It’s officially summer, and Policycraft is all about having fun: we’re featuring World Cup policymaking, a podcast to help you relax, and a personality quiz!

This month’s welcome is on a brief hiatus as I’m currently writing a quartet of long-form pieces for both Policycraft and elsewhere. (On that note, if your outlet is interested in publishing a 10,000-word, philosophical-yet-practical piece on the use of AI in policymaking, please contact me).

THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

💻The World Cup as a Policy Pilot? by Mitch Davidson, The Policy Shop

Major global sporting events are often - somewhat cynically - cited as necessary to get governments to finally move on major projects (think: significant transportation infrastructure investments). Mitch Davidson argues that they are also fertile ground for experimentation and pilots and, if governments track performance, can provide useful intelligence for how to invest permanently. He identifies some of these pilots already underway for the World Cup in Toronto and Vancouver, as well as a couple of missed opportunities.

💻Battling the Deep Status Quo: Policy Innovation in Canada’s Public Service (Part I) and Policy Innovation, notwithstanding: Tackling the Deep Status Quo (Part II), Policy Ready

Policy Ready and the Institute on Governance have published a two-part readout from a really smart daylong working session: put senior policy leaders and frontline policy staff in separate rooms to work the same problem, then compare how each defined it and what each proposed to do about it. Both groups landed on the same diagnosis, which the organizers call the “deep status quo”: risk aversion, a thicket of rules (real and perceived), and a chronic case of ‘pilotitis’ where promising experiments never scale. So the question is, if the constraint is this well understood by the people living inside it, what is keeping it in place?

🎓Are All Policymakers Data Scientists Now? Data, Data Science and Evidence in Policymaking by Omar Guerrero and Helen Margetts, LSE Public Policy Review

The answer to this article’s question is decisive: they’re not, but they should be. Omar Guerrero and Helen Margetts argue that there is tremendous opportunity for the productive use of data science in policymaking, but capturing it will place new and greater demands on public servants as technical and generalist roles merge. They sort the adoption question into three parts: how fast the tools spread, whether they stay the preserve of specialists or become general practice, and whether they change how policymakers understand the world at all. It’s hard to imagine analytics not changing the way policymakers understand the world.

💻Three myths about policy everyone believes, Apolitical

Policycraft’s 🔥Hot Take of the Month🔥 names three assumptions about policy that sound like common sense but are potentially misguided: that good policy is evidence-based (evidence matters, but narrative is what carries it into implementation), that good policy finds the right answer (hard problems resist singular solutions, so the real work is balancing evidence against ethics, equity, and political reality), and that good policy speaks for everyone (the closest you get is building in continual listening and revision). You may not agree with every point of this myth-busting, but consider the through-line idea: that we should be treating policymaking as an adaptive system rather than a fixed process.

⚙️Quiz: What’s your 2026 public service personality?, Apolitical

Apolitical has also provided us with something a little more lighthearted: a personality quiz! Answer seven questions to find out your public service personality. (I got “The Changemaker”).

🎙️Understanding Public Policy (in 1000 and 500 words), podcast by Professor Paul Cairney

Picture this: You’re lakeside, in a Muskoka chair repose. The sun warms your face as you sip a cool beverage. The water gently laps at the dock, lulling you into a state of summer bliss. The only thing missing? 15-minute podcast episodes about the core concepts of public policy delivered in a Scottish accent. Don’t worry, vacationers - Paul Cairney is here for you. From “What is Public Policy?” to “The Psychology of Policymaking” (and beyond), each ASMR-esque episode is accompanied by a blog post to deepen your understanding.

📣“Hypotheses are supposed to be proven wrong”, social post by Laura Nelson-Hamilton, LinkedIn

I’ve become a fan of hypothesis-driven policy work over the past few years, and this post from friend of the newsletter Laura Nelson-Hamilton contains some important reminders about the nature of hypotheses - not only can they be wrong, it’s valuable when they are!

My 2026 has so far been defined by the shock of just how readily our institutions absorb the very things built to change them. In one of this month’s links, policy writer James Plunkett describes government as two systems running in parallel: the one we inherited and the experimental one we’re trying to build in its place. His warning is that the old doesn’t fight the new so much as swallow it, quietly folding bold experiments into the existing machinery until nothing of substance has changed.

Plunkett does not mean the ‘experimental system’ abstractly. He means the edge: the independent individuals and teams working close to a wicked problem, the deliberative experiments, the units given just enough licence to work differently from the core. This is where most of the genuine energy in government sits right now, even as the centre that controls it struggles. The trouble is that staying at the edge is not enough to change anything at scale: the moment something promising tries to grow, it has to be translated into terms the centre already recognizes (which is to say, its funding cycles, its normative standards, its assurance processes). That translation is where co-optation does its real work, less through rejecting the new thing than through welcoming it, smoothing it, and absorbing it until it has been contorted to fit the old system's image. The experiment changes shape so the system never has to.

