Past events

We offer a range of open enrolment programs on core public policy themes such as systems approach to governance, design thinking in public policy, leadership and strategic thinking for public leaders, negotiations, and data analytics for public policy; and applied themes such as agricultural policy, gender, social policy, sustainable development, and so on. These programs are designed keeping in mind state-of-the-art public policy and public management literature and contemporary challenges facing various sectors.

Doing Business with Government (11-15 July, 2022)

The government, at all levels, has a significant role to play in the country’s polity, economy, society as well as the markets and industry. While growing the economy is key, one of government’s top policy priorities is social welfare through delivery of public goods. There are many touchpoints where the roles of the government and private sector overlap but the latter focuses primarily on profit maximization. From this perspective, the government is also a major market, procurer of goods and services, and also seller of goods and services. Therefore, it becomes critical for industry and the private sector to better understand the nature of government in order to transact business more effectively. In India, with the disproportionate size of government and its finger in almost every market pie, the way business interacts with government can lead to success or failure.

The programme aims to provide participants from the private sector with right set of skills to understand the institutional architecture and functioning of central, state, and local governments. The programme will closely focus on the following aspects:

• Government-business relationship and its significance
• Business incentives that drive government behavior with respect to engaging with the private sector
• Key business processes that directly matter to the private sector such as procurement and digital transformation
• Motivations and challenges in designing and implementing PPPs in different contexts and sectors
• Government as a seller’ of goods and services

Designing Effective Public Policies: Blending Design Thinking, Behavioural Insights, and Futures Thinking ( 25-29 July, 2022)

It is a stylized fact that the policymaking process is bounded by context and politics. Policymakers and public managers are rarely conceived as “designers” in the same sense as product or service designers. Increasingly, however, there is a realization that even within these constraints, there are degrees of freedom and room for creativity that policymakers and public managers can exercise to ensure effective policy design, that is, policies which are likely to succeed in being adopted, implemented, and possibly even replicated. These degrees of freedom allow policymakers and public managers to embed design features such as empathy, behaviour change, technology, and experimentation into policies and also factor in complexities and uncertainties to ensure robustness and resilience in the delivery of the policy. Importantly, the design approach to public policy underscores the importance of collaboration and co-production in the policymaking process, wherein non-state actors such as the private sector, civil society, academics, international organizations, and so on play a key role in informing, shaping, and designing effective public policies.

The programme is structured to take participants through the key frameworks of design thinking, behavioural thinking, and futures thinking and apply them to real-life policy problems spanning across different policy domains. The programme will closely focus on the following aspects:

• Understanding the policy process and how design thinking can be incorporated in it
• Understanding the design thinking framework and applying the principles to policymaking
• Understanding design principles of policies aimed at bringing about behavioral change
• Understanding frameworks that will enable assessment of risks and uncertainties in the policy environment and how policies can be designed to be future-oriented