This week’s faculty seminar will feature a presentation by Dr. Devyani Pande, Assistant Professor, Public Policy, NLSIU on ‘Educating for Policy: Disciplinary Foundations of Public Policy Curricula in India.’ Her co-authors are Ishani Mukherjee, & Dayashankar Maurya.

Abstract

Public policy schools around the world have each had their unique struggle towards balancing multi-disciplinarity and contextualisation of public policy education. With the proliferation of public policy education in the Global South, there is still a lack of comparative literature examining the design and delivery of these programs and the extent to which they align with Global North approach and local context as well as meet the vision of multi-disciplinarity.

India has been an interesting case due to the uptick of public policy institutions in recent years offering degrees at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Given this trend, how is the curriculum in policy education being organised in India? The authors examine the curricula of 52 public policy institutes in India using the novel method of topic modelling to identify key themes in the stated objectives of institutions and course offerings. While on one hand they find partial convergence with major topics covered in the core curriculum of Global North institutes along with multi-disciplinarity, on the other hand they find no indication of any emerging pattern of institutionalising public policy curricula in India.

Where there is some alignment, it is mostly limited to course offerings that are based on the broader context or specialisation of the institutes themselves. The emphasis on research is also evident across programmes in line with their objectives. They propose several layers of factors that contribute to this variegated offering of courses at the national level -comprising context, purpose, and desired outcomes and institutional level (institutional endowment, job market requirements, indigenisation/localisation).