Duration: 1 year part-time, 1 semester full time
Minimum: 24 units

The Graduate Certificate in Public Policy comprises four courses taken at master degree level. This Graduate Certificate is in effect half a Master of Public Policy, which comprises eight courses. This Graduate Certificate is designed for those professionally engaged in government and other policy-related organisations or activities who wish to study at master degree level to develop their skills in policy analysis. The Certificate provides students with a wide menu of choice of master degree courses selected from those eligible for the Master of Public Policy.
Students who are thinking of later proceeding on to the eight-course Master of Public Policy should consider the course-selection requirements appropriate to the various specialisations offered under the Master degree.

Program Director: Professor John Uhr

John Uhr is a Professor of Public Policy at the Australian National University, and Director of the Policy and Governance Program in the ANU’s Crawford School of Economics and Government, where he teaches courses in the ANU Masters of Public Policy on ‘ethics and public policy’, and ‘policy advocacy’. He also teaches regularly in the Political Science Honours program in the Faculty of Arts.

John is a graduate of the University of Queensland and the University of Toronto, Canada, where he obtained his MA and PhD in political science. He worked in Canberra in the Commonwealth public service for most of the 1980s: serving as director of studies for the former Public Service Board; and later as a committee secretary in the Australian Senate. John has extensive experience working in the Australian Parliament, as a researcher and as a committee secretary. John was a Harkness Fellow in the US from 1985-1987, and joined the ANU to teach in the masters of public policy degree in 1990. He was the last director of the ANU’s former Federalism Research Centre, and has held a number of positions in the Politics Program in the ANU’s Research School of Social Sciences. He is the author of Deliberative Democracy in Australia: the changing place of parliament (CUP 1998) and more recently of Terms of Trust: arguments over ethics in Australian government (UNSW Press 2005) as well as many academic and professional articles on public policy and administration.

John is also the founding director of the Crawford School’s new Parliamentary Studies Centre which has won a substantial three year Linkage Grant (in co-operation with the Commonwealth Parliament) from the Australian Research Council, to lead a large international research project on ways of ‘strengthening parliamentary institutions’.