Assignment Question
The final step of the case study project is the construction of a “policy paper.” A policy paper is a distinct type of argumentative paper, where the central goal is to recommend a concrete set of actions that an actor should take to address a specific problem. We’ve already worked through many of the necessary steps for this process – including identifying the central challenge that we are trying to remedy, and surveying the scholarly research on the topic, with a particular focus on what this literature says regarding the causes of the problem and potential solutions. If your literature review emphasized the causes of problem X, then this offers some implicit solutions to problem X, namely by addressing and mitigating the causes. If your literature review emphasized specific studies that proposed and evaluated actual solutions to problem X, then you can also draw on those studies to formulate and advocate for a specific policy response. Policy papers have a few key points of difference from the kind of writing that you may be more familiar with in the college classroom setting. First, policy papers are written mostly for non-academic, policy-maker audiences. Writing a recommendation for a policymaker at the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development, or the State Department will look quite different than writing a paper for a professor. We want to minimize academic jargon, unnecessary filler or complicated language, and get directly to the point. Your audience does not have much time to read about the subject, so you need to write efficiently. More specifically, your policy paper should have the following components: An executive summary on the first page – a single paragraph summary of the main argument Description of the context and importance of the problem. Think of this as a brief review of the first two parts of the case study assignment (the country background and the identification of a specific development challenge). This part should be no longer than 1 page. The policy recommendation itself. What are the specific choices, policies, decisions, and/or behaviors that an actor or actors should make to mitigate the problem? As noted above, this policy recommendation should be anchored in what the scholarly literature has discovered about the problem. However, it is not a repetition of what you said in the literature review. Instead, you must present a specific set of recommendations. This means it should: Identify concrete steps to be taken. “Reduce corruption” is not a concrete step. “Tie the disbursement of bilateral official development assistance to the creation of an independent auditor that examines a country’s budget” is a concrete step. Note – your policy recommendation may have muliple steps. Identify the actor(s) involved. Who or what is involved in the implementation of this policy? Justify why this policy should be adopted over other alternatives. Discuss any potential barriers to adoption. What might prevent this policy from being adopted or implemented, and what can be done to reduce these barriers? Discuss how we will judge the effectiveness of this policy approach. What will signal that the policy achieved its stated goal? How will we know if the policy was successful or not? What are the metrics we will use to judge success? A bibliography of works cited Final policy papers are likely to be in the 4-5 page range, double spaced. Note that they tend to be more effective when they include graphs, tables, or other non-text items that help convey the extent of the challenge and the proposed solution.