Knowledge Transfer and Teaching Public Administration: the Academy Model

Since the beginnings of Public Administration in the US and its accompanying education in other parts of the world, government and policy have become more complex. The education in Public Administration created a professional pathway to public service. The addition of education to Public Administration came out of the Progressive Movement in the United States to make knowledge in Public Administration more important in the face of corruption brought on by patronage appointments. When nonprofits became part the US public sector as elsewhere along with nonprofit healthcare, the complexity expanded enormously, requiring professionals to know more in what has become a multidisciplinary field of study. Given the diversity and complexity of the public sector and the need for Public Administration to embrace more knowledge from many disciplines, it stands to reason that an earlier start on the education portion of Public Administration or a pathway would be beneficial. A model of early Public Administration knowledge transfer is described and illustrated below. The Academy described is based on the US career pathways and high school academies as part of the school to work educational movement. The success of the combination of these two areas will also be pointed out in the academy described. Translation of lessons learned from the Acdemy to Europe and Asia are also considered

Re-visiting Meltsner: Policy Advice Systems and the Multi-Dimensional Nature of Professional Policy Analysis

10.2139/ssrn.15462511-2

Making better use of information to drive improvement in local public services: A report for the Audit Commission

This report on making better use of information to drive improvement in local public services was commissioned from the School of Public Policy at the University of Birmingham, by the Audit Commission. It explores how decision makers use information when making decisions. These decision makers can be politicians, top managers, operational managers, planners etc. The focus of this report is not on the use of performance indicators sensu stricto, but on the use of information more generally. Rather than studying how existing information is used or not used in decision making, this report is looking at how decision makers go about searching, analysing, summarising, processing and interpreting information when they need to make a decision. The report consists of three main chapters. - A summary of key government policy initiatives in the UK to stimulate the use of information in decision making - A review of the relevant research literature. This is the main section of the report. In it, we review the role of information in decision making theories, the organisational and structural context of information use, and psychological factors in the use of information in decision making - A presentation of a number of international perspectives on the use of information in public sector decision makin

Visual Decision Support for Policy Making: Advancing Policy Analysis with Visualization

Today’s politicians are confronted with new information technologies to tackle complex decision-making problems. In order to make sustainable decisions, a profound analysis of societal problems and possible solutions (policy options) needs to be performed. In this policy-analysis process, different stakeholders are involved. Besides internal direct advisors of the policy makers (policy analysts), external experts from different scientific disciplines can support evidence-based decision making. Despite the alleged importance of scientific advice in the policy-making process, it is observed that scientific results are often not used. In this work, a concept is described that supports the collaboration between scientists and politicians. We propose a science–policy interface that is realized by including information visualization in the policy-analysis process. Therefore, we identify synergy effects between both fields and introduce a methodology for addressing the current challenges of science–policy interfaces with visualization. Finally, we describe three exemplary case studies carried out in European research projects that instantiate the concept of this approach