Policy labs, partners and policy effectiveness in Canada

Abstract

Upon election in 2015, the Justin Trudeau Liberal government announced its intention to transform government operations by bringing nonprofit and private sector partners into the center of public sector decision making through new structures such as Policy Hubs and Innovation labs. These collaborative arrangements were intended to yield the benefits of Michael Barber's theory of deliverology by breaking through the public sector aversion to risk and change and by creating new spaces for devising effective solutions to the increasingly complex social and economic challenges facing government. A preliminary examination of the use of policy hubs and innovation labs in Canada between 2015 and 2020 indicates that the results have been mixed for the nonprofit sector partners. Collaborative relations have offered nonprofit sector partners new opportunities and access to influence policy decisions. However, this influence also poses risks to their independence, legitimacy and effectiveness as policy advocates. Both public and nonprofit sector partners in PILs should heed certain cautions in choosing future partnerships or they may find their ability to achieve meaningful policy change is limited.

Policy experimentation and policy learning in Canadian cultural policy

“…Prime Minister Trudeau was elected again in October 2019, albeit with a minority government. Experimentation is not mentioned in the 2019 ministerial mandate letters, and there is a sense that the focus on deliverology and results-based outcomes has decreased (Brock 2021).…”

“…Because experimentation was a new initiative, there was both government-wide and departmentspecific support put in place (see Brock 2021, Experimentation Works 2019. Alongside centralized oversight in the PCO's Impact and Innovation Unit, a new team at PCH was created in part to support experimentation.…”

Tipologias da inovação no setor público: uma revisão integrativa da literatura

“…Vinculam o resultado das políticas às prioridades do governo, e enfatizam as evidências em sua formulação, medição e avaliação. Na visão de Brock (2021), os laboratórios de inovação em políticas públicas conseguem desenvolver soluções para desafios complexos de políticas sociais ou econômicas, em um lapso temporal relativamente pequeno.…”

“…O principal objetivo dos laboratórios de políticas públicas é promover o atendimento à sociedade com a entrega de resultados em uma ampla gama de áreas, tais como: governança, educação, saúde, imigração e emigração, habitação, transporte, segurança pública, transformação social, sustentabilidade, entre outras (UNCETA; BARANDIARAN e RES- TREPO, 2019;BROCK, 2021;KOMATSU et al, 2021, LEWIS, 2021.…”

Super‐users and hyper‐experts in the provision of policy advice: Evidence from a survey of Canadian academics

“…The “politicization” of policy advice through such routes as consultants and political staffers has also been noted in many countries, including Canada and Australia (Brock, 2021; Savoie, 2015; Weller, 2015), and has displaced thinking which centered both on the central role that administrators played in “the politics of policy advice” (Craft & Howlett, 2013). This second movement has added further complexity to the relationships that have developed in policy‐making, replacing the simpler, older, models that relied on evidence, and “speaking truth to power” (Wildavsky, 1979) with notions of weaving together multiple sources of knowledge and opinion (Parsons, 2004; Prince, 2007).…”