Our Executive MPA Concentrations: Global governance challenges

In 2023, many of the challenges facing the world today, such as climate change, global pandemics, terrorism, and poverty, are complex and interconnected, and cannot be solved by any one country or actor alone. As a result, there is a continuous need in every field for professionals who have the tools to understand and find ways to address these modern challenges.

As an Executive MPA candidate at the Hertie School, you have the opportunity to specialize in one of three areas of concentration. If you are passionate about learning and addressing complex international challenges that impact the lives of people around the world, our global governance challenges concentration could be the perfect addition to your studies.

About the concentration

Should you choose this concentration, you will have the opportunity to deep-dive into policy issues that can only be addressed at the international level. In stepping away from the perspective of nation states, you will gain insights into public administration and policy-making on the supra-national level and around the world, including both formal and informal mechanisms for cooperation and decision-making, along with the most pressing challenges and possible ways of tackling them.

You will learn more about challenges to governance in the 21st century, such as geopolitical change, rapid technological developments, environmental and democratic crises and the changing world order. By the end of your master's programme, you will have further deepened your ability to analyse the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of recent global governance responses via key conceptual and policy frameworks.

Course offerings

Throughout your Executive MPA studies, you will take three courses from your chosen concentration, and two elective courses from any other area of concentration.

If you select global governance challenges as your primary concentration, you will have the opportunity to take courses such as:

• Challenges to democracy in the 21st century (Fall 2023): Taught by Prof. Dr. Andrea Römmele, this class looks at democracy's contemporary threats, the institutions which contest it, as well as how it may develop moving forward.
• Demographic change and policy challenges (Fall 2023): Taught by Prof. Dr. Michaela Kreyenfeld, this will be the first ever Executive MPA course that is also a CIVICA honours seminar, which means that students from other universities within the CIVICA network will have the opportunity to participate.
• Sustainability (Spring 2024): Taught by Dr. Nils aus dem Moore, this class will explore the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability, with a particular focus on public policy approaches. 

Students enrolled in the Spring 2024 semester can also look forward to a course discussing war, technology and diplomacy taught by Nico Lange, a Senior Fellow with the Munich Security Conference's "Zeitenwende-Initiative."

Do note that, as this is a program tailored for professionals, you can organize your schedule as best fits your needs. You can complete your degree full-time over the course of one year, or you can extend your studies part-time to 2 (or even 3 or 4) years. Courses can also be combined into one-to-two-week blocks, thus requiring you to spend less time in Berlin.

Curious to know more?

You can read more about our concentrations, as well as our Executive MPA programme as a whole, on the programme website. If you have specific questions, we are always happy to chat one-on-one. Feel free to book a 30-minute call with a member of our Admissions Team here.