About Course
Course code: PG-F01 | Level: Level 1 | Group: A
Foundations of Public Policy — School of Public Policy & Governance, KBA13 Academy.
Non-degree professional-learning course. Instructor: INSTRUCTOR PENDING OWNER CONFIRMATION. Price: Owner Approval Required. Enrollment disabled until substantive content passes academic, legal-source, evidence, and technical review.
All legal, regulatory, budgetary, and institutional references: VERIFICATION REQUIRED (dated and source-verified before publication). Responsible-AI and non-partisan statements apply.
Content Status: DRAFT — GROUP A (Launch Priority). Module architecture + Tutor shell to be built.
What this course is about
Public policy is where intentions meet institutions, and institutions usually win. This foundation course examines how policy is actually made — as opposed to how textbooks describe it — with attention to the gap between a decision announced and a change delivered. That gap is where most public value is lost, and it is largely a matter of implementation, incentives and administrative capacity rather than of insufficient goodwill.
How the course is structured
The opening sessions cover problem definition, which is the most consequential and least examined stage. How a problem is framed determines which solutions become thinkable, and framing is rarely neutral. Students take a single situation and construct three legitimate but incompatible definitions of it, then trace the different policy paths each opens.
The middle sessions cover instruments and trade-offs: regulation, taxation and subsidy, direct provision, information campaigns, and the design of incentives that survive contact with the people they target. Each instrument is examined for its characteristic failure mode.
Later sessions deal with implementation and evaluation — administrative capacity, principal-agent problems, the difficulty of measuring outcomes rather than outputs, and why pilots so often succeed and scale-ups so often do not.
What you will be able to do
You should be able to write a policy problem statement that does not smuggle in its own solution, choose among instruments with reasons, anticipate implementation obstacles at the design stage, and read an evaluation critically enough to see what it has not measured.
Who it suits
Civil servants early in their careers, local government staff, NGO and advocacy professionals who negotiate with government, legislative and ministerial advisers, and researchers who want their work to be usable by decision-makers. No economics background is assumed, though basic quantitative reasoning is used.
The course is the entry point to the School of Public Policy & Governance and connects usefully to the School of Leadership & Organizational Development for those responsible for delivery. Applied advisory work is described under Consulting, and remaining pathways are listed in the Academy.
Course Content
Module 0 — Course Orientation, Public Interest, and Non-Partisanship
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Lesson 0.1 — Orientation: How to Use This Course Responsibly
Module 1 — What Public Policy Is—and Is Not
Module 2 — Public Problems, Values, and Competing Interpretations
Module 3 — Actors, Institutions, Power, and Policy Systems
Module 4 — Policy Processes, Agendas, and Decision-Making
Module 5 — Policy Instruments, Implementation, and Capacity
Module 6 — Evaluation, Learning, and Policy Change
Module 7 — Final Applied Project
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