The virtual summer school is a unique week-long workshop and competition that serves as an introductory primer to different facets of public affairs and public management in different sectors around the world. The programme comprises of a five day-long workshop with faculty led sessions that feature academics and practitioners, followed by a two-day long policy analysis competition, where students compete to present their solutions to a novel case-study situation. The workshop seminars and homework tasks would have served to prepare students for the policy-analysis competition. The Programme would be conducted in English. The detailed schedule for the Programme can be viewed using the Schedule Tab. The exact time of the sessions would be announced later keeping in mind the geographic location of the majority of the participants.

• Health Policy
• Refugee Issues
• Policy Analysis
• Data Use in Public Policy
• Climate Policy
• SMART cities and Urban Governance
• Human Resources Management

Each morning, three short seminars will introduce participants to the topics of the day. The focus is not a deep-dive into a single technique or issue, but rather to introduce participants to key concepts, recent academic work and their real-world relevance on a range of issues relevant to public affairs and public management. As part of the Workshops there will be special panel featuring former public administrators and public managers in Hong Kong and Canada.

The afternoon sessions of the workshop are devoted to virtual student-cafés where students have a chance to get to know each other and undertake the homework tasks for the day. Carefully designed activity tasks would be solved in groups with the help of the teaching assistants.

In the last workshop session on August 20, 2021 the topic and groups for the policy analysis competition will be released and students will have 48-hours to prepare for the competition presentation on August 23, 2021. Although the final group size would depend upon actual enrolment, but the groups would tentatively comprise of 5-6 students. The groups would be pre-decided based on geographic and disciplinary skillset to build diverse teams. For the competition each group would be required to prepare a 20-minute presentation. This would be followed by a 10-minute Q&A session, featuring questions from the judges as well as the audience.