On the Future of the Public Policy School
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12599 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
On the Future of the Public Policy School
Helmut K. Anheier
Hertie School of Governance, Heidelberg University
Abstract
Initially created as schools of public administration to help consolidate and advance the functioning of the expanding nation
state, these institutions evolved into public policy or governance schools over time. As they evolved, they encountered many
tensions inherent in a triad of “management and administration –policy analysis and academia –policy making and politics”.
Each of the triad corners represents a distinct and relatively powerful constituency: academia mostly interested in analytics;
public administrators eager to optimise processes; and policy makers looking for actionable answers. For the most part,
schools managed to negotiate the tensions inherent in the triad, but they now face a series of new challenges that will
require them to change substantially to maintain their relevance. The article discusses the evolution of public policy schools,
presents the reasons behind current challenges and offers several recommendations.
By way of introduction, it is useful to present the main argu-
ment developed in this essay. Initially created as schools of
public administration to help consolidate and advance the
functioning of the expanding nation state, these institutions
evolved into public policy or governance schools over time.
1
As they evolved, they encountered many tensions inherent
in a triad of management and administration –policy analy-
sis and academia –policy making and politics’(Figure 1).
Each of the triad corners represents a distinct and relatively
powerful constituency: academia mostly interested in analyt-
ics; public administrators eager to optimise processes; and
policy makers looking for actionable answers.
Having negotiated these tensions for the better part of a
century –and without necessarily solving them –the public
policy school has nonetheless proved resilient as an institu-
tion and managed to address the somewhat divergent
demands of administrative practice, academic analysis and
policy making. However, the environment for public policy
schools has changed and is changing –not dramatically in a
short period of time but gradually over the last 20–30 years;
importantly, many of these changes have either gone unno-
ticed or were ignored, and had, consequently, little if no
effect on programs and curricula.
What is more, given political developments in the United
States and Europe, there is a chance that in future public
policy schools will be challenged more directly and openly
by anti-governmental, anti-elitist political and populist
forces, which are already beginning to express themselves
as a general backlash against evidence-based policy making.
These developments are unfolding in a context where gov-
ernments themselves, and the public sector as whole, are
less sure about their role today than a generation ago. Trust
in core institutions of modern societies has been shifting
away from government for some time, and is even declining
in some countries overall (Cingolani, 2018). Many reforms
that are needed to equip countries for current and future
challenges are held back by established interests or not
even attempted. Governance capacity, as the 2018 Hertie
School Governance Report finds, has not improved this dec-
ade, and many lessons that could have been learned from
the global financial crisis of 2008 went unheeded (Anheier,
Cingolani, Hallerberg et al., 2018).
Indeed, as we approach the quarter-century, few govern-
ments and societies are better off than they were a decade
ago, even if their economies have revived. This situation
does not bode well for schools of public policy. On the one
hand, schools are seen as too technocratic, seemingly ill-
equipped to anticipate political developments, and not in
tune with the changed political realities. On the other hand,
they are regarded as too scholarly, catering to the academy
as their ultimate constituency, paying lip service to public
problem-solving and administration, while hoping for fuller
acceptance by the major disciplines of economics, political
science and sociology.
The two main challenges to public policy schools –being
a technocracy having lost touch with changing politics, and
having unfocused curricula at odds with student and
employer demands –are gaining in urgency. In response,
five major reforms are needed if public policy schools are to
continue flourishing as much as they have in decades past:
1. revisit the politics–analytics link by taking a necessary
intellectual step: introducing political philosophy into
core teaching to compensate for the normative vacuum
and lack of vision in curricula dominated by political
economy;
2. revisit the management–policy link by emphasising the
stewardship of, and leadership for, the public good, and
to stress that public administration is more than a set of
tools and standard processes, but rather a demanding
intellectual task, especially in view of digitalisation;
3. revisit the analytics–management link by widening the
compass of public policy schools to include business and
civil society directly and to reflect the changed realities
Global Policy (2019) 10:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12599 ©2018 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 1 . February 2019 75
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