The government of every country and state bring policies and schemes for the welfare of society and the nation. These governments implement policies and schemes through their departments and sometimes they assess them with either own departments OR external agencies. This assessment process has nothing to do with:
‘What new theories are evolving while implementing the scheme or policy?
Why the existing theories or not working while implementation or in it’s impact?
Why global findings are not matching?
What are the initial flaw in terms of conceptualization of the policy or scheme? ‘ etc…
In the entire process from policy or scheme conceptualization to implementation, the concerned government department or agency does not see a possibility of theorizing a phenomenon or identifying a theoretical relationship with field-level data. And they assume, ‘it is not their job’.
So whose job is this? Is this a researcher’s job who is either in a doctoral course or post-doctoral assignment, a faculty who is studying public policies/schemes or a consultancy firm who reads/analyzes the data and based on the analysis floats some project?
As a teacher, I see students struggling while exploring their research areas – either for their doctoral dissertation, post-doctoral research or a research paper. They explore with zeal and confidence by reviewing the existing literature – mostly referring research articles published in top-tier journals, but these researchers have no interest in studying the Public Policies or schemes with a view to understanding theoretical grounding of policy or schemes.
Why they do not see this as an opportunity for research? I think these researchers assume that ‘understanding a policy or schemes in not academic job’. If this is that assumption, I do not agree with that.
In fact, data on these policies and schemes are available to any researcher who wants to study. Most importantly – concerned government department or agency will be happy in supporting them since these arms of government would learn significant findings of the policy they implemented and would know what kinds of policies and schemes be required in the country.
In a true sense, this kind of attempt by a researcher would help the government and country in a bigger way.
Dear Dwivedi, the process of new policy generation, implementation and review should be done by government or bureaucrats, as all this might emanate from the political commitment politician made during their campaign for office (election). However, equally for reasons of independence and technical capacity it is equally necessary to involve academic institutions in the process. The collaboration between government and academic could be designed as joint research or independent contract given to academic institutions.
Dear Gebregziabhar, Industry-Academia-Government collaborative research is the need of the hour, but how many campuses use this mechanism and involve their students in order to study government led policies/schemes or projects? I agree with the point raised regarding Government's own agenda about policies and schemes, but is this not a job for researchers to study and suggest the theoretical flaws in policies or schemes which are initiated by Governments.
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