Write a policy briefing of up to 2,000 words on a topic of economic or democratic recovery in the European Union associated with this module. Compared to the essay, you are free to choose your own title in consultation by email with Dr Benedetto, and the briefing is a somewhat different assessment. The target readership of your briefing is a politician or senior negotiator like a diplomat or a European Commission official. Such decision-makers usually have time to read only 100 words or a single page of bullet points, but this politician has 30 minutes available to read your 2,000 words of advice. Some reference to academic literature may be appropriate if it helps your argument but it is not essential. Instead you need to draw on policy evidence, which can be academic, or think tank based, or quality journalism, or what we know of how EU policies or mechanisms (including democratic mechanisms) work in practice, e.g. from special reports. This part of the assessment is similar to the gathering and writing-up of primary material in a dissertation.
Think of your briefing as having five sections, each of a maximum of 400 words:
1. Executive summary. A paragraph to summarise the parts of the paper that follow, one after the other.
2. Background issue: explain something about what it is. For example, if you cover the EU’s post-pandemic recovery strategy, you might explain in 400 words what the pandemic was and why it posed an economic challenge. In this section, you would not argue that the recovery policy has any problems nor that it is perfect [that comes later].
3. The problems or the praise: what is wrong (or right) with the policy issue? For example, if you were covering post-pandemic recovery and you are a supporter of public healthcare you might point out that measures taken focused only on economic investment but have missed out the healthcare crisis that the pandemic had caused
4. The solutions: OK, there’s a problem, but what’s the solution? Or, if everything is well functioning, but what could improve it even more? Again a maximum of 400 words
5. How to achieve the solution and overcome opposition. E.g. in the case of post-pandemic investment, what would you recommend as a strategy to overcome objections from those who doubt vaccination or from those who want to see cut-backs and austerity rather than investment? Perhaps you can suggest ways to build alliances within the health care or economic sectors plus working with public opinion.