Public policy training and development of MPA/MPP programs in the Russian Federation

Abstract

The article reviews the evolution of Master level public policy and administration education in the Russian Federation in the past 25 years. It focuses on the changes in the curriculum, the main institutions in public policy and administration graduate training (the Russian Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration, the Moscow State University, and the Higher School of Economics), and the legal framework regulating the standards for teaching and research in the field. It shows that despite the increasing popularity of graduate level training in public administration and public policy, programs only selectively represent standards practiced elsewhere in the world. MPP/MPA training in Russia has diverse origins, borrowing from the Continental tradition of the study of administrative law, an increasing popularity of business education and management practices, as well as current demands of the Russian state to develop managers in a variety of policy fields. The selective representation of international standards in various programs has resulted in some convergence and some isomorphism with those standards, but there remain many particularities in the Russian tradition and the current Russian situation in higher education.

Keywords:

• Public policy
• Public administration
• Public policy teaching
• Research in public administration
• Educational standards
• Russia

1 Introduction

There are over one thousand private and public universities in the Russian Federation (hereinafter, Russia) today. Among them, public policy and public administration is a popular focus of study and research. More than half of all Russian universities offer graduate or undergraduate degrees in public administration. In the past twenty-five years, the number of such programs has been increasing. The attractiveness of a public policy degree is due both to the increasing role of the state in post-Soviet Russia, and the high prestige of government jobs among young graduates. But despite its increasing popularity, graduate level training in public administration and public policy only selectively represents standards practiced elsewhere in the world.¹ This article analyzes the evolution of Master level programs in Russia, focusing on the changes in the curriculum, the description of the main providers in public administration training, and the legal framework regulating the standards for teaching and research in the field of public policy and public administration.²

This analysis should be set against the backdrop of the larger issue of convergence in MPP/MPA programs, and hence the “inter-operability” of governance and policy systems. As noted in the introduction to this journal issue, we can understand the dynamics of program diffusion in terms of national context, international dynamics, and institutional isomorphism. The first two of these are particularly “sticky” in Russia. The national context is marked by a long history of distinguished universities and academies, and a particular configuration of the social sciences due to the legacies of the Soviet period. Some segments of the social sciences (e.g., mathematical economics) were as good if not better than western counterparts. There is also a strong Russian tradition of detailed oversight and regulation of post-secondary institutions. International dynamics played out somewhat differently in Russia than the rest of the post-Soviet space. Like all post-Soviet states in the first years after the collapse, Russia was vulnerable, weak, and dependent on international organizations. But unlike the countries in central and Eastern Europe, which had aspirations to join the European Union and hence an appetite to absorb and emulate western public administrative practices and pedagogy, Russia would ultimately have to remain distinct – though as we point out below, there was movement to adopt the Bologna process. While international organizations like the World Bank and the IMF obviously had great influence in the first decade after the collapse, that influence waned in 2000s. In the current circumstances, of course, there is an element of willful rejection of those influences. On the other hand, isomorphism as a set of informal dynamics has encouraged convergence, as illustrated by the example of Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) shows (more on this below).

Taken together, these factors suggest that while we should see some elements of convergence in the Russian case, they will be limited. Our analysis supports this hunch, and provides some additional insights into its implications.

2 Background

Russia boasts one of the most educated populations on the planet. Fifty four percent of its population aged 25–64 has a higher education degree (Newsland, 2012). Of the total 5.5 million students enrolled in the Russian universities, about 20% are enrolled in Master level programs. Engineering, mathematics and science have been the traditional dominant fields for bright young Russians. But more recently the study of social sciences such as political science, economics and public policy, have attracted scores of new university entrants. The popularity of these fields is connected to the increasing role of the state in the Russian economy. Working for the public sector is now considered to be prestigious and safer than working for a private enterprise.

In terms of structure and shape, the Russian civil service is still not particularly large by international standards. The core government employment as a share of total population in 2010 in Russia was only 2.4%, slightly higher than in Poland and Ukraine, but significantly lower than in the more advanced OECD countries such as Denmark (15.3%), France (6.9%), and Germany (4.5%). In 2009, federal and sub-national civil service employment stood at 870,000 (or roughly 0.6% of total population) with about 73% employed by the federal authorities.³ In the past seven years, public sector employment declined slightly, due to a declining economy and a shrinking share of the budget going to maintaining civil service employment.⁴

In the early 1990s, tens of thousands of civil servants exited the government sector, with a disproportionate share leaving the upper echelons. The lure of the private sector and opportunities for rapid advancement attracted the most talented members of the Russian bureaucracy. But despite this, the number of federal civil service employees soon began to grow again and remained relatively constant in the late 1990s and 2000s while at the regional level their number (as well as relative salary levels) continuously increased. Just over 30% of total government employees in Russia belong to the federal level, the rest are regional and municipal sector employees. This was due to the process of federalization and a massive expansion in administrative staff among the regional and municipal personnel.⁵

In the early 2000s, Russia began to exhibit higher rates of growth spurred by a rise oil and gas prices, the country's biggest export. Between 2000 and 2008, Russian GDP grew by 6.9% a year, and productivity growth over the same period was 70%. The Russian government expanded its spending on health and education, and became more dominant in domestic industries as the new state corporations in the areas from nanotechnology to oil and gas began to displace private players. By 2013, over 60% of Russian GDP was produced by the state or companies affiliated with the government.⁶

As the demand for regulatory capacity of the public sector increased so did the popularity of new higher education programs in policy and administration. And while the new recruits flocked into undergraduate programs in economics, management, law and public policy, existing civil servants were obligated by law to go through formal training at least once every three years. Both factors led to the development of MPA degrees, some composed as a bricolage of various short-term capacity building activities, others as top-down initiatives aimed at replicating practices and frameworks of programs in the US and Europe.

