Programme
When deciding what to study you undoubtedly read a lot of information about your study programme. Leiden University employs various systems to provide information about programmes and courses and to facilitate communication between lecturers and students.
The Prospectus contains information about all the courses within your study programme. Here you can find all you need to know about your programme. Via the online learning environment Brightspace you can communicate with your lecturers and submit assignments.
The Master of Public Administration focuses on the management, steering, and coordination of political, administrative, economic, and social actors, as well as the formal and informal regimes and policy processes within which they act towards addressing collective social problems at regional, national, and international levels. A defining hallmark of the master is that governance is studied and taught from a multi-level perspective. This means that there is no single level of governance at which societal challenges can be addressed best. For example, the Ebola disease started as a local governance problem of a few countries but transformed itself rapidly into a global problem due to the disease’s spread by means of modern transportation. Boat refugees, to take another example, who flee their homelands because of local famine or civil wars poses a major challenge for the European Union.
These examples show that for educating future public policy professionals, in order to be able to address these problems in an adequate ways, a holistic rather than a single-level approach is needed. Hence, the various specialisations within the Master of Public Administration span the intricacies of multi-level governance by a multitude of public and private actors, all the way to the management of organisations and the behaviour of individual public managers. Students following this program can choose between the specializations:
The programme consists of core courses followed by all students, specialization courses, electives, and a master thesis. The core courses ensure that students master the most important theoretical and analytical approaches in the analysis of institutions and policy processes, as well as essential analytical and research skills. Specialisation courses allow students to learn more about the problems and state-of-the art research within the context of each of the three specialisations, culminating in an independently conducted master thesis project.
You can read more about the programs in the Prospectus by clicking on the links above.