Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. These policies govern and include various aspects of life such as education, health care, employment, finance, economics, transportation, and all over elements of society. The implementation of public policy is known as public administration. Public policy can be considered to be the sum of a government's direct and indirect activities and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways.
CIGI Campus, home to the Balsillie School of International Affairs
The Blavatnik School of Government building on Walton Street
Public administration, or public policy and administration, is the academic discipline that studies how public policy is created and implemented. It is also a subfield of political science that studies policy processes and the structures, functions, and behavior of public institutions and their relationships with broader society. The study and application of public administration is founded on the principle that the proper functioning of an organization or institution relies on effective management.
Public administration is both an academic discipline and a field of practice; the latter is depicted in this picture of U.S. federal public servants at a meeting.
Administrators tend to work with both paper documents and computer files: "There has been a significant shift from paper to electronic records during the past two decades. Although government institutions continue to print and maintain paper documents as 'official records,' the vast majority of records are now created and stored in electronic format." Pictured here is Stephen C. Dunn, Deputy Comptroller for the US Navy.
Woodrow Wilson
Luther Gulick (1892–1993) was an expert on public administration.