In terms of content, from Continental Europe Russia borrowed a tradition of the study of public policy and administration predominantly as a legal study. The basic premise in teaching these subjects in Russia is through the study of administrative law. In other words, while public administration is studied from the integrated viewpoints of different disciplines, generally those of political science, law, economics, and sociology, and management, a core subject of the program is always the administrative state viewed from the standpoint of enforcing the law.⁷ Teaching concepts and approaches are highly dependent on this tradition.

Students focus on how the state is organized, which laws regulate different aspects of administration, and how civil servants are supposed to enforce state decisions. Essentially, it is a positivistic approach fed by the basic value of the separation of the state apparatus from society. But since some of the public policy programs started out essentially as outgrowths of business education programs, training in public administration is also sprinkled with studies of management practices and strategic development theories. But it is mostly evident at the micro-level (courses on organizational theory), and does not represent a large part of the standard curriculum of graduate level program in public policy.

No story of the development of MPP/MPA programs in Russia will be complete without the discussion of the universities in which these programs originated. Russia exhibits features of an intermediary approach to civil service training, most closely exemplified by Germany, where receiving training in a centralized institution or academy is not a prerequisite for entering the public sector. Nonetheless, a dominant institution does exist to provide short- and long-term training for civil servants.⁸

During the Soviet period, elite civil servants were trained at the Communist Party school, named the Russian Academy of Public Administration (RAPA). In 2010, RAPA was merged with the Academy of the National Economy, creating the largest professional training academy focused on social sciences and public administration. The Russian Academy of the National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) under the Presidential Administration has about 60,000 thousand full-time, and about 50,000 part-time students. In addition, up to 80,000 regional and federal civil servants go through short-term capacity building training programs every year. The university has a central campus in Moscow, but also over 63 smaller campuses spread across the Russian regions. It has a Master of Global Public Policy (taught in English) equally split between Russian and foreign students, and a much larger MPA aimed at the Russian market.

RANEPA is not the only school offering MPP/MPA programs in Russia. Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics, the North Western Civil Service Academy (part of RANEPA network) and several other regional universities offer graduate level training in public policy. The composition of curriculum and the quality of teaching in these programs differ dramatically. This article describes the development of these programs and explains how recent progress has exhibited some of the features of gradual convergence toward international standards, but only to a limited extent.

3 The legacy of the Soviet Union and the training of public officials

In the Soviet Union, the training of public officials was highly politicized. Professional training in public policy did not exist as such. However, there were sectoral universities that offered specialized training for those entering the public sector. Most of the higher education training in the Soviet Union was technically and professionally narrow. Institutes prepared managers in the textile, oil and gas, or agricultural sectors. Universities trained professional generalists: lawyers, accountants, and public managers who had little exposure to other disciplines. All students, regardless of the chosen concentration, were bombarded with a heavy dose of Marxist and Soviet ideology. “Marxist-Leninist philosophy” was a required course, as was the course in the “History of Communist party.” Management theory and some of the early attempts to define the field of public administration in 1970s in market economies were almost unknown to Soviet students in any field.

Specialized technical training became more prominent as the complexity of the Soviet economy grew. Highly selective schools in Moscow were churning out new graduates to enter the workforce, with most of them having predetermined slots in the various regions and sectors. Consistent with the Soviet practice of raspredelenie (distribution of graduates), all students were assigned positions in various regions and cities where they were supposed to work a certain number of years. At the very top, lacking the features of open competitive recruitment and meritocratic promotion, the public administration in the Soviet period became increasingly dominated by party nomenklatura, an established clique of party officials, who were recruited and promoted based more on loyalty rather than professionalism or experience.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Moscow State University and the Russian Academy of Public Administration (the former top party school) established centers dedicated to teaching public administration. Soon thereafter, the newly established Higher School of Economics along with the Academy for the National Economy began to offer courses in public administration and offer training to civil service officials. The dominant school, however, remained the former party training school, RAPA. It had a branch in nearly region of Russia and was also responsible for short-term training courses for public officials. However, it did not dominate the field of master level training until much later.

4 The emerging field of public management training

The first departments dedicated to teaching public administration were created between 1990 and 1993 at the Moscow Institute of Management, later renamed the State University of Management, at the Moscow State University, and at the Ekaterinburg and Samara regional branches of the Russian Academy of Public Administration (Barabashev & Kastrel, 2013). The first degrees offered in the field of public policy focused on undergraduate training, the so-called “specialist” degree. Russia would later adopt a more standard four-year Bachelor and two-year Master degree differentiation, but up to 2011, undergraduate students would take five years to finish their (specialitet) specialist degree.

The early public administration curriculum focused on management training and courses in economics. Students were also offered courses in the legal foundations of the state, including courses in constitutional law and laws governing civil service management. Very few political science and political economy courses were offered at the time. Students also had very little international exposure, with heavy emphasis instead on theoretical and historical foundations of public policy with some general management training; however some early attempts were made to translate classics in the field of public administration.

