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In this module you look at the state and how it is managed. This is a huge agenda and brings in ideas from political science, from history, sociology, economics, anthropology and management science. The purposes are these: to establish what is meant by some key concepts such as the State, Government and Policy, which are often taken for granted but about which we need to be clear – and to understand different interpretations; to survey the principles and practice of public management using a historical and comparative perspective; to introduce a range of ideas that have emerged about how to manage the public sector to demonstrate the importance of context in understanding management and changing management practices;.to raise some issues about the nature of the policy process in different contexts; to set out some of the main debates in the field in order to help you to make your own judgements.

Decentralisation is a worldwide reality, as most countries are already engaged in a more or less advanced form of it. The following figures illustrate this trend: in the 1980s local governments around the world collected on average 15% of revenues and spent 20% of expenditures. By the late 1990s those figures had risen to 19% and 25% and had even doubled in certain countries. Moving beyond the fiscal arena, major public services such as education or health have also been transferred to local governments and political and electoral reforms have taken place. News headlines testify to the importance of local governance and local governments’ issues around the world.

The first implication for us, and for policy-makers and donors, is that the debate on whether decentralisation is good or bad in itself has lost its relevance. The key question is no longer whether a country should further decentralise or whether donors should support such a process. Although in different forms and to varying degrees decentralisation is there, it is part of the reality in which governments, other actors and citizens need to operate.

This module aims to introduce you to the main forms of cooperation between the state and the private sector in the provision of public goods and services. It does so both by examining the theoretical bases of public-private partnerships, and by an analysis of a number of recent case studies of PPP in action.

The module text is focused primarily around the following two questions.

What are the role and the duties of a state – which goods and services should be guaranteed to the population when employing financial resources raised through taxation?

Which provisions should be made directly by the state, or instead outsourced to the private sector operating on its behalf?

Welcome to this module on public policy and strategy. Strategy is a term that has become very common in both business and government, and it is likely that you have your own understanding of what it may mean. This module sets out to explore the meaning of strategy generally, and more specifically as a feature of the work of governments and public authorities.

It is written for people who are engaged in the processes of strategy development, policy-making, implementation and evaluation, whether as professionals, politicians, advisors or citizens.

The module covers an extensive range of issues and, in the next eight weeks, you will study a wide spectrum of topics associated with the relationship between the IMF and macroeconomic stabilisation. Because the subject matter is vast, I have tried to focus on some of the key themes and provide some indications as to where this subject matter can be studied in greater detail if or when you have time to do so.

This course has been specially designed to increase the depth of your understanding of macroeconomics by focusing on the relationship between financial markets and macroeconomics. We place the subject in a real-world context, aiming to show how theoretical and empirical knowledge of macroeconomics and financial markets provides ways to analyse the salient problems faced by modern macroeconomic policy makers.

Research plays an essential role in business and in public policy and management. Increasingly, organisations undertake small-scale research projects, to find out about matters relating to the concerns of their organisation or to critically evaluate existing policies. Both commercial firms and government institutions rely upon research to inform their decisions, to test the effectiveness of existing policies, to predict the effects of intended future policies, to understand management processes and decisions and to gain insights into public preferences and opinions about public services.

Whether you are studying this module in order to carry out research in your professional role, to commission and project-manage research conducted by others or to complete a dissertation for your MSc qualification, your ability to appropriately and rigorously design, execute report, and evaluate research is essential.

In this module you will learn about evaluation, and specifically about the types of evaluation that assesses the achievements of public interventions and uncover the lessons learned which have wider application. Often termed 'summative', 'ex-post', or 'post-hoc' this sort of evaluation looks back over what has changed over the course of an intervention by a public institution, and tries to answer questions such as:

What difference has our project, programme or policy made?; who has benefitted and who has been left out?; did our intervention deliver what we expected and hoped it would?; were the resources spent on it justified by the results achieved?; what else might account for the changes that have happened?; should we continue doing this sort of thing, and what have we learned to help us do better in the future?