Short course description

Public governance is essential for societies to dealing with shared challenges and to keeping collective life running. The course treats governance as ‘the interaction between government and non-government actors engaged in the governing of specific public problems.’ (Ansell 2023: 3). Mitigating large problems including climate change, diseases, (forced) migration, and poverty require some form of governance. But that is easier said than done, because these large problems are essentially messy, have no clear problem definition, and involve competing interests. Governance is much more than just designing an ‘optimal’ solution to a problem. Understanding public governance involves understanding the logic of institutions, politics, and bureaucracies. It requires balancing performance, legitimacy, accountability, and other public values.

The central questions in this course are: What is public governance, and how do we develop and apply theory in public governance research? Answering these questions is essential to study public governance in a rigorous way. We will delve into large societal problems and apply different approaches and theories of governance to gain a deeper understanding of these problems. We will notice that good theories of governance can be instrumental to governance, critical of governance, as well as explanatory.

Participants will examine major societal challenges through different theoretical approaches and explore how governance theories can explain governance processes, inform practice, and support critical reflection. Public governance is inherently interdisciplinary. This is one of the field’s strengths, but it can also be challenging for researchers entering it from other disciplines. The course is designed for PhD candidates who study governance but have little or no prior training in public administration or political science. It is particularly suited to researchers who want to relate governance theories to their own dissertation projects.

Course objectives

After this course, participants:

• Have an overview of core concepts and theories of public governance

• Are able to apply theories of governance to the topics of their thesis

• Understand the inherent interdisciplinarity of governance studies

• Are able to analyze problems from an interdisciplinary governance perspective

• Have acquired the prerequisite knowledge to continue with the course Classics and Contemporary Challenges for Public Governance Research (NIG core curriculum course).