One problem was that all university departments operated like startups. New departments had to bring educators from other fields such as economics, management and history to develop an entirely new field of study and research. Hence, the degrees in public administration had little in common with established canons elsewhere in the world, and most closely resembled management training offered for the private sector. Around 1995 the Russian education ministry began to develop new standards for the field of public policy and public administration.⁹ Barabashev, the Russian scholar who for a long time headed the public administration faculty at the Moscow State University and now teaches at the Higher School of Economics, has studied the evolution of higher education standards of public policy studies since the early 1990s. In a recent article, he lamented that the first standards adopted in 1995 had a heavy dose of business and management curricula, making the degrees hardly indistinguishable from the increasingly popular MBA programs in the country.

According to Barabashev, the Ministry of Education classified the core discipline of public administration as a “type of business-management” science (Barabashev, 2014). The second generation of government standards, adopted in 2000, divided guidelines into separate categories for Bachelors and for specialists: for Bachelors, public administration was incorporated into a management BA standard, and for specialists, it provided more independence and freedom for departments to define their own curriculum.¹⁰ Barabashev argues that the first and second generations of governmental standards for public administration differ in a number of courses and in percentages of credits for them, but not in their orientation toward an economic-managerial interpretation of public administration and its core disciplines.

In other words, the early curricula had clear predispositions toward the technical nature of management without the comparative study of various fields of public policy or analysis of stages theory, development of bureaucracy or implementation research as the field was traditionally taught elsewhere (Smith & Larimer, 2013). Efforts to make public policy studies more interdisciplinary in the hopes of providing richer and more powerful way to study and conceptualize policy decisions were not successful in this early period.

The most recent standard for public administration Bachelor's degree in Russia was unveiled in 2011. The standard sets strict guidelines on the number and content of courses. It describes competencies that the student is supposed to have upon graduation. For example, the graduate should be able to “draft legislation,” “participate in budget planning,” “organize projects,” “complete cost-benefit analysis.” According to the Ministry standard, the course work should consist of lectures and seminars in philosophy, political science, micro- and macro-economics. Universities that offer degrees in public administration must have a library equipped with certain number of periodicals. Even the number of hours of class work is regulated by the state. The Ministry of Education standard has an applied focus. Its sets out to train future public servants capable of joining the ranks of government agencies, and less at providing a broader interdisciplinary liberal arts perspective.

Master degrees in the field of public policy, on the other hand, were not as heavily regulated, at least not until recently. Up to 2008 there was no formal standard for Master level public administration or policy programs. In 2008, the Russian government finally approved standards for the MPA degree, but they were short-lived. The initiative to establish guidelines belonged to RANEPA. The university wanted to create a program for top level officials that would be different from the traditional short-term training courses offered for mid-level and lower-level government officials, and lobbied for the first mover advantage when it comes to such programs. At the same time as the new MPA programs began to open up, Russian universities began to gradually attempt to replace the “old” specialist's (five-year) degree programs with Bachelor's and Master's degree programs in public administration.

The changes occurred along several dimensions. First, the older form of specialitet was completely abolished in 2011, with students shifting to a four-year Bachelor's and two-year Master degrees. The shift was influenced by an eight-year reform process after Russia joined the Bologna Process aimed at harmonizing Russian and European educational standards (Vostrov, 2012). Also around the same time, universities began offering the first MPA and MPP programs that would experiment with contents of the curriculum. The quality and reach of these programs differed dramatically, depending on the level of qualification of faculty and access to international outreach programs, but leaders located in Moscow achieved quite significant progress in the short period since such courses have been offered.¹¹

The higher onus on universities became more relevant after the 2012 changes in the federal law on education which basically left the state out of the detailed control of program content. The Ministry was now responsible for licensing of programs but not for the content and number of courses. A group of leading universities, consisting of approximately 20 institutions, among which such flagships as the Higher School of Economics, Moscow State University, and RANEPA, began to set their own individual guidelines, which included the number of credits (h), and as it currently stands the educational standards for MPA programs in Russia are voluntary. Since the initiation of the first MPA program in 2009, only about a dozen schools offer MPA or MPP programs, the largest being RANEPA's.

4.1 Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)

RANEPA was created in 2010. It was a merger, or (as some in Russia call it) an uncomfortable marriage of two previously existing but distinct social science-oriented universities: the Academy of the National Economy (ANE), founded in 1977 and the Russian Academy of Public Administration (RAPA), established in 1994.¹² Its origins however, were actually the 1946 government order to create a school for training the party elite. That school did indeed become the core place for capacity building programs for central and regional party elites. Known informally as the “Higher Party School” its mission was to train senior party executives of different specializations. As noted above, much of the training was ideological in nature. The senior party cadre would usually be required to attend two- or three-day training seminars that would give them the latest update on the Party plans and current state of world affairs.

