While the emergence of big data creates several opportunities for governance and public policy, new capabilities, processes, standards, strategies, and technologies will be essential for deriving value from big data while addressing issues and mitigating risks posed by it. Arguably, above all, these will require the integration of big data analytics in public policy pedagogy. In this chapter, we examine whether public policy education has kept pace with the growth of big data research in the field, with a specific focus on the Asian context. We start by identifying prominent themes in research on big data in governance and public policy. We supplement that with an analysis of academia’s response by examining the prevalence of big data teaching in public policy programs. Based on our analysis, we highlight the current geographic and institutional dominance in research and teaching on the topic, and conclude with key lessons for the design, content, and delivery of pedagogy on big data in public policy.@en

While the emergence of big data raises concerns regarding governance and public policy, it also creates opportunities for diversifying the toolkit for analysis for the policy sciences as a whole, i.e., research concerning policy analysis as well as policy studies. Further, it opens avenues for practice, which together with research requires adaptation in teaching curricula if policy education were to remain relevant. However, it is not clear to what extent this opportunity is being realized in public policy research and teaching. In this study, we examine the prevalence of big data analytics in public policy research and pedagogy using bibliometric analysis and topic modeling for the former, and content analysis of course titles and descriptions for the latter. We find that despite significant scope for application of various big data techniques, the use of these analytic techniques in public policy has been largely limited to select institutions in a few countries. Further, data science has received limited attention in policy pedagogy, once again with significant geographic variation in its prevalence. We conclude that, to stay relevant, the policy sciences need to pay more attention to the integration of big data techniques in policy research, pedagogy, and thereby practice.

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