Hello everyone,
We seek to study public policies, particularly in OCDE countries, that relate to a specific theme in education. We are interested in understanding if there is a methodology that would facilitate the rigorous and exhaustive implementation of such a survey.
Such inquiry strategies may be pertinent to professionals in political science, public administration, and related disciplines. I would greatly appreciate your insights and expertise on this matter.
I really appreciate any help you can provide.
Best regards,
FM
My personal advice is to look for previous reports above the subject, mainly in public policies analysis and public policies management. It's important to keep the progress of the literature and other works in the specific area.
I am suffering with the same struggle to overlook education and research data, but there isn't an academic consensus on the field, so best luck.
Regards,
In general terms, for doing analysis of public policy it is useful to understand policies as structures of instruments that aim to articulate public actions. These actions could be directed to sustantive variables (social structures or institutions) that tend to be rigid, or to procedimental variables (interactions) that change more in the short-term.
Now, an instrument needs resources to modify the social context and reality, there are several classifications, personally I have been using the one presented by Fontaine (2015). This classification defines a policy instrument as a combination of resources like information (related to those that produce data), authority (norms and legal system), treasury (related to economic resources or instruments), and organization (people or organizations responsible of the policy or that have some role on it).
Using that categories you can evaluate an instrument to determine if it has actual capacities to create public actions or transformations. And from there, you can use the instruments as evidence to evaluate public policies, and determine whenever they have actual possibilities of achieving something or are just "lists of nice wishes".
If you consider this methodology could be useful, I attach a couple of references in English, because the book I mentioned earlier, of Fontaine, is in Spanish:
HOOD, C. (1986). The Tools of Government. Chatham: Chatham House
HOOD, C.(2007), «Intellectual Obsolescence and Intellectual Makeovers: Reflections on the Tools of Government after Two Decades». Governance, 20 (1): 127-144.
HOOD, C. & MARGETTS H. (2007), The Tools of Government in the Digital Age. Nueva York: Palgrave, Macmillan.