirituality as Strategies for Sustainable Development Policy. He has published several books and journal articles. His last edited book published in December 2023 by Emerald (U.K) was entitled “Applied Spirituality and Sustainable development Policy”. Professor Singh was a visiting scholar at several universities in North America including Boston, Harvard, Fordham, McGill, Waterloo and Guelph. He has been a consultant to the United Nations Development Program, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Pan American Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Course: Policy and Program Design and Evaluation in Complex Situations

Traditional approaches to public policy design and analysis use the policy cycle, which is an essentially linear approach even when used in a cyclical mode. It is useful mainly for deterministic problems where the context is relatively fixed and the outcome can be defined with high certainty and evidence-based approaches might be feasible. However, today’s world has been characterized as volatile, uncertain, complex and uncertain (VUCA) by some and as brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible (BANI) by others. Policy challenges from the pandemic to inflation, to supply chains disruptions as well chronic challenges such climate change, economic inequality, social exclusion and many of the SDGs are have been defined as wicked policy problems having many dynamic causes and no clear solutions. In the case of most wicked policy problems, evidence-based approaches are not effective. Wicked problems are characterized by complex interactions, gaps in reliable knowledge, and enduring differences in values, interests and perspectives

Over the last 2- or 3-decades complexity science ideas have been increasingly applied in the social sciences to deal with social, economic and political systems and other arenas of interest to public policy which displayed complex adaptive systems characteristics such as ecosystems. This has resulted in some refreshingly new ways of thinking of wicked policy problems and even spawned some new social science sub-disciplines like complexity economics. Yet a chasm exists between these developments and the use of complexity sciences in the teaching and practice of public policy. This course synthesizes a lot that has been learned in the use of complexity thinking in public policy and summarizes the practical tools that can be used for policy and program design and evaluation in complex situations. The focus is on how to design interventions, whether these be policies, programs or projects in situations of high complexity where outcomes cannot be determined with certainty or where the intervention seeks an innovative outcome which, by definition, cannot be clearly defined upfront.

The course is designed to be very practice oriented, but adequate theory is included to ensure that participants new to this kind of thinking can have a sound understanding of the principles in order to be ready for the practice.