California State University, Sacramento
Public Policy & Administration

COMMUNICATOR

February 1, 2002

• It's designed to be the first of two PPA courses on collaborative policy making, developed with the California Center for Public Dispute Resolution (a nationally recognized program associated with CSUS). This particular course will be entitled "Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Collaborative Policy Making." Topics will include (among others) interpretative policy analysis, deliberative democracy, public participation, policy networks, conflict resolution, and interest based negotiation. We anticipate that the second, more application oriented course will be offered in spring, 2003.
  
  
• The summer course will be taught by David Booher, a consultant with the Center for Public Dispute Resolution. David has written and worked extensively in the field, and has taught a similar course at Berkeley.
  
  
• Our new courses are designed to complement, not replace, well regarded conflict resolution courses taught by OBE faculty within the University's College of Business. Indeed, we think that people with a strong interest in the area of collaborative decision making and conflict resolution would be well served by taking both of our new courses and an OBE course on conflict resolution, the latter of which would focus in more depth on topics such as arbitration and concentrate more on the private sector.
  
  
• We anticipate that the summer course will be offered in the first eight weeks of the summer session (beginning in early June), although there's still a bit of uncertainty in this regard. The likely format is two evening classes a week.
  
  
• Our main remaining hurdle is that the new courses need to go through the (cumbersome) university course approval process. We don't anticipate problems in this process, but until that hurdle is cleared we can't make the course offering official (and it's still possible, though unlikely, that something could go wrong in the process).
  
  
• For that reason as well, it will be some time before students can officially enroll in the summer course. However, we don't anticipate that registration will be problematic once approval is granted.