• Have been working in a particular government agency in a developing or transitional country and want to widen skills and knowledge to qualify for promotion or a new job. For example, students have come from the Statistics Office, the Ombudsman’s office, or a regional government
• Have been working in an aid agency and want to increase their skills in management, increase their understanding of development issues, and gain a portable qualification. For example, students have come from AUSAID or the Salvation Army; and
• Want to study and carry out research on practical or theoretical issues in development.

Acting Program Director: Professor Richard Mulgan

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’.