Teaching Public Policy in East Asia : Aspirations, Potentials and Challenges

Public policy courses have increasingly become an indispensible part in professional training programs in public affairs in East Asia in response to rapid changes in political, social and economic environment in the region. In this paper, we examine the current trends in public policy education in East Asia through the lens of syllabi of public policy courses offered in graduate programs in leading universities in mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Our comparative analysis points to three main challenges in teaching public policy in East Asia: insufficient attention to policy knowledge rooted in the local context, inadequate teaching capacity and under-representation of policy analysis