When Everyone Is a Policy Expert, Policy Loses Its Meaning

Public policy in India is having a moment, as it has become one of the most elastic professional labels in the contemporary marketplace. Yet this apparent success masks a deeper intellectual crisis. As public policy becomes more popular, policy studies pedagogy is taking a back seat. 

At the centre of this crisis lies the transformation of public policy from a rigorous intellectual field into a market-friendly quick-fix category that anyone can navigate without venturing into the pedagogical depth. Professionals from public administration, human resources, marketing, finance, and technology increasingly rebrand themselves as policy experts now, and interdisciplinarity is frequently invoked to legitimize this shift. It is epistemic flattening, where familiarity with policy lexicon is misrepresented as an understanding of the state.

Public policy was never meant to be a stand-alone toolkit. It emerged as a way of analysing how power, institutions, ideas, and interests interact to shape collective outcomes over time. That required theoretical grounding, methodological rigour, historical consciousness, and ethical responsibility. Instead, contemporary policy pedagogy increasingly begins and ends with the policy cycle: problem identification, formulation, implementation, and evaluation taught not as a limited heuristic but as an accurate description of how policymaking works. This pedagogical narrowing has serious consequences. Students are trained to believe that policy is sequential, rational, and correctable through better design, rather than contested, non-linear, and often deliberately incoherent. Compounding this is the uncritical import of Global North case studies. OECD experiences are routinely taught as universal templates, detached from their specific political economies, historical trajectories, social status and institutional capacities. India, by contrast, appears primarily as an implementation challenge or a deviation from the norm. This asymmetry subtly trains students to internalise an epistemic hierarchy in which theory comes from elsewhere while complexity resides at home. The result is not global learning but intellectual dependency, where borrowed abstractions substitute for indigenous theorisation.

Academic research in the domain, too, offers little resistance to this trend. The quality of public policy research in India has steadily declined, not because of an absence of talent or data, but because of distorted incentives and institutional fragility. Open the top global policy studies journals, and you will rarely find Indian case studies being discussed. Worst of all, in the majority of them, there are hardly even Indian origin members in the editorial panel. If they are, they are somewhere in Singapore, Japan or China, dealing with their policy case studies. Indian cases rarely function as sources of theory, and when they do appear in top global journals, they are disproportionately authored by Global South scholars working from the Global North, reinforcing existing hierarchies of agenda-setting and legitimacy.

The consequences are not merely academic. A crowded field of confident generalists with shallow roots emerges, fluent in policy jargon but ill-equipped to explain why policies repeatedly fail, mutate, or get captured. When everyone is an expert, accountability and expertise dissolve. Mistakes are reframed as learning experiences, and harm is abstracted as an unintended consequence. In a field where decisions affect millions, such intellectual shortcuts carry real material costs. Interdisciplinarity, rather than correcting this trend, is often used to justify it. But, genuine interdisciplinarity requires deep grounding in at least one discipline and intellectual humility in translating across others. 

The long-term risk of this phenomenon is not academic decline alone but weakened state capacity. A policy ecosystem dominated by overconfident, under-trained and unread self-claimed experts will consistently misdiagnose problems, overestimate administrative capacity, and underestimate resistance. It will generate impressive documents and fragile outcomes, substituting performance for durability. India today governs at an extraordinary scale, diversity, and contradiction. This should be fertile ground for original policy theory and serious pedagogy. Instead, the current trajectory trains managers and salespeople of policy appearance rather than thinkers of policy substance. The crisis is not that too few people care about policy. It is that too many are allowed to practise it without intellectual formation.

If public policy is to recover its meaning in India, it must reclaim seriousness. That requires resisting credential inflation, restoring theory to the centre of pedagogy, treating Indian experience as theory-generating rather than derivative, and recognising that policy is not a technical fix to politics but politics formalised. Until then, the glow of policy’s popularity will continue to conceal the erosion of its intellectual foundations.