This article describes UI's efforts to strengthen the policy development skills of Russian local government officials and NGO representatives. In 2-3 day courses, participants work together on exercises in analytical decision-making methods and monitoring and evaluation. The course also covers key concepts in policy making, such as considering the distributional aspects of policies, developing explicit decision-making criteria, balancing political and technical factors, defining public goods and services, and introducing competition to the public sector. Evaluations of the course indicate that it fills a definite training need for local officials and staff at advocacy NGOs in Russia.