Public policy education has rapidly spread among universities worldwide and in Turkey in the last few decades. Despite this spread, it is a question mark what competencies this education promises to future public policy analysts in today's complex economic, social, and political environment. This study first investigates the rising expectations…

Journalists, politicians, watchdog institutions, and public administration scholars devote considerable energy to identifying and dissecting failures in government. Studies and case-studies of policy, organizational, and institutional failures in the public sector figure prominently in public administration curriculums and classrooms. Such a focus…

A substantial amount of scholarly work focuses on conceptualizing, theorizing and studying the policy capacity of governments. Yet, guidance for practitioners on developing policy capacity training programs is lacking. In this article, I reflect on my experience as a public servant in the provincial government of Prince Edward Island where I…

If the aim of developing public policies is to solve social issues, it is worth asking whether the higher education programs for future public servants are being adapted to the demands of our societies. If we also recognize a relationship between education and political capacity, then it is pertinent to study the development of knowledge, skills,…

Despite the fact that our knowledge on how policies are designed has substantially improved during the last two decades, prescriptive literature on policy formulation remains largely disconnected from these new findings. The article examines five major assumptions upon which policy formulation is still predominantly based: (a) there is one way…

When crises occur, revisiting given knowledge and practices seems sensible and necessary. For instance, the recent financial crisis in 2008 lead to questioning the role played by financial institutions and business schools in precipitating the crisis by allowing questionable professional ethics to go unchallenged. There is a current crisis in…

Public policy is frequently characterised as a sub-discipline of political science which is practically oriented and concerned with what government does and does not do. Further, policy analysis can also be characterised as concerned with either the analysis 'of policy' or 'for policy'. This clearly has implications for the design and delivery of…

This article investigates transformations in public service education over the past 50 years, specifically: How have organizational forms evolved, and what lessons can we draw from that evolution? The organizational form construct originates in population ecology theory. We draw from a variety of evidentiary sources in answering the research…

In recent decades civil services worldwide have experienced exogenous forces that are transforming their work and workplace. In turn, these changes are altering the skills set associated with civil service employment. As professional degrees oriented towards careers in civil service these changes can have important ramifications on the curriculum.…

Policy writing assessments are increasingly used as an alternative or supplementary method of assessment within the teaching of politics and policy. Such assessments, often referred to as 'policy briefs' or 'briefing memos', are often used to develop writing skills and to encourage active learning of policy-related topics among students. While…

There have been few studies on topic difficulty in the public administration curriculum of African universities. This is further problematized by non-existent literature on the relationships between gender, future career interest and country of study on student difficulty in the study of public administration. This is a gap in the public…

This article aims to discuss the health of the public administration discipline in the US higher education system. In particular, it debates two possible alternatives: decline or reposition. The paper analyzes the academic offers of political science, public policy, and public administration programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The…

This paper draws on nine years of undergraduate student course evaluation surveys to explore learning and teaching practices in an introductory public policy course in Australia. The paper situates student responses in terms of an increasingly complex teaching and learning environment. The student cohort includes a diverse group of arts, law,…

Diversity, cultural competency, and global awareness are three broad and mutually reinforcing conceptual themes in the literature of American public affairs education that are rarely implicitly interconnected. A primary challenge has concerned how to teach these themes, either separately or in unison, when designing courses and curricula to…

Since rural Canada contributes about one-third of the national economy and significantly to culture, we argue it deserves greater attention in public policy, beginning with policy education. A scan of 22 Canadian Masters of Public Policy (MPP) and Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs reveals a marked absence of policy training focused on…