Following Perestroika, Boris Yeltsin renamed the school as the Russian Academy of Management. The name change indicated a shift from ideological training to postgraduate preparation and professional development of public managers, independent of their political and social affiliation. It also called on the Academy to focus more on policy research and international outreach. Then, in 1991, President Yeltsin formally created the Russian Academy of Management, and in 1994 transformed it into the Russian Academy of Public Administration (RAPA) and set its mission as the “training, preparation, and professional development of civil servants, policy support for civil service management and public sector transformation.”¹³ In fact, RAPA became the destination for the majority of public sector officials in Russia who by law had to go through short-term capacity building programs every three years. By 2001, RAPA was offering 39 different Bachelor degrees and 11 graduate level programs.

Despite its wide outreach with nearly seventy RAPA regional campuses sprinkled across the Russian provinces, and the mandate to train and develop future and current civil servants, RAPA never became the flagship for public administration training in Russia. Most of its academic staffs were remnants of the old Soviet system, with very few having had exposure to international graduate education in public policy or administration. Despite numerous attempts to join international epistemic communities around public sector management, RAPA never managed to transform its core teaching modes or recruit younger faculty.

Its counterpart, which ultimately became the second component of the newly formed RANEPA, was the Academy of the National Economy (ANE). ANE, located right across the street from RAPA, had a different, slightly more fortuitous history. Founded in 1977 by the Soviet Council of Ministers, ANE's goal was to train the management cadre in the Soviet ministries. Its outlook had always been less ideological and more focused on applied management practices, even allowing some limited study of market economics. After the fall of the Soviet Union, ANE took the lead in the development of Russian MBA standards. It invited faculty from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France to teach, and became one of the first institutions in Russia to allow students to have joint Russian and foreign “double diplomas”. In 1999, its efforts culminated in the recognition of its MBA program by the Russian Ministry of Education as the standard for others to follow.

ANE also expanded its reach into training of public officials. It implemented the highly selective Presidential training program, which allows talented young government officials to train abroad. It also offered various training programs for local government officials. As part of its internationalization efforts, in 2004 it created a specialized unit dedicated to bringing faculty and students from abroad to teach and do research at the university.

In 2010, the merger of ANE and RAPA created the largest social science-oriented university in Europe, with an enrolment of 120,000 students, half of them part-time, and an additional 50,000 government officials in short-term training. The goal was to use the synergy of RAPA's public administration focus and ANE's entrepreneurial spirit and openness to internationalization and spread of best teaching standards. The union came fortuitously at the right moment as both schools began to experiment in graduate level training in public policy. One of RAPA's academic institutes began offering the first MPA programs in 2009. In 2013, the RANEPA MPA program became the first Russian member of the NASPAA (Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration) as well as a member of the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee). Domestically, the institution became instrumental in drafting voluntary guidelines for MPA programs offered across Russia.

The MPA program in RANEPA is targeted toward higher level government officials. The curriculum consists of six modules. The first module is dedicated to theoretical foundations of public administration and includes courses such as “Comparative Public Administration,” “Organizational Theory,” and “Public Sector Economics”. The second module focuses on more narrow topics such as budget and human resource management, as well municipal and local governance. In the third module students get to choose electives. Most of the courses are focused on applied skills such as how to manage time, develop strategies and political analysis. The last three modules consist of internships, a final project and actual exam. Usually internships take place over the summer or between semesters before graduation. The students are supposed to spend the total of 650 h in the classroom and do 860 h of independent work, roughly equivalent of two years of coursework (Table 1).¹⁴

Table 1 RANEPA MPA program modules.

Module 1. Basic foundations of State and municipal Governance	Select examples of offered courses:	Number of study hours (336 h)
	(Comparative Public Administration, Organizational theory, Administrative Ethics, Legal System in Russia, Theory of Social Governance)	72 h of lectures, 88 h of practice seminars, 176 h of independent work
Module 2. Basic administrative competencies	Select examples of offered courses:	Number of study hours (556)
	(State and Municipal Governance, Strategic Management, Human Resources Management, Regional and Infrastructure Development, Local Governance)	112 h of lectures, 146 h of practice seminars, 298 h of independent work
Module 3. Elective courses ^15	Select examples of offered courses:	Number of study hours (420)
	(Public Relations, Anti-corruption Policy, Negotiations, Risk Management, Leadership, Public Procurement, Electoral Campaigns, Public-Private Partnerships, Project Management)	84 h of lectures, 140 h of practice seminars, 196 h of independent work
Module 4. Thesis work	–	Number of study hours (40)
Module 5. Internships and Special Training	–	Number of study hours (170)
Module 6. Final Exam (Attestation)	–	Number of study hours (110)

Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7OBj8Rvnm1wU1VfUHdoQmdZM1k/view.

One of the difficulties in getting the program up to speed with international best practices is that many of its students study part-time, a common Russian practice for working professionals, who rarely take time off for graduate education. The second issue is that the program still relies heavily on course materials that use little cross-national materials, focusing more heavily on the Russian experience. Given that almost all instruction is provided in Russian, and there few recent public policy and public management materials translated from English, most of the material is outdated. The program recognized the need to develop more domestic cases, with RANEPA recently launching an initiative to develop a library of cases to be used in the courses throughout the university.

