The problems encountered within the spheres of public policy and public administration typically span diverse topical domains, involve the perspectives of multiple actors, and are situated within rapidly changing environments. The nature of these problems thereby demands a diverse skill set from those working directly to engage with them. Policy analysts need to be able to not only understand the requirements of effective and efficient analysis of complex problems, but often do so within far from ideal situations and environments. They also need to know how such insight can be operationalised into practical process design, procurement, quality assurance, and communication of analysis.

While policy challenges faced will be diverse in their contexts and specialist requirements, this module seeks to impart a systematic and widely applicable approach to underpin their analysis. The module explores a broad subset of analytic methods likely to be useful in resolving a wide range of policy issues. This approach is, however, not readily encountered in practice. Constrained by time, limited resources and other working pressures, analysts often default to selecting analytic methods on, for example, grounds of their familiarity rather than suitability to the task at hand. In addition, it is not uncommon for analysts to have been conditioned throughout their educational and professional personal histories to affiliate themselves with either quantitative or qualitative expertise. Such preferences  put at risk the potential for the use of analytical methods to effectively and ethically contribute to the resolution of a policy issue. Rather than separately engage quantitative and qualitative techniques, this course is grounded in the view that analysis for policy instead requires multi- methodological practice.

The course introduces over 30 different methods  as an overview of the landscape of analytic practice for policy. These cover analytic contributions across the spectrum of policy development  activities: defining problem requirements; understanding the system; exploring options; analysing risk; informing action; and communicating insight. Traditionally these methods would be encountered and grouped under different sectoral or disciplinary labels, including ‘decision analysis’, ‘strategy development’, ‘operational research’, ‘problem structuring’, ‘foresight & futures’, ‘research design’, ‘evaluation’, ‘design thinking’, ‘systems analysis’, ‘data science’, and ‘coding’. The course will explain historical end emerging connections between these fields, and introduce all methods with a single, overarching analytic practice for policy framework.

This course is intended to support students on the UCL STEaPP Masters of Public Administration (MPA) and Doctral Training programmes . It is also intended for UCL postgraduates who have an in interest in analytic practice for public policy.