Suspended in 2025/26
PP450      Half Unit
Public Organisations: Theory and Practice

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

Some understanding of economics and quantitative methods is desirable.

The course will offer students the analytical frameworks and practitioners’ knowhow for understanding public organisations and the challenges in design and implementation of public policies.  Public organisations are key determinants of state capacity and this course will draw primarily on social science, primarily economics  and political economy to understand these. The lectures will take different views of public organisations: a micro, personnel-economics view; an organizational level perspective; and a heterodox approach drawing on the recent literature from several disciplines on identity, values and norms.
The seminars will have an applied focus and will deal with intractable public policy problems and unpack reasons why it is so difficult to design and implement effective public policies. The group work during seminars will use a systematic and structured framework to identify pressing policy problems, diagnose the underlying causes of these problems using evidence, and design, test, implement and refine policy innovations. There will be a lot of emphasis on learning-centric approaches to transforming public organisations and to diagnosing and dealing with the challenges of policy implementation and political authorisation and the skill sets needed to address these challenges.

16.5 hours of seminars and 22 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

Students will be provided regular and weekly feedback on their group work during WT.

Key readings:

• Timothy Besley, Robin Burgess, Adnan Khan and Guo Xu. (2021). Bureaucracy and Development. Annual Review of Economics. Forthcoming.
• Besley, Timothy and Torsten Persson. 2014. “The Causes and Consequences of Development Clusters: State Capacity, Peace and Income”. Annual Review of Economics. Volume 6:927-949.
• Finan, Frederico, Benjamin Olken, and Rohini Pande. 2015. “The Personnel Economics of the State”, The Handbook of Field Experiments.
• IGC Evidence Paper. 2019. “State Effectiveness”
• Cristina Corduneanu-Huc, Alexander Hamilton and Issel Masses Ferrer. 2012. “Understanding Policy Change: How to Apply Political Economy Concepts in Practice.” Washington D.C.: World Bank Publications.
• Andrews, M., L. Pritchett & M Woolcock. (2017). Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action. Oxford University Press.
• Parkhurst, Justin. 2017. “The politics of evidence: from evidence-based policy to the good governance of evidence”. Routledge Studies in Governance and Public Policy.

Essay (60%)

Policy brief (40%)

The group assignment (40%) will consist of a presentation and policy brief.