Political Science, Governance & Development

This field-based program explores how power operates in practice, through institutions, policies, budgets, service delivery systems, and civil society networks.

Students move beyond capital-city abstraction to examine governance across scales: national, state, district, and village.

The design emphasizes comparative governance and development trade-offs, linking policy intent to lived outcomes through stakeholder mapping, institutional analysis, and grounded observation.

Rather than observing politics from afar, students engage with how systems function, where they stall, and how incentives shape decision-making in real contexts.

Students will:

Map institutions and stakeholders across governance levels and identify incentives, constraints, and power flows.
Analyze development outcomes using field evidence, access, equity, accountability, and implementation gaps.
Examine trade-offs in policy design and service delivery systems.
Ask compelling questions such as:
- Where does policy intention diverge from local experience, and why?
- How do budgets translate into lived outcomes?
- What makes decentralization succeed or falter?
Practice applied policy writing through briefs, memos, and evaluation frameworks.
Develop a governance case-study presentation grounded in field observation and comparative analysis.