PPP200 | Policy Practice

Course Description:

This course is the penultimate course of different policy related courses the students learn through 2 year MPP programme. Prerequisites there are the courses on Introduction to Public Policy (1st trimester), Policy Analysis and Clinic (2nd trimester), Policy Dialectics (3rd Trimester), and Policy Design and Evaluation (4th trimester). As the penultimate course, the course will review practical dilemmas a practitioner experiences in different decision making situations, and how to respond to.

The course shall be divided into three modules:

(1) The first module is focused on reflexivity: This module will enable students to appreciate practice contexts as different from activist contexts and how to integrate reflection and action into one unit.

(2) Second module led by Dr CK Mathew, will focus on the point of view of the bureaucracy, specifically the Indian administrative structure and how it operates.

(3) The third module led by Smita Mutt,will bring a different point of view to practice – that of policy consultants. Here, the focus will be on various ways ‘external’ individuals and organisations work with: (i) the state (primarily on implementation), (ii) politicians & political parties, and (iii) in CSR and grant-making spaces.

The course will be concluded by a public management framework of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) that enables students to appreciate context-dependency in policy practices.