Practical Approaches to Policy Development: an NGO Perspective
Ted Richmond
Speaking Notes for June 22, 2006 celebratory dinner for graduates of the Ryerson MA
Program in Public Policy and Administration
Introductory Remarks
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Thanks for opportunity to be here
Congratulations to Ryerson for this new program, and to all the hard-working
graduates for their efforts and contributions
When you are asked to do something like this, you have to think about what you
are going to say. My first criteria were negative. I don’t want to be pretentious,
claiming to have unique insights about problems to continue to perplex us all.
And I don’t want to be trivial, telling you things you already likely know.
My son Sean – who just turned 28 and is much closer to your age than I -suggested I talk about the difference between pickerel (or walleye) and pike
fishing. We don’t know if that’s just because he knows people speak best about
subjects for which they are passionate, or if it’s because he is still preoccupied
with our recent expedition driving 800 km. (and back) to catch a dozen pike and
no pickerel, or whether he just can’t imagine I would have anything else to say…
But I decided to exercise my parental rights to disagree with our offspring, and to
talk on the subject of practical approaches to policy development from a nongovernment perspective. This allows me to reflect on some of what might be
useful in my own experience, and also to capture a range of ngo perspectives from
service organizations to foundations. Remember here that “non-government”
does not necessarily mean community; it also includes foundations which are
themselves funders, and policy-oriented academics.
I will try to do this with concrete examples along the way, so things don’t get too
abstract
We might talk about these examples, or other issues, when we have time for
discussion
Main thesis: the policy process is not completely rational, it is an art as well as a
science. Doing good policy work is hard – getting it considered and implemented is
an even bigger challenge. Although there is a lot of talk these days about “evidencebased research” and “academic knowledge transfer”, the reality is that policy does
not get solicited or implemented within the rationalist framework implied by these
terms.
I am clearly not the only person who thinks this. In the past few days, as I was reflecting
on this topic, I noticed two recent publications which speak to this issue [references cited
in presentation are to “Knowledge Transfer and Mobilization” in the Metropolis National
Newsletter March 2006, and CERIS Policy Matters No. 27 July 2006 by Michelle
Goldberg “Getting Stuck, Tangled and Unravelled: Policy Makers, Researchers and
Advocates Navigate Access to Professions and Trades Policy Webs”.
Does this mean that the policy process is totally irrational, and that only irrational people,
or people obliged to behave in irrational ways, as is often the case with politicians and
government bureaucrats, can impact public policy? I admit I am often tempted to think
so, but basically I don’t believe this is true. I think it is more useful to think of the initial
process of soliciting policy input and the later stage of implementing policy
recommendations as sharing the characteristics of being highly political, volatile,
conjunctural and ‘irrational’ in the traditional academic sense of scientific enquiry
(although not outside the boundaries of useful academic study). The process of preparing
good policy that has been solicited and may be implemented however, in my opinion, still
falls within the general boundaries of the kind of academic training you have received.
Whether good policy is solicited or implemented can’t be guaranteed. But if no one is
available to develop good policy, or do high-quality policy-relevant research, there is no
chance of making any progress.
Example: poverty amongst seniors. Today there is a consensus in the ngo sector and with
government policy people that this is a Canadian policy success story. Thirty years ago,
poverty for seniors was a huge problem. It is still a serious issue today, but due to a
combination of income security measures (CCP, OAS and GIS) and tax reforms, rates
have dropped dramatically. This could not have been done without the advocacy work
drawing attention to the issue and the policy work on the solutions. But at the time there
was no way of predicting in advance that this issue would get traction, compared to other
issues on which there has been much less reform or progress. Examples that come to
mind are child and family poverty, or adequate housing, or environmental protection, or
Aboriginal rights.
