Introduction

This chapter will survey the way in which skills for policy analysis have been integrated with educational curricula in Australian universities. It considers education for policy professionals in general, but will examine the development and current status of instruction in policy analysis – known in Australia mainly as ‘public policy’ – for public servants in detail. This focal point is important because it recognises the convergence of frictions that mark the rise of policy analysis as a research and teaching field in Australia, and that help to distinguish it in comparative perspective. In particular, the way in which policy analysis has been embedded in university instruction has been dominated by the dynamics of contending role expectations for public servants (‘trade craft’ versus ‘policy craft’) and influenced by conflicting disciplinary knowledge (public policy versus public administration).

The chapter is structured as follows. The next section will background the emergence of policy analysis as a field of study in Australia and trace its development in the context of public service professional education. It will map some of the key defining debates in policy analysis instruction, with a focus on the nexus between theory and practice in pedagogy. This is followed by a detailed survey of the structure and curricula of current policy analysis programmes in Australian universities. Observations in the concluding section seek to synthesise historical and institutional path dependency with the current state of instruction for policy professionals. It argues that there is, indeed, a distinctly Australian approach to teaching policy analysis, one that is firmly grounded in an Antipodean proclivity towards pragmatism.

Explaining development paths for policy analysis instruction

Policy analysis, it is often asserted, is both an academic and a practitioner field (see Botterill and Fenna, 2013). As an academic discipline, it is organised around analysis of policy: it aims to develop models of policy process and interest interactions that help to explain decisions and their making. As an area of practice, policy analysis is directed at analysis for policy: it seeks to apply models of policy process and analytical techniques to improve decisions. In both areas, a better understanding of process dynamics is expected to lead to better understanding of policy content (Howlett and Ramesh, 2003).