Another branch of RANEPA, having originated in ANE, offers a different approach to public policy training. Since 2014 it began offering an English language, two-year Master in Global Public Policy (MGPP). The programs is designed “to prepare its graduates, as future leaders and professionals, to address global challenges with sound public policy.” The program, the first of its kind in Russia and taught entirely in English, welcomed its inaugural class of 15 students in September 2014 and continued with a class of 14 students in 2015. The MGPP is a two-year Master's degree that meets international standards and has been carefully benchmarked to the top graduate-level public policy programs around the world. It was designed with the support of the World Bank, and an international team of experts who quite deliberately positioned the program as “world class” and thus with an eye to leading programs in the US and globally. It has three elements: a core curriculum, two concentrations, and a final project. The program puts strong emphasis on core competencies. In the first year, students take courses in public policy, public management, economics for public policy, statistical and research methods.

The core curriculum, which is taken primarily in the first two semesters, focuses on the knowledge and skills that enable students to master the academic discipline of global public policy. It has two concentrations, which students choose from at the end of the second semester: “Russia and the World” and “Global Development and Emerging Economies.” The first concentration on current policy dilemmas and those who may seek to understand Russia through an historical perspective. The second has at its center the emergence of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the increasingly important role of various international organizations such as the G-8, G-20, and APEC. All students in the first year also attend a required monthly public policy seminar, the McKinsey Global Public Policy Forum. In the final fourth semester, MGPP students complete their thesis or capstone projects, and also choose two elective courses on issues of global governance, international security, demography, human capital development, political economy of energy or international trade and finance (Table 2).

Table 2 First year curriculum for the MGPP program in RANEPA.

Semester 1	Semester 2
Required courses	Required courses
1. Policy-making	1. Economics for Public Policy II
2. Governance: origins and concepts	2. Statistics of public policy
3. Research methods	3. States and markets
4. Economics for Public Policy I	4. Public management
5. Russia and the world	5. Professional and career skills development
	Workshop (required non-credit course)
	Choice of the following three courses: global governance, international trade, sustainable development

The MGPP program is part of the International Development and Public Policy Alliance (IDPPA). It was inaugurated in 2012 to connect scholars and practitioners in major emerging economies to collaborate in the areas of research, teaching, and policy action. The member institutions are all graduate schools offering Master's degrees taught in English that offer training in global development and public policy analysis for the next generation of policy-makers. The MGPP program has an international board composed of key scholars from public policy programs from France, Canada and the US which regularly reviews the progress of the program and provides support on the curriculum development and governance.

As such MGPP is unusual for the Russian context as it clearly represents a break from the traditional approaches to public policy teaching. Compared to other programs it has more focus on international comparative experience, it spends more time on rigorous economic and statistical training and its teaching methods are more closely aligned with discussion and group work format. It also has international faculty, and the founding Director was an American. All of these features show a strong and deliberate strategy of “convergence” and isomorphism to international standards. The institution as a whole, however, even while it too is changing (offering more English programs, operating more as a university than an academy for senior public servants), is still distinctly Russian. In a sense, the MGPP is a limb grafted onto the larger RANEPA body.

4.2 Moscow State University (MSU)

Moscow State University (MSU) celebrated its 260th anniversary in 2015. One of the oldest Russian institutions of higher education, MSU was established in 1755 by Catherine the Great. MSU offers 128 undergraduate degrees in its 39 faculties (departments), while post-graduate students may specialize in 18 branches of science and humanities and in 168 different areas.

In the Soviet period, the preference was given to hard sciences and to some extent humanities. Social sciences including economics, political science, sociology and public administration were secondary. With the advent of Perestroika, the study of economics and sociology received greater attention and some of the key members of the Russian government in the early 1990s such as Egor Gaidar and Evgeniy Yasin came out of economics department. Political science and the study of public administration however, did not show such bright promise and for very long time, the departments did not feature any significant scholarly output, though MSU was one of the first to introduce the specialist degree in public administration.

Over the years the university began to introduce innovative techniques in the study of public administration. The main idea of the MSU Bachelor's program, implemented by the MSU School of Public Administration, is to introduce a project-based approach in which students are divided into small groups and cover relatively separate subject areas of public administration and related fields with different Bachelor specializations.

Within MSU's public administration school, special units (departments) were created to focus on political economy analysis, study of legislative branches, historical institutionalism, and even information technologies and mathematical methods. Over 18 various “departments” that also included the department of international organizations and global governance, the department of natural resources management, the department of financial management, the department of strategic communications, the department of personnel management, the department of political history, and the department of regional and municipal management, span not only the narrow field of public administration but also a variety of related fields in economics, political science and finance, making the Bachelor's degree at MSU one of the contextually richest of all of the undergraduate programs in Russia. The program now offers about 70 short, two-credit courses, distributed among four different specializations (human resource management in the public sector; political science and public governance; public management; public administration). The specializations differ from each other in sequences of disciplines, and course selection is determined by the initial specialization choice of entering students.¹⁶ Students that enter one of the specializations in the first year generally stick to their choice until the final year.

The MSU offers training for public officials through its Educational and Scientific Center, created in 2010. The center offers a variety of short-term programs in municipal governance, ethnic relations and public administration, targeting not only current public officials but also young graduate students, including master students doing graduate work in related fields, including MPA programs.¹⁷ The MSU MPA program is offered by the Department of Public Administration. The curriculum consists of required core courses, electives, practical seminars and skills development training. The core courses are fairly standard for Russian MPA programs. They include courses in current politics, center-regional relations, social policy, international law and strategic management. The electives offer more targeted courses in public-private partnerships, working with citizens through crowdsourcing, and development institutions. Specialized skills development program in leadership, negotiations, time management and scenario building makes the program different from other such related MPA programs. Compared to international MPA programs, the MSU curriculum does not provide as many courses in economic and statistical methods, it has only a few courses devoted to international comparative public policy, and in its teaching relies more heavily on lectures rather than discussion seminars and group work (Table 3).

