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    Canadian Political Science Association
    2020 Annual Conference Programme

    Confronting Political Divides
    Hosted at Western University
    Tuesday, June 2 to Thursday, June 4, 2020
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    Presidential Address:
    Barbara Arneil, CPSA President

    Origins:
    Colonies and Statistics

    Location:
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 05:00pm to 06:00pm
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    KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
    Ayelet Shachar
    The Shifting Border:
    Legal Cartographies of Migration
    and Mobility

    Location:
    June 04, 2020 | 01:30 to 03:00 pm
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    Keynote Speaker: Marc Hetherington
    Why Modern Elections
    Feel Like a Matter of
    Life and Death

    Location:
    Wednesday, June 3, 2020 | 03:45pm to 05:15pm
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    Plenary Panel
    Indigenous Politics and
    the Problem of Canadian
    Political Science

    Location: Arts & Humanities Building - AHB 1R40
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 10:30am to 12:00pm

Law and Public Policy



D07(b) - Learning and Policy Change: Shared Puzzles and Divergent Methods

Date: Jun 2 | Time: 03:15pm to 04:45pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Katherine Boothe (McMaster University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Katherine Boothe (McMaster University)


Session Abstract: This panel will bring together scholars working in diverse policy areas with a shared theoretical concern with policy learning and policy change. How do politicians, bureaucrats, stakeholders, and members of the public learn and take on new or different policy ideas? How do actors’ differing interpretations of the risks and benefits of various policy measures help us understand gaps between policy design and implementation? What opportunities for policy learning are afforded to different groups, and what are the causal connections between different types of learning and policy change? The panel will be an opportunity for researchers to share early versions of cutting-edge research that explores “how we learn about learning”, and considers the particular methodological challenges involved in studying the role of ideas in public policy, and measuring gradual or incremental policy change. Policy areas include changes in Canadian arm’s-length agencies, renewable energy policy in Ontario and Nova Scotia, modern land claims negotiations in Canada, and the development of municipal financial autonomy in Kenya. These disparate empirical concerns are united by a common theoretical question of how actors understand the range of policy problems and solutions that they face, and how these understandings help us explain policy stability and change.


Policy learning in the evolution of arms-length agencies across Canadian provinces: Carey Doberstein (University of British Columbia)
Abstract: Arms-length agencies are used widely across Canadian governments for various purposes, among them regulatory, advisory, service delivery, or as a corporate enterprise. Energy regulators, utility commissions, statistics agencies, arts councils, health authorities, and crown corporations like BC Hydro and ICBC, for example, are all organs of government that function quasi-independently from the state. Trends in the type of agencies created (and eliminated) shift over recent decades, and this paper draws on ideational scholarship in search of an explanation for these broad trends. There is a complex mix of partisan, ideological and public administration ideas that undergird the creation, evolution, expansion (and elimination) of arms-length agencies, yet they have not been studied in a systematic and longitudinal fashion in Canada. This paper draws on a new comparative database created by the author to link changes in the types of agencies used in Canadian provinces with evolving political and public administration discourses and ideas from within, as well as outside of, Canada.


Learning to Listen: Public engagement, policy elites, and policy learning in renewable energy policy making in Ontario and Nova Scotia: Heather Millar (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: Across Canada, government officials and citizens are engaging in highly contentious debates about energy technologies, from oil pipelines to hydraulic fracturing to wind power generation. Public resistance to renewable energy production has stalled or prevented renewable energy production and policy development, resulting in significant economic and environmental consequences (Stokes 2013, 2016). Energy scholars have identified public engagement processes as a critical factor in determining public acceptance of new technologies (Boudet 2019). Research has demonstrated that low levels of procedural justice – namely the perception that processes of public engagement and consultation have been unfair – can cause public resistance to new technologies to increase over time (Walker and Baxter 2017; Mills, Bessette, and Smith 2019; Neville and Weinthal 2016). Although scholarship has begun to tease out the influence of public engagement processes on public opinion, less is known regarding what policy makers themselves “learn” from public engagement processes. Do policy makers engage in public consultations in order to gain votes, legitimize policy decisions, or dampen public opposition? Or can public engagement processes trigger processes of policy learning among government officials, leading to alterations in future policy implementation and design (Hendriks and Lees-Marshment 2019)? Drawing on scholarship on policy learning, deliberative democratic theory, and public acceptance of new technologies, this paper develops an analytical framework to trace the influence of public consultation on policy makers’ attitudes over time. To test the framework, I examine two public consultation processes (and subsequent impacts) on renewable energy production in Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canada.


The Challenges of Building Local Financial Autonomy in Nairobi : Colette Nyirakamana (McMaster University)
Abstract: The decentralization policies adopted in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s allowed the transfer of significant political, administrative and financial powers to municipal governments (MGs). Financial decentralization grants MGs the power to generate revenue, as a means of building local financial autonomy and implement programs valued by citizens. After three decades of decentralization experience, scholars agree that MGs still face several challenges of building local financial autonomy as evidenced by the poor revenue collection performance. Therefore, MGs rely on external revenue transfers from the central government and international donors to fund local development programs. In view of these findings, this paper seeks to explain the poor revenue collection performance in Nairobi, a city with a high potential of financial resources that remain dependent on external revenue. I argue that the poor revenue collection performance results from gradual change in financial decentralization rules by the city’s political leadership and revenue collectors. The political leadership affects change through drift, due to their unwillingness to endorse the strategies and enforcement measures designed by the Revenue Department bureaucrats to raise more revenue. On the other hand, revenue collectors affect change through layering by adding new rules to existing revenue mobilization ones. Drift and layering are mediated by the strong incentives for tax avoidance by the city’s political leadership and tax diversion by revenue collectors. These arguments are supported by interviews, primary source documents and observations collected in Nairobi during field research from February to May of 2018.


: Adrienne Davidson (Queen's University)
Abstract:


Participants:
Carey Doberstein (University of British Columbia)
Heather Millar (University of Ottawa)
Colette Nyirakamana (McMaster University)
Adrienne Davidson (Queen's University)



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