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/ Canadian Government Executive
// February 2016
If governments are serious about opening the policy process up to
non-governmental actors, then a greater institutionalization of the
process is necessary.
Adam
Wellstead
Bryan
Evans
The Policy Role of
Non-Government Actors:
A
number of studies of Canadian
federal and provincial govern-
ment policy workers have shown
the importance of well-estab-
lished networks outside of government.
However, these studies also concluded that
government policy workers interacted in-
frequently outside the comfort of their own
department. This stands in contrast to the
widespread conviction that non-govern-
mental organizations (NGOs), including
nonprofit groups, should, and do, play an
important role in shaping public policy.
Our research probed where NGO–gov-
ernment interaction takes place. In 2012,
we invited 1,763 policy analysts working
in the NGO sector and in provincial gov-
ernment public services in Ontario, Sas-
katchewan, and British Columbia to re-
spond to our on-line survey of thirty-eight
questions. They were selected from four
policy fields: environment, health, immi-
gration, and labour. These provinces and
policy sectors were chosen because they
represented heterogeneous cases in terms
of politics, history, and economic and de-
mographic scale. 603 individuals (a re-
sponse rate of 34.4 percent) responded.
If the question is, “Do non-government
actors play a significant role in the policy
process?” then the answer, according to
our data, would be, “Sometimes yes and
sometimes no: it depends at what stage of
the policy process.”
A stark revelation was that nearly a
third of respondents indicated that they
had never been invited to participate in
any policy discussion with their provincial
government. This trend is troubling and
certainly provides reason to question the
actual extent of engagement. However, an
equal number of our respondents reported
fairly frequent (monthly or quarterly) en-
gagement with their provincial govern-
ment, which is indicative of robust multi-
actor policy processes of some type.
We need to learn more about why NGOs
are either significantly or insignificantly
engaged. Several researchers have identi-
fied the constrained policy capacity of non-
governmental organizations as the key rea-
son for modest or even non-participation
in the policy process. Yet just over half of
the respondents to our survey considered
the policy capacity of their organization to
be “somewhat high” or “very high.” At the
same time, our survey data indicated that
non-governmental actors have serious con-
cerns about their training of policy staff, as
well as the recruitment of sufficient num-
bers of staff with policy expertise.
Non-governmental actors understand
that their success depends to a great de-
gree on what information they can bring
Management
In from the Cold?