Table 3 Moscow State University MPA program modules.

Module 1. Professional disciplines	Select examples of coursework:	Number of study hours (1316 h)
	(Strategic Regional Development, Soft Power in World Politics, Taxation, Human Capital Development, Social Policy, History of Public Administration)	374 h of lectures, 376 h of practice seminars, 566 h of independent work
Module 2. Elective courses	Select examples of coursework:	Number of study hours (612)
	Innovations in Budget Management, Managing Government Programs, Citizen Participation in Municipal Governance, Crowdsourcing, Managing multi-ethnic regions, Public Policy in the System of Public Administration	136 h of lectures, 170 h of practice seminars, 306 h of independent work
Module 3. Practical training	Select examples of coursework:	Number of study hours (80)
	Time management, Public Speaking, Negotiations, Leadership	40 h of lectures, 38 h of practice seminars
Module 4. Applied seminars	Select examples of coursework:	Number of study hours (368)
	National Politics Seminar, Comparative Municipal Management Seminar, Budgetary Politics Seminar, Anticorruption Seminar

Source: http://www.spa.msu.ru/uploads/files/dopolnitelnoe_obrazovanie/utchebnii_plan_.pdf.

MSU also offers another MPA program aimed more at government relations specialists.¹⁸ It is run separately from the Department of Public Administration's “Graduate School of Public Administration,” initially set up as a joint project between MSU and the National School of Administration (ENA, France). The School is a member of the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA) and the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA), however it does not show much of any publishing or research activity. It focuses on short-term training of mid-level and senior public officials and government relations specialists. It has a core program consisting of courses in public governance, strategic management, corporate finance, organizational behavior, and theory of governance. Electives are offered in communications, public finance, administrative law and human resource management. Even though the program claims to have an international outlook, it has very few courses aimed at understanding international political economy or comparative practices. It also is light on statistical methods and rigorous policy evaluation.¹⁹

4.3 Higher School of Economics (HSE)

The Higher School of Economics (HSE) was founded in 1992. The university is a product of the introduction of a market economy and a few liberal economists who early on decided that Russia needed a university that teaches economics according to the best possible standards. It grew from a relatively small boutique school of higher learning of just a hundred students, to a large social science-oriented university offering programs in history, political science, economics, sociology, and public policy. From its very origins, it cooperated with several key European institutions, including the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.²⁰

Starting “from scratch” as argued by Anton Oleinik (2012), the HSE was free from historical organizational patterns of the Soviet universities and therefore more open to new approaches and disciplines. It pushed aggressively to adopt meritocratic open hiring procedures for faculty, encouraged emphasis on research and publishing (especially in peer-reviewed journals) and moved quickly to form new academic programs focused on economics, sociology and public policy.

Currently, the HSE is a multi-disciplinary center for study and research. It has established partnerships with leading foreign universities, international organizations and research consortia. Among international networking initiatives, the HSE serves as the Russian coordinator of the TEMPUS SCM project TUNING Educational Programs in Russian HEIs (Tuning-Russia) and EUNEG TEMPUS Joint Project ‘European Neighborhood Policy Law and Good Governance (EUNEG)’, as well as its partnership in the Erasmus Mundus External Cooperation Window project. It regularly invites leading scholars from abroad to conduct research and joint projects with local HSE faculty. The proportion of faculty with foreign Ph.D.’s at HSE is the highest in Russia among major universities.

The HSE is a leader in the academic fields of economics, management, sociology, computer science and political science among Russian universities. It also offers one of the most competitive programs in public policy, both at the Bachelor's and Master's degree level. One of the characteristic features of HSE is the ever-increasing number of faculties and schools, set up in response to labor market demands. Master's degree programs in public administration in Russian at HSE are offered through the School of Public Administration and Municipal Management. At present, several Master level degree programs are offered in Russian: the traditional MPA as well as Master level public administration degrees with a special focus on human resources, health, education and demographic management. The HSE MPA has a “competency-oriented approach” meaning that the coursework must strive to develop certain skills in the future areas of specialization.

The core curriculum of the MPA program consists of the following courses: Theory and Instruments of Contemporary Governance; Public Sector Economy; Management of Social Policy; plus selected parts of disciplines in personnel management in public organizations, in local governance, in innovative policy, in program evaluation, public-service management, organizational management, and civil service. The program also offers a variety of electives that students can take in other departments. Some of these electives can be taken in English. Finally, all students must take courses in public policy analysis and develop research competencies. Research seminars are offered to test those capabilities and allow students to present independent work. The research seminar is a required part of the HSE program for Master's degree students.

Just like RANEPA, HSE recently launched a new English language MPP program. The MPP program is run separately by the Public Policy Department.²¹ Over 40% of its student body (35 students) come from 20 different countries including India, Ecuador, the United States and Italy. In the concept note prepared before its launch, the program articulated its aim to prepare graduates capable of “modeling decision processes,” on defining a problem, analyzing key actors, designing and evaluating various alternative solutions, measuring risks and implement a plan of action.²² In addition to more general MPP courses, the program offers a specialization in human rights and democratic governance aimed at students with interested in working for domestic and international NGOs as well as international organizations promoting human rights. The program has exchange programs with foreign universities such as University of Bologna, University of Turin and Strasbourg University.