Moving on: a few insights or ‘tips’
1. Necessity of persistence, examples:
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Racism (systemic racism as a barrier to settlement) and ngo consultations with
federal government officials over past 20 years
- starts with ‘can’t talk about it’
- then ngo’s allowed to name it, but not in the minutes
- then in the minutes, but only as a claim (assertion) by ngo’s
- then it could be in the minutes as something both sides discussed
- now it is named in official government documents, as a barrier, and a research and
policy topic
Note in order to get to this point we had to be persistent, and educational, and distinguish
between attitudinal and systemic racism – because otherwise people weren’t listening,
they felt they were being judged and blamed. So the subjective aspects of the debate –
the individual guilt and moral confusion of the mainly White people in positions of power
– played an important role in stimulating a more rational or scientific (objective)
discourse on racism.
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Second example, the research and policy work that John Shields and I have been
doing on the restructuring of ngo funding and its implications for community
autonomy and advocacy as well as quality service delivery.
We have been trying to demonstrate in our writing and our public interventions that this
system of short-term contract funding and burdensome conditions of administrative
accountability is detrimental to service quality, organizational efficiency, and
independent community voices. Even more important, we have been articulating a view
that this regime is a consequence of deliberate public policy reforms within the
framework of neoliberalism, motivated by desires to reduce state deficits and social
responsibilities by contracting services to underfunded community organizations and
forcing other funders to share these social costs. Other critics of the regime have focused
on its negative consequences, while portraying its roots in legitimate but excessive
responses of funding bureaucracies to increased public demands for accountability. We
have done this work with in collaboration with people like Professor Bryan Evans from
Ryerson and consultant Lynn, Eakin, as well as researcher Katherine Scott at the
Canadian Council on Social Development. We have engaged in academic publications,
popular summaries and policy pieces, conference presentations, and extensive ngo and
funder networking.
After more than two years of work in this area, we began to see the community
organizations articulating the basic issues in a way that went beyond demanding more
funding for their service sector, and publically challenging the granting policies of the
funders on which they are so dependent. After three years of work, John and I at a recent
conference in Vancouver had the pleasure of hearing a high-ranking official in the BC
government admit that this funding regime was a deliberate public policy choice
motivated by the neo-liberal theory of New Public Management, and that it had caused
great stress to the community service sector. Hopefully over the next three years,
together with our various allies, John and I will have the opportunity to participate in an
actual policy debate with representatives of senior levels of government over alternatives
to this destructive funding regime.
Subject: don’t romanticize or idealize community voices including service providers
and community spokespersons
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Example, going back twenty years and more, there was considerable opposition
from community spokespersons to the collection of census and administrative
data with ethno-racial classifications. There were legitimate reasons for the
opposition, based on fear that either the individual information or the statistical
summaries would be misused. In spite of this opposition, I joined with other
community spokespersons and some academics and independent researchers to
promote the development of this kind of data through initiatives like the addition
of a ‘visible minority’ classification in the Canadian census. Today the usefulness
of this data has been recognized as more important than its potentially negative
impact, and many of the same people who were opposed to collecting ethno-racial
data sit on panels with me discussing the policy significance of the data collected.
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Another example, based on the research and policy work I have done with John
Shields: much of what has passed for ‘advocacy’ in the ngo sector in the past few
years has been little more than corporatist (narrowly sectorial) self-interest. To
the degree that ngo’s have remained relatively silent about general government
funding policies and priorities, preferring to argue that their agency and their
clients should be spared from the general cutbacks, these so-called advocates have
in fact contributed to a competitive and collaborationist discourse in the ngo
service sector.
Subject (to be balanced): be properly suspicious of your academic colleagues and
institutions
There is a lot of talk these days in academic circles about the importance of community
and the related issues of “knowledge transfer” and “community academic partnerships.
Before you get involved with these things – and you can’t escape it if you want to do
policy work, or policy-relevant research – think three times about what you are getting
into and what you want to accomplish.
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“knowledge transfer” – assumes the knowledge produced by academic institutions
is both reliable and relevant to community needs – but how do you know this?
How did you check? Who did you ask, and what did they really tell you? A
colleague of mine used to say that if you took most of the surveys designed by
academics out to the community, the activists would glance at the survey
questions and tell you ‘the answer is number three, now leave us alone, we have
work to do”.
