This course offers an introduction to the policy process and core concepts of policy analysis, with an application to climate policy. Climate change has been characterised as the “greatest market failure that the world has seen” (Lord Nicholas Stern). Policy responses are being crafted at multiple levels of governance, while cutting across a wide range of traditional policy fields and being relatively new. What is agenda-setting and how has the climate change problem moved from fringe to center stage of policy agendas over the past decades? What are tools of government and key response options for mitigating climate change, and how can they be analysed and designed from welfare and political economy perspectives? What social conflicts and power struggles are unfolding at different levels of governance? How can we understand policy stability and change, and what are actionable intervention points for different actor groups? What are key differences – and perhaps similarities – in how democracies and autocracies respond to climate change and other policy problems?
This course is for 1st year MPP and MDS students only.
Instructor
- Christian Flachsland , Professor of Climate Policy | Director, Centre for Sustainability
