Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy

Gender mainstreaming, a gender equality governance strategy, is performing poorly across governments. While many national and regional governments have adopted gender equality policy tools, developing and implementing an integrated gender mainstreaming strategy requires substantive reforms to existing procedures and institutional structures.

The success or failure of policy reform is often attributable to the poor integration of new policy interventions into existing policy regime. Where instrument mixes are poorly coordinated ambiguity over policy goals can lead to confusion over program objectives and instrument application. Too often gender mainstreaming and gender-based analyses are used interchangeably which has significant implications for planning and implementation practices. This paper argues that the implementation of a new policy instrument is not isolated from the established policy regime and must contribute to the existing policy mix to perform optimally. Using Canada as a case study the gender equality policy instrument mix is examined to demonstrate how different abstractions of the problem result in sub-optimal performance.

Globally, gender plays a significant role in the adapting of behaviour to global warming and has also been correlated with greater vulnerability to climatic variability; however, in Canada, the implications of climate change on gender and gendered roles have largely been ignored. Despite Canada’s international and national commitments to gender equality and the numerous promises to include women in decision making, discussions of gender continue to be excluded from the climate-change debate. In this chapter we examine how gender has, or has not, been included in the development of
climate-change policy in Canada.

Public sector websites are heavily invested in influencing policy outcomes through information provisioning and dissemination. Traditionally e-government research has focused on the internal functions of e-government studying service delivery, horizontal information processing integration and levels of implementation maturity. This paper shifts the analytical focus to external facing e-government to consider the macro presentation of state-sponsored sites on the Web. To evaluate the external face of Canadian e-government this project measures the web-based impact of public sector websites in virtual policy networks. Virtual policy networks are web-based issues networks containing content on a specific policy topic and connected through hyperlinks. It is argued that government’s online nodality in these networks is an indicator of public sector websites’ authority and influence on the Web.

Theories of reflexive governance are closely linked with the claim that more traditional modes of coordination have been replaced by networked structures, allowing reflexivity to emerge. This paper explores this overlap between reflexivity and networks in terms of two questions: the extent to which networks actually deliver reflexivity and the extent to which reflexive governance is a hybrid mode of governance, interpenetrated by other modes, or whether it exists alongside and in competition with them. Using two Canadian case studies, it argues that, while there is a close connection between policy networks and reflexive governance, new network metaphors are needed to capture the complexity of the relationship between the different modes of governance and the new forms of power that this relationship creates.

The Canadian welfare state has changed significantly in the last decade with the federal devolution of policy responsibilities creating opportunities for some provinces to adopt American social policy ideas. Given the expectations of resilience and non-convergence, in the welfare state literature, this article addresses the issues of policy change by demonstrating that the movement of British Columbia's labour and social policy towards international neoliberal norms, including policy examples set in many US jurisdictions, have produced limited convergence. We suggest that this indicates that more change has occurred and is occurring in the Canadian welfare state than the resilience model or comparative public policy literature would indicate.

This paper analyses policy information on the Web to understand how the hyperlinked organization of webpages, produced by real world, web-enabled policy co mmunities, influences the structure and content of the Web's information supply. These virtual networks of information will be referred to as virtual policy networks (VPN), which are defined as observable patterns of relations among web-enabled policy co mmunities. The organization of virtual teams, social networks and online co mmunities is well documented; however, similar considerations of real world policy co mmunities that are fully established, and then become web-enabled are sparse. This project takes tentative steps towards addressing this dearth in the literature by exa mining the networked relations of the Canadian climate change VPN. The key research questions addressed are what policy actors are participating in the web-based policy com munity, who has the most influence in the virtual climate change do main, and how is information organized.

Public sector websites are heavily invested in influencing policy outcomes through information provisioning and dissemination. Traditionally e-government research has focused on the internal functions of e-government studying service delivery, horizontal information processing integration and levels of implementation maturity. This paper shifts the analytical focus to external-facing e-government to consider the macro presentation of state-sponsored sites on the Web. To evaluate the external face of Canadian e-government this project measures the web-based impact of public sector websites in virtual policy networks. Virtual policy networks are web-based issues networks containing content on a specific policy topic and connected through hyperlinks. It is argued that government’s online nodality in these networks is an indicator of public sector websites’ authority and influence on the Web.

Saskatchewan, a Canadian prairie province, has recently begun to restructure the provincial energy system. The institutional, technological and social bases of the Saskatchewan power regime have been disrupted by both exogenous pressures and endogenous problems, providing an opportunity for alternative energy options to be considered as possible power alternatives. As the province addresses the long-term socio-technical transition (STR) associated with a regime change in the power sector a number of alternative energy options have been identified. Using a transition management approach, this paper argues that the path taken will depend very much on whether these alternatives can be adopted as modifications of the existing STR -leaving the key actors, institutions and relationships essentially untouched -or whether they will necessitate a wholesale reconstruction of the regime itself. In this paper we analyze how, over time, the socio-technical configurations of the energy system became very durable as existing technologies become embedded in regulatory frameworks, infrastructure, users practices and expert communities. We then consider the potential of several alternative technological trajectories and the likelihood of one of these socio technical regimes emerging in Saskatchewan.

Governing on the Web is a critical aspect of any e-government project as it is the Web that provides the chief platform through which information is disseminated with websites operating as the main information delivery mechanisms. This study analyses policy information on the Web to understand how the hyperlinked organization of webpages, produced by web-enabled policy communities, influences the structure and content of the Web's information supply. It is argued that governing on the Web requires new governing instruments that are designed to manage in technologically-mediated environment which means that governments will no longer simply manage bulk data, but rather govern dense networks of information to manage the information flow. This paper explores the Canadian government's influence on the Web arguing that government capacity online is shaped by the state's nodality in online policy networks.

The onslaught of information and communications technologies (ICTs), the burgeoning popularity of the Internet, and the ideology behind the new information economy has coalesced into a force that is fundamentally reshaping the contours of the Canadian political landscape. This reorganization of the state will profoundly impact women's opportunities to participate in and alter conventional notions of citizenship. The establishment of electronic or e-government and the implications behind the development of the cyberstate promise to revolutionize Canadian governance and our traditional understandings of democracy. While there is the

Public sector reform is a key policy area, driven by global public policy networks. Research on these networks has been inductive, highlighting organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This article examines "virtual policy networks" (VPNs) on the Web. Using IssueCrawler, we conduct a hyperlink analysis that permits us to map seven VPNs. The first network mapped the hyperlinks of 91 organizations identified through inductive methods. The hypothesis that the virtual network would include all actors identified in the inductive approach was refuted. The other six networks focused on: market mechanisms, open government, performance, public employment, reform, and restructuring. Among the findings, the U.S. government is prominent in the first three, while international organizations dominate the others. VPN rankings show that the World Bank dominates the OECD. When the inductive research is blended with the VPN research, the OECD's prominence increases, and we see the importance of market mechanisms and reform VPNs as pillars of globalization.