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Community-academic partnerships – these have evolved from token support
letters to getting community organizations active in carrying out the research
(focus groups, translation, etc.) – but where are the community voices when the
research problem is being defined? And the policy implications of the research
results being assessed? This is the true test of community-based research.
Subject: reformism and collaboration
All of what I am presenting tonight is about reforming social policy. Some reforms
might be minimal, and some might be much more radical or wide-sweeping. But nothing
I have discussed so far suggests anything remotely revolutionary. Let me say a few
words about that.
Some will present themselves to you and your colleagues as if their reforms, or the issues
around which they are mobilizing for reforms, are somehow revolutionary – and
therefore of more priority than the reforms you support. In my view this is pretentious
and ultimately rather silly. Unless some group or leader has a real plan for revolutionary
change, whether socialist or anarcho-ecologist or libertarian communalist or whatever,
with concrete proposals for overthrowing the state and eliminating capitalism, their
‘revolution’ is not serious. Further I would argue that unless these same people also have
some concrete plans and new ideas for the big issues of economic productivity and
political democracy in this revolutionary society – issues which have bedeviled the noncapitalist societies to date -- they are still not serious. So let’s just agree that for now at
least we are all in the political zone of reformism, and try to judge each reform on its own
merits. Let us also admit that the realization of small, concrete, practical reforms may
sometimes – not always, but sometimes – be just as important in moving forward a
community agenda as continuing to work around more sweeping and ambitious packages
of global policy reform.
Having said that, I still believe there is a huge difference between reformism and
collaboration. It is so easy to slip from reform to collaboration – most of the public
recognition, promotion and professional rewards lie in that direction.
How can we tell whether we are in fact drifting into collaboration? First of all, as I have
suggested earlier, you have to listen to the community – and that goes in my opinion for
community leaders themselves, as well as funders and academics. Secondly I would
suggest you apply the litmus test of looking carefully at ‘what is on the table’. I will
explain what I mean.
Governments in Canada are famous the world over for their eager desire to consult on
policy issues. Academics, community partners, foundations, even graduate students –
anyone is fair game for the invitation lists. But we also know that these consultations
frequently produce no useful results. How is this possible? Is it simply because the
sound recommendations from the consultations do not receive funding for
implementation? Partly this is indeed the case. But in addition these consultations are
usually organized on the basis of a pre-determined agenda based on ‘what is on the table’.
Decoded, this phrase means ‘what you are allowed to discuss if you come to this
meeting’ and it usually means as well ‘nothing outside the current government agenda’.
In other words, behind the smokescreen of attention to a major issue of public policy, we
are being asked to discuss not what the government should do, but how it will fine tune
and implement what it has already decided to do. Small wonder that such consultations
produce little that is useful in terms of new policy!
Example: I was involved in some very interesting consultations on social inclusion in
Ottawa in the fall of 2005, along with colleagues from Ryerson like Anver Saloojee and
Myer Siemiatycki and a number of other policy specialists. At a certain point in the
discussion the majority of participants, many of whom I would not describe as politically
radical, were pointing to the issue of the growing income polarization in the Canadian
labour market. As long as more and more people were trapped in poverty even while
working, we argued, any perspectives on inclusion would only mean that different
excluded groups were shuffled in and out of the bottom end of the labour market. This
produced a prolonged and rather emotional reaction from one of the senior federal policy
people in the room, who suggested sarcastically that only a bunch of socialists would be
preoccupied with these kinds of issues, and explained that the low-wage economy was
essential to Canada’s global economic position. For this colleague in other words, the
issue we had raised was “off the table”.
So I suggest that if you want to avoid becoming a policy collaborationist, you use the
litmus test of whether your issue is on or off the table. If it is on the table, and you are
convinced it is important, then by all means consult on its implementation. But if it is off
the table, and you still remain convinced of its importance, then you may want to skip the
consultation and spend more time with your community partners creating the pressure
required to put this on the public agenda.
That’s all I have to say for now … perhaps there will be time for some comments and
questions.