5 Conclusion

Over the past eight years Russia has seen an emergence of MPP/MPA programs in key universities, most of them located in Moscow. All of them started in the late 2000s, growing out of undergraduate programs in public administration and shorter term capacity building programs for civil servants. At the core, these degrees follow the Continental tradition in focusing on administrative law and are explicitly designed to target future public officials. They focus on professional training for policy work in the government, and less on churning out policy analysts for the NGO sector and international organizations. The language of instruction is predominantly Russian but two programs have emerged with explicitly international content offering instruction in English, with about a half of the student body coming from abroad.

Most of the programs offer core curriculum consisting of introductory courses in management of various spheres of public sector such as budget preparation and management, territorial development, social policy, human capital development and administrative law. Electives consist of research seminars and more in-depth exploration of core themes. Practical seminars and specialized training supports development of individual skills such as critical thinking, strategic planning and communications. While the courses generally comply with NASPAA's five high level competencies (leadership, contributing to the policy process, critical thinking and decision-making, public values, communications) and go along with EAPAA broad recommendations for the curriculum to focus on key components of “economics, law, political science, sociology, public finances, informatization and public management,” there are also some differences with international practices.²³

For example, the programs have not yet fully integrated the development of hard skills related to policy evaluation, statistical methods, advanced micro- and macro-economics and econometrics. The programs rely heavily on the core courses that review legal frameworks for different policy subfields (regulations that govern state-regional relations, civil service regulations – courses on how is something is organized) and focus less on why certain processes in the public sector work in a particular way, and more importantly how these processes can be improved. Rigorous policy evaluation requiring advanced knowledge of economic theory, cost-benefit analysis and other program evaluation methods are only slowly being integrated into the core curriculum of these programs. The same can be said of the pedagogy. Traditional lectures remain the predominant mode of delivering information, although recently leading universities have started to expand the use of group project work and development of domestic case material that focuses on applied analysis of key policy decisions.

Finally, as noted in the introduction to this journal issue, members of common epistemic communities are expected to “know” their discipline. In other words, academics engaged in teaching and research in a field of public policy reinforce their participation in a learning community through publishing in peer reviewed journals, participating in international conferences and actively navigating international job markets. Here much is yet much to be desired. Among the 20 most important journals in the field there are very few articles by Russian scholars, an issue that affects not just the field of public administration but also the area of social science research in general.

MPP/MPA programs in Russia still represent a select niche that does not attract a high volume of students. One reason may be that government officials by law are not required to go through a rigorous training offered in these programs, and only have to go through short-term courses to keep with up with the job description. Furthermore, the MPA programs are generally expensive, with tuition fees closer to the mid-level Russian MBA programs, and for most students interested in working for the public sector (Barabashev, 2014).

The Ministry of Education in Russia is allowing universities to develop their own standards and curricula for MPA programs. Nevertheless, a respected national accreditation council for business education, NASDOBR, has recently called for adoption of “national accreditation criteria” not only for the MBA but also for MPA programs, and as a result created a special committee to advance the matter.²⁴ Accreditation of NASDOBR is voluntary and is meant to provide guidance for regional universities interested in developing MPA programs as well as to coordinate the development of academic standards for leading universities in Moscow. It should be noted that some of the leadership of NASDOBR have strong connections to public administration training programs, and the Russian MPA programs have yet to establish an association of their own.

The development pattern of MPA/MPP programs in Russia certainly represents a move toward a common alignment with the rest of the world, albeit with distinctly Russian features. The interplay between the national context and international patterns discussed in this journal issue play a particularly strong role in Russia. Having an obvious attraction to connecting to European and the Western academic communities through adoption of Bologna standards and membership in associations such as NASPAA and NISPAcee, Russian programs nonetheless only partially adopted teaching and research standards practiced elsewhere in the world. Part of the international story is related to the on-again/off-again relationship with the West, as the integration pull of the 1990s switching to a more cautious, even antagonistic, approach more recently, with academic and professional exchanges being negatively affected in the process.

Part of the domestic story has to do with a strong historic tradition of state regulation of higher education and the long tradition of understanding the state and administration through the prism of law. The centralization of oversight meant that the curricula and teaching patterns were regulated down to the smallest detail, with most universities incentivized to abstain from experimentation or adoption of new practices. If convergence did occur, it was mostly at the “peaks” of leading institutions, the MSU, HSE and RANEPA, which could “afford” taking on challenges and redrawing the way public policy was taught in Russia. Beneath those peaks, the institutions remain quite traditional.

In terms of “interoperability” of policy making systems, this does suggest some continuing and strongly distinct approaches to how Russian and non-Russian policy makers (insofar as they are trained with MPP/MPAs) think and practice. However, the recent attempt to regulate the quality and the content of those programs horizontally, at a university level, with the state stepping aside from regulating MPA/MPP programs directly, represents a step in a new direction, especially given a strong exposure to international associations of leading public policy schools. Russian MPP/MPA programs are becoming explicitly extroverted. Some have already become members of NASPAA and of NISPAcee. One Russian program (the MGPP) was instrumental establishing the IDPPA, a fledgling association of public policy programs in the BRICs and developing countries. They are also becoming more competitive internally, with HSE and RANEPA programs competing against each other for the best students and faculty across Russia. It should also be noted that the three institutions discussed in this article are among a tiny group of elite “research” universities within Russia. To that extent, they are expected to be leaders and climb into the higher international rankings. They will therefore have a demonstration effect on other institutions.

