CPSA/CAPPA section on Public Administration

K15 - New Methods for Public Policy Analysis and Implementation

Date: Jun 4 | Time: 08:45am to 10:15am | Location:

Boundary Spanning Across Multilevel Jurisdictions: The Triumphs and Headaches of Administering Multi-Actor Policy Initiatives: Charles Conteh (Brock University), Brittany Harding (Brock University)
Abstract: The challenges of boundary spanning activities across federal-provincial-local jurisdictions in the implementation of ambitious national policy initiatives is one of the quintessential features of public administration in Canada. Drawing insights from the multilevel governance literature, the proposed paper will explore Canada's recent Innovation Superclusters Initiative (ISI) aimed at building a network of five regionally-based innovation systems across the country. These ‘Superclusters’ consist of a constellation of city-regions stretching across provinces and bringing together public agencies, post-secondary institutions, research centres, businesses and a wide range of non-state policy entrepreneurs to pursue national innovation goals and strategies in five sectors, namely; digital technology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced manufacturing, agrifoods and oceans technology. Through the lens of the multilevel governance literature, the discussion will analyze the tensions and synergies of these intergovernmental and interprovincial administrative networks as well as the complex and sometimes opaque junctures of evolving state-market-society relations in this recent policy initiative. Some of the questions to be addressed include the following: First, how do agencies and actors span jurisdictional boundaries to accommodate the growing imperatives subnational policy assertiveness? Second, how are different orders of government and their non-state partners navigating the tensions of their often conflicting political, ideational and material interests while seeking to pursue joint actions in implementing ambitious and highly complex policy initiatives? The discussion will highlight some of the administrative triumphs and conundrums of pursuing a cohesive national policy on the one hand and navigating the centrifugal forces of provincialism, regionalism, localism on the other.

Intersectional Child Care Advocacy: Exploring New Methods of Policy Analysis: Tammy Findlay (Mount Saint Vincent Univerity)
Abstract: Hankivsky and Cormier (2011) note that while intersectionality has become an important theoretical framework, its application as a method of policy analysis is still underdeveloped. One of the emerging methodologies they identify, the “multi-strand” approach, uses a systematic four-step process of mapping, visioning, road testing and monitoring and evaluation to achieve a “cohesive and integrated approach to promoting equality” in the policy process (Hankivsky and Cormier 2011 223). My paper explores the application of the multi-strand method to the policy advocacy community, where it was used to facilitate a dialogue between the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of British Columbia and the Vancouver Committee for Domestic Workers’ and Caregiver’s Rights. I argue that this method has promise for use not only inside government, but also to guide critical policy conversations that could advance “social movement intersectionality” and “political intersectionality” (Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013; Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) and serve to “confront political divides” among potential policy allies.

Gender Dimensions in the New National Development Planning: Lauchlan Thomas Munro (University of Ottawa), Laurence Granger (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: National development planning has made a comeback over the last decade. In a sharp reversal of trends from the 1980s and 90s, most countries now have a national development plan, and governments have invested substantial administrative and financial resources into developing these plans. Around the same time, all countries have adopted the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which include important, though incomplete, provisions for gender equality, notably SDG5. Given that national development planning has always involved not only technical (economic, statistical, administrative) but also deeply political considerations (models of development, state-society-economy relations), this paper seeks to understand the role that gender plays in this new generation of national development plans. Specifically, we ask the following questions: To what extent is gender an important consideration in the drafting of this new generation of national development plans? What theoretical and policy logics inform how gender issues are treated in these plans? What explicit or implicit theories of change with respect to gender are present in these plans? Using a modified and updated Moser framework for gender planning, we answer these questions at a global level by performing content analysis on our database of 134 national development plans. In addition, four national case studies (Benin, Iraq, Pakistan, Zambia) then serve to ground these overall findings in particular political and administrative contexts.

Instrument Constituencies as Embedded Actors: Who Are They and How They Help Couple Three Streams?: Ozge Uluskaradag (Concordia University)
Abstract: Emerging scholarship on instrument constituencies has argued that different instrument constituencies advocate for specific policy instruments regardless of the problem context (Béland and Howlett, 2015). The scholarship also argues that instrument constituencies sit in between epistemic communities (Haas,1992), who define policy problems and advocacy coalitions that engage in political bargaining process (Sabatier, 1987). Having Kingdon’s three streams approach as the base, recent work located instrument constituencies in the policy stream (Béland et al 2018), where the policy formulation work is carried out. However, the literature analyzes the involvement of these subsystem actors in the policy process independent of one another, thus overlooks how the interaction and information based resource based exchanges between instrument constituencies and other actors affects their views of their proposed solutions and give them new ideas about the policy instruments they propose in changing policy making environments where the sources of policy advice have diversified and multiplied (Radin, 2000; Prince, 2007; Craft and Howlett, 2012). Having such developments in mind, this paper takes a theoretical look at the current scholarship on instrument constituencies and argues that the interaction, membership in different streams and information based resource exchanges that these actors have with others should be taken into account while analyzing the work of instrument constituencies to better understand how they contribute to policy stream, help move from one stream to another and couple problem, policy and politics streams together, which the current scholarships on policy subsystems and policy change have longed sought for (Béland et al 2018).