Courses: Policy Cycle

Teaching Staff

Prof. Marleen Brans (University of Leuven, Belgium)

Objectives

This course aims at fostering students understanding of the different phases of the policy cycle and feedback loops between them. It offers theoretical models and analytical concepts with which the policy cycle as a whole and the different phases separately can be understood and analyzed.

Contents

The course content is structured along the study of different phases of the policy cycle: agenda setting: policy formulation, decision-making, implementation, evaluation, policy change.

  1. Setting the policy agenda: How is the agenda set? Do policy problems influence the agenda as they come (positivism) or are they social constructs (constructivism)?
  2. Formulating policies: How is policy formulated, what options are explored and which instruments investigated? Which actors constitute the policy subsystem and engage in formulating policy options?
  3. Deciding policies: How are policy programs chosen? Do decision-makers decide rationally, incrementally or in an irrational way?
  4. Implementing policies: What are the conditions for successful policy implementation? Which implementing processes explain policy failures?
  5. Evaluating policies: Who is engaged in policy evaluation? How is evaluation organized and is evaluation administrative or political?
  6. Changing policies: How and to what extent do policy programmes change? Do policy systems learn from past experiences? How are policies terminated, altered, or consolidated