Founders' Message

This website is a dynamic online community for people all over the world who study, research, and teach public policy. Whether your interest is nuclear proliferation, urban development, global climate change, healthcare, or any other public policy issue, PolicyNet puts a wealth of information at your finger tips.

Here you can find information about policy schools all over the world, see what degrees and courses they offer and how they teach. You can find faculty and students studying issues that interest you, and collaborate with them via a range of sophisticated web tools. You can search a wealth of information covering the topics that matter to your research or studies.

The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (WWS) saw a need for better linkages between policy schools around the world. Unlike more defined academic fields or professional schools, "public policy" spans a wide range of issues, disciplines, and institutions, making it difficult for educators, researchers, and students to identify and collaborate with their counterparts around the world. By bringing the world's leading schools and institutions together in a dynamic online community, we seek to break down these obstacles to cooperation.

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is the perfect partner in this project. Dedicated to bringing technology to bear on international governance issues, CIGI has built this website to make information-finding and exchange easy across a range of institutional models and national borders. Supported by CIGI's IGLOO platform, PolicyNet brings together and organizes a uniquely large and accessible cache of information about public policy education and research.

We invite you to explore this site and to encourage your colleagues and classmates to do the same. Please do not hesitate to contact us with your questions or suggestions.