Moreover, short-term teaching programs for the top government officials are benefitting from a “spillover effect” from the new MPP/MPA teaching patterns as the top public officials in RANEPA are now encouraged to work in teams on specific policy projects using case studies, something unheard of just a few years ago when most short-term courses for public officials consisted of traditional lecture courses. In a sense, all three universities are exhibiting a “signaling” pattern for the future, launching programs despite low demand and little encouragement from the state, fostering evidence-based policy research in teaching in undergraduate and post-graduate short-term courses, and adopting standards that could someday become commonplace across Russia.

Notes

1 There are obvious challenges to identifying standard practices in teaching and research of public administration as clearly the schools of public policy that are being established around the world tend to be more grounded in their home countries programmatic contexts. Yet when it comes to systemic approaches related to quantitative methods, program evaluation and policy analysis tools commonalities and frameworks of thinking can be more readily identified and established. See Besharov and Oser (2013). See also Leslie A. Pal and Ian D. Clark's overview in the Atlas of Public Management, http://www.atlas101.ca/pm/.

2 I also briefly discuss development of undergraduate education in public administration, one of the most popular concentration for Russian students.

3 In Russia employment at the executive-level authorities (including at the local self-governments with executive functions) accounts for more than 82% of core government administration employment. Relative to other countries, the core government (civil service and non-civil service public administration) employment level in Russia is in a relative medium. See World Bank (2011).

4 For more information on public employment data, see OECD (2013).

5 Experts also note that new agencies were created to support and regulate the nascent market economy, but at the same older government entities, such as the Ministry of Agriculture, were not downsized accordingly.

6 Data provided by the Russian Ministry of Economic Development.

7 For in depth discussion of the impact of Continental tradition on the study of public administration, see Connaughton and Randma (2002).

8 Germany is an example of the mixed system. Each authority independently organizes selection and defines policy in the field of qualification development. However, authorities receive assistance in the design of concepts of staff policy on the federal level from the Federal Academy of State Administration (BAköV). As an independent subdivision of the Ministry of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Academy assists to develop standards of education on the state service, carries on the necessary qualification of employees and works as a main coordinator of the educational activity of state servants.

9 In the Russian practice, universities receiving accreditation from the Ministry of Education have to comply with a strict set of guidelines for each particular subject. The study of public administration at the undergraduate level is strictly regulated through the Ministerial “standard.”

10 See Russian State Standards of Higher Professional Education for Bachelors 061000 with qualification “manager”, approved by the Ministry of Education of Russia on 17 March 2000.

11 Between 2003 and 2013 as the changes in the teaching of public policy were taken place, Russia was undergoing major administrative reform. The Presidential decree of 2003 established major priorities with the Government commission on administrative reform formed the same year focused on functional reviews and changes in the government structure. Later, the administrative reform expanded to include standards for service provision, consisting of multi-functional service standards and introduction of performance management. The Higher School of Economics was a key institution drafting some of these reform measures, however the people consulting the government on the reform measures were by and large not directly involved in pushing the new framework for teaching public policy and public administration. The administrative restructuring of the Russian government had only a tangential effect on the changes in the way public policy was taught in graduate programs.

12 The merger also brought together twelve other regional and Moscow based institutions.

13 http://www.ranepa.ru/eng/about-academy-ranepa/at-a-glance.

15 For more on this see http://mpa.ranepa.ru/news/4365/.

14 RANEPA's MPA program description is available at http://mpa.ranepa.ru/abiturients/.

16 RANEPA MPA offers 40 elective courses, out of which the student must choose 14.

17 The application process for the School of Public Administration of MSU undergraduate students is separate for different specializations, and it is impossible to enter the specialization and move to another specialization in the first year of education. From the second year on, a transfer is possible, but the student should cover the difference in already taught courses.

18 http://izvestia.ru/news/584404#ixzz3jixuGmqu.

19 It should be noted that it is not unusual to have similar sounding programs offered at the same university. The issue is more problematic for MBA programs. For example, in RANEPA there are over a dozen different MBA programs offered by four different “business schools” each operating as competitors to each other.

20 The approved curriculum is available at http://www.anspa.ru/linkpics/News/planuch2014.pdf.

21 In 2003 the HSE became a member of the European University Association (EUA) and joined the Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) program of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The university actively participates in the EUA and IMHE projects, aimed at enhancing the quality of university programs, research and governance. In 2004 it carried out an Internationalization Quality Review and is continuously striving to integrate best practices in higher education governance in its teaching and research.

22 At HSE, public policy and public administration faculty are nominally separated. Public policy has a slightly more international outlook.

23 The concept note for the English language MPA program is available at http://www.hse.ru/data/2010/06/29/1220075344/Polit_analysis_publ_policy.pdf.

24 EAPAA accreditation criteria are available at http://www.eapaa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/EAPAAAccreditationCriteriaVersion9Jan2013.pdf.