Education for Public Policy and Management: Views from the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague

Introduction
When the Institute of Social Studies, ISS, was founded in 1952 in The Hague as a postgraduate centre for teaching and research on social and economic development, it established the first Masters programme in public administration and the first professorial chair in that area in the Netherlands. Since the late 1970s the programme’s emphasis has been on public policy and public sector reform rather than on traditional public administration, for which there are sufficient programmes in the South. From the same time the ISS and especially the public policy programme has had Southern Africa as one of its main work areas, notably including inter-university cooperation projects in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia. These two orientations -- education in public policy and public management, and special reference to Southern Africa -- are combined in the set of four articles that follow. Four ISS faculty members, three of whom have worked extensively in Southern Africa since the 1970s, present ideas about the teaching of public policy. Vasant Moharir provides an overview of the evolution of policy studies education and training, drawing on a career of over forty years as academic and adviser in numerous countries in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe, including South Africa in the 1990s. He raises some questions of special importance for Africa, and stresses the value, yet shortage, of national and international fora for exchange and discussion of experiences in teaching public policy. He also argues for the special potential importance of short-term courses in policy analysis for senior and middle level officials and politicians, if national training institutions can attain and maintain the stature and competence of a body like INTAN in Malaysia. In South Africa there appears good progress with some of these elements if not yet all. Jim Björkman looks at changes in the world since public policy was conceptualized as a field of research fifty years ago and operationalized as a field of study thirty years back: greater mistrust of governments (though South Africa is perhaps presently an exception); the growth of multi-jurisdiction and cross-sector programmes; the hegemony now of liberal economics and liberal democracy, at risk of ignoring their limitations and contradictions; the information revolution; and the failure to arrive at a grand unifying theory for policy studies. He draws implications in each case for public policy education. He then synthesizes these into a broad sketch of elements of a desirable curriculum, including sets of necessary skills and values as well as relevant areas of knowledge. Marc Wuyts and Des Gasper provide complementary papers, on attainable skills and tools that can be offered to students of public policy and development management to help them deal intelligently with the texts and data-sets they encounter. Wuyts takes quantitative analysis and Gasper qualitative. Wuyts considers how to descriptively summarize data in order to generate hypotheses, as a prelude to trying to test them; Gasper considers how to descriptively summarize arguments, as a prelude to assessing them. Wuyts presents quantitative data analysis as centrally involving the generation of questions and hypotheses, not merely the testing of already given hypotheses. The creation of conjectures is promoted by intelligent description of the data, in dialogue with theory. Description and summarization involve choices and always imply ideas about the material. We describe more intelligently by becoming more conscious of our assumptions and consequent choices. Wuyts shows how to tackle data so as to raise questions and examine assumptions, with a case from Botswana statistics on population distribution. Gasper looks at tools of argument analysis, with extended examples of their use on policy-related texts from Zimbabwe and South Africa. He presents three workable, complementary methods: a tabular format for examining the components of an argument and their meanings; second, attention to the use of terms that convey praise or criticism and hence hint at conclusions but also, as one becomes conscious of the linguistic choices made, point towards possible counter-arguments; and thirdly, another tabular format, for describing an argument’s logical structure and the possible rebuttals. Both Wuyts and Gasper seek to combine systematic use of methods with close attention to the meanings of data, whether quantitative or qualitative, so that methods will be one’s tools and not one’s master. Together with Björkman they give advice on how to teach methods of analysis so as to fit them into systematic argumentation about development situations and policy options, rather than let methods dominate and thus hinder purposeful and independent thinking. This is the approach that ISS aims to practice and share.

DES GASPER Editor