abstract |
Policy analysis has been practiced in one form or another since the time of the Greeks. Policy analysis as a discipline, however, only really began to take shape in the 1960s, first in the United States and now around the world. Unexpectedly, the process of policy analysis has not developed a dispassionate, scientific endeavor but, rather, as competing analyses using often different data, different analytic methods, and different ideological premises. Panelists will discuss how “modern policy analysis” is being used to select, plan, implement, and evaluate government policies.
bio |
Douglas J. Besharov teaches courses on poverty, welfare, children and families, policy analysis, program evaluation, and performance management (including “pay-for-success”). He is also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, where he leads a program on international policy exchanges. Between 1975 and 1979, he was the first director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. In 2008, he was President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) and, subsequently, APPAM’s International Conference Coordinator. Together with Neil Gilbert of the University of California (Berkeley), Professor Besharov is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford University Press Library on International Social Policy. Among his eighteen books is Recognizing Child Abuse: A Guide for the Concerned, a book designed to help professionals and laypersons identify and report suspected child abuse. He has written more than 250 articles, and has contributed to The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
Neil Gilbert is also the co-director of the Center for Child and Youth Policy, director of the Center for Comparative Family Welfare and Poverty Research and the founding director of the Family Welfare Research Group. He served as Acting Dean of the School of Social Welfare from 1994-96 and served for five years as Chair of the School’s Doctoral Program. Additionally, Dr. Gilbert was a senior research fellow at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva in 1975. In 1981, he was awarded a Senior Fulbright Research Fellowship to study the changing structure of social services in the British welfare state, and served as a visiting Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University in Israel. In 1987, he was awarded a second Fulbright Fellowship to study European Social Policy as a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at the University of Stockholm Social Research Institute. Dr. Gilbert also served as a visiting scholar at the International Social Security Association in Geneva in 1993 and 1997, and at Ox