University of Canberra has just published our first OER on Pressbooks under a CC BY licence:
Pearson, Leonie J. (2026). Economic policy analysis playbook : tools, applications, and global insights (2nd edition.). University of Canberra.
About the author:
Dr Leonie Pearson is an ecological economist who has spent over two decades refusing to let economics be boring. She has worked across Australia, Southeast Asia, the UK, and China, advising governments, securing over $60 million in research funding, and somehow managing to make cost-benefit analysis genuinely compelling in a classroom. In 2025, the Lao PDR Government awarded her the Friendship Cross for her contributions to rural development policy — proof that good economics, done well, actually changes lives.
Economic Policy Analysis Playbook grew out of four years of award-winning teaching at the University of Canberra, where students discovered that economics could be taught through real ministerial briefs, policy games, and problems that actually matter. The book is the distilled, battle-tested version of that approach: rigorous where it needs to be, diverse in its perspectives, and deliberately light on theory that never survived contact with a real policy problem. It is free and open access — because good economic thinking belongs to everyone, wherever they are.
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Thanks for sharing the Economic Policy Analysis Playbook, Kathleen, and congratulations to the university for their first title. At a quick look the OER is overflowing with so many useful real world historical examples, the Myth Busting call outs and useful reflection questions. As I have not read too deeply, does it include, link to some of the policy games?
Mostly this is the phrase that jumped out - that Dr Pearson “spent over two decades refusing to let economics be boring.” Success! How was the process to develop, plan and publish the OER? I’m always interesting in the behind the scenes, making off.
We look forward to seeing what other titles come from University of Canberra, what is in the works?
Thanks Alan! This is actually one that Leonie has been working on for a few years - she was sharing the 1st edition directly with students as a PDF and looked into publishing it commercially but hated the thought of paywalling it, especially since she is all about educational equity and does a lot of work with students in less affluent countries. So she came to us at the end of February with a peer reviewed manuscript that just needed some updates based on reader feedback, and sent through the completed text and figures in mid-April. I imported that into our newly set up Pressbooks and spent some solid time on things like formatting, checking and linking references, and linking her glossary terms. We decided to only link out to freely available materials to keep it within the open ecosystem, but I’m going to go back and add DOIs and ISBNs to help people locate the commercial documents as a minor edit.
This was really great timing because I was able to use it as a learning tool for working out how to use the system. We did a launch for the book and the Pressbooks site yesterday so that will help to get some buzz going on the campus. 
We made it a second edition because the first edition had its own ISBN and is available online from the National Library of Australia. We’ll be lodging the PDF version and live link for this one with them too (Australian legal deposit requirement).
Policy games: It’s a metaphorical playbook and isn’t linking to policy games, but she’s interested in making a companion workbook with interactives once the dust settles.
We have a really interesting pharmacy textbook for Australian and New Zealand fairly far along in development and will release the first tranche of chapters in the next couple of months: Administering vaccines and medicines by injection: a comprehensive guide for pharmacy. This will fill a knowledge gap because there was a legislation change in Australia which now allows trained pharmacists to administer vaccines, so we’re expecting interest from current practitioners as well as pharmacy schools. We have PHD candidates involved in that one and they’ll be able to incorporate their chapters into their theses.