The Department of Public Policy has been awarded three Open Society University Network (OSUN) and a The European University of Social Sciences – CIVICA projects recently.
The OSUN project GLOBALED is led by CEU’s Department of Public Policy (DPP) professor Kata Orosz, in collaboration with professor Tamo Chattopadhay from the American University of Central Asia (AUCA). A grant from the Open Society Foundations will enable them to develop and pilot a blended certificate program in policy and practice of global educational development for university students and practitioners from across the Open Society University Network. The GLOBALED certificate program was launched in September 2021. It offers two online courses and a blended experiential learning course to advanced undergraduate and graduate students; these courses are hosted by CEU’s Department of Public Policy. 31 students from 6 OSUN institutions – CEU, Ashesi University (Ghana), AUCA (Kyrgyz Republic), BRAC University (Bangladesh), European Humanities University (Lithuania), and the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) – enrolled in the inaugural cohort of the certificate program for students. The OSUN GLOBALED project will also offer an executive course to practitioners of educational policy and development, to be launched in May 2022.
DPP has also joined forces with CEU’s Democracy Institute (Budapest), University of Los Andes (Bogota), BRAC University (Dhaka), and SciencesPo (Paris) to create an OSUN-funded Global Corruption Observatory. The Observatory team led by DPP professor Mihály Fazekas will provide reliable and actionable data, evidence, and skills to enhance students’, civil society activists’ and policy makers’ understanding of anticorruption and improve their hard data skills for effectively pursuing good government. The Observatory will compile large-scale micro-level datasets from around the world on government contracts, national legislation, and subsidies, covering 3 major areas of corruption and state capture. It will build an interactive analytical tool and publish actionable indicators, while also offering tailored training to stakeholders, based on high-quality evidence. The training courses offered by the team will be open, both online and offline, to OSUN universities but also for a wide range of stakeholders outside of academia.
Under the leadership of DPP professor Andrew Cartwright, DPP is teaming up with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva) and the American University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan) to develop and expand its Policy Lab program. With three years support from the OSUN, the aim of the project is to build on the experience of CEU and Geneva in running Policy Labs and to develop new teaching materials that will be shared across OSUN. By working across campus, students get access to more expert resources, get chance to work on joint research projects and to enter their final projects in the annual Policy Lab Jamboree. Andrew Cartwright, the director of the Policy Lab program at DPP, says that “the initiative allows for far greater scope in project planning, for example, research projects can embark on long term monitoring and evaluation programs with partner organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, the International Federation of the Red Cross, the World Bank, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization as well as think tanks such as Political Capital and research centers such as the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies.” The generous support from OSUN allows the team to commission surveys, buy data, run stakeholder consultation exercises and organize an array of public dissemination events. With plans to roll out the program to other members in the OSUN group, the opportunities for global co-operation abound.
Marie-Pierre Granger, DPP professor, is involved in a CIVICA-funded project on Contesting the Court: Examining Judicial Politics in the European Union (lead institutions: Hertie’s School of Governance and EUI). The project starts from the observation that the Court of Justice’s role in EU politics is increasingly contested. Not only politicians complain about the Court's decisions, but also national courts and scholars who deride ‘activist’ rulings in particular areas, while simultaneously complaining of a failure to proactively defend European legal values in others. This project will revisit the debate over judicial politics in the EU by examining the causes and outcomes of the increasing contestation of the EU judiciary. In doing so, it brings together a group of leading lawyers and political scientists within the CIVICA network to examine a key research priority within CIVICA, namely the constitutional resilience of the EU political order and the role of the judicial branch in safeguarding its basic principles. It will also include leading experts from outside the network. Their preliminary findings will be presented at a workshop at EUI on 16-17 June 2022 at the EUI, and lead to an edited publication.
The Open Society University Network (OSUN) is a new global network of educational institutions that integrates learning and the advancement of knowledge—in the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences and the arts, on undergraduate and graduate levels—across geographic and demographic boundaries, promotes civic engagement on behalf of open societies, and expands access to higher education for underserved communities.
CIVICA – The European University of Social Sciences unites eight leading European higher education institutions in the social sciences, humanities, business management and public policy, with a total of 50,000 students & PhDs and 10,000 academic staff. Together, we build on an ever-stronger combination of education, research & innovation, and civic outreach to develop the European university of the future: grounded in excellent teaching and learning, offering seamless mobility, contributing innovative solutions to societal challenges, and creating a path for other universities to follow.