Most of this month's syllabus comes from outside Canada. (Regular readers may assume that this is where I post from.) The honest explanation is that the most interesting meta-level thinking about how to actually do policy well is happening elsewhere right now. The less comfortable one follows straight from Plunkett: if the old system survives by co-opting the new, then a culture that prizes stability and treats the status quo with quiet reverence is a culture built for co-optation - and on that score Canada is a strong candidate for worst offender. The instinct to absorb belongs to the centre, though, and the centre is not the whole of the public policy ecosystem. The edge is still ours.

So if we want to build something transformative here, how can we ensure it survives contact with the centre? I don’t have an answer yet, but I’d rather work toward one in the open, with you, than pretend otherwise.

I have two invitations this month: Readers who are working at the edges, I’d love for you to find one another through this newsletter, so comment on this post or message me and share what you’re building. And if you’re not there yet, take this as your nudge: what’s one experiment you could try to make at your institution’s edge? (I’ll want to hear about that, too).

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

💻 “Re-energising Government“ by James Plunkett, Future State

Plunkett opens this on-going essay series expressing two moods that have been driving my thinking and work this year: a creeping sense that our inherited policymaking tools are exhausted, set against the euphoria of experiencing what’s occurring in the experimental margins. His sharpest observation is about the relationship between the inherited and the experimental, which often resembles two separate policymaking systems: one dying and one being born. The piece launches Governing Human, a project that sets out to make the energy at the edges legible to the centre: diagnosing what is actually wrong (his optimistic answer is that the system is both broken and also isn’t), mapping innovation, and asking how procurement, commissioning, and civil service training might absorb these practices without flattening them into the logic of efficiency. The challenge he names is one I have been struggling with: that the old system will always co-opt the new, folding Horizon 2 experiments into Horizon 1 institutions while changing nothing of substance.

If you want a theoretical anchor for why that handoff is so hard, check out Stephen Bell’s chapter on institutionalism, the notion in political science that institutions actively shape what political actors can think and do, operating as constraint and as resource at the same time. His own contribution to the literature is “agency-centred historical institutionalism”: institutions rarely die and get replaced wholesale, they get reworked by the agents operating inside them, which is how a promising practice imported from the edge so often stalls the moment it meets the existing machinery. It can be dry in places (unless you read it out loud in the original Australian), but it hands you the vocabulary for a dynamic that transformation-minded practitioners keep running into.

⚙️ “Rapid policy making“, Institute for Government

The IfG has spent more than a decade warning that fast policy is usually bad policy. This report is its attempt to take that warning seriously while accepting reality: in an age of 24-hour news and insatiable ministerial appetites for an “announceable,” speed is now a standing feature of governing rather than an occasional emergency. The authors focus on the awkward middle ground of “urgent priorities” (driven by public outcry or political pressure, but short of genuine crisis) and document how bureaucrats and staff, working to compressed timelines, end up compromising the fundamentals of good policymaking. The practical payoff is a digital toolkit on policymaking in a crisis, built from a user-journey map of where the pain points actually sit, that identifies what works and doesn’t (and why) under these circumstances.

💻 “Reimagining Policymaking at City of Brampton“ by Sarah Mazhar, Policy Ready

Mazhar offers something both rare and wonderful in the literature: a first-person account from inside a government that is actively rebuilding its policymaking capacity. Her starting diagnosis will be familiar to anyone who has watched a top-down policy land badly: namely, that policies written by senior management can lack operational insight and buy-in, so frequently decay once conditions shift. Brampton’s response was to ask what policymaking would look like if it were as innovative as the services it enables, and to build a Corporate Policy Innovation Hub (launched in 2023) that pulls frontline staff, legal, finance, and communications into the room early, before a solution is fully defined. What’s particularly notable about this work is the municipal angle: local practitioners sit closest to residents and implement in real time, yet have far less access to structured policy training than their provincial and federal counterparts - a gap she frames as a sector-wide vulnerability rather than a local inconvenience. Her closing reflection is worth musing on: genuine innovation in policy turned out to be a matter of shifting mindsets, with the tools and frameworks following from there.

💻 “How one Australian State Built a Digital Government“ by Victor Dominello, Inflection Points

Dominello, who served as the State of New South Wales’s Minister for Digital, tells the story of how Service NSW became the kind of government app citizens genuinely like (yes, it’s possible!). He argues that seamless digital interaction now sits alongside roads and hospitals in how people judge a government, which puts service delivery at the centre of any conversation about trust and productivity. What’s striking is that Dominello identifies the foundation of the app’s success as being two policy decisions: the decision to consolidate client interactions via one “front door” at Service NSW, and the decision to create a digital driver’s license. This piece digs deep into the plumbing of the work, with lots of transferable insights for Canada.

🎓 “Government as a Brain“ by Geoff Mulgan, Digital Government: Research and Practice

Mulgan’s essay pairs nicely with Dominello’s, as it presses on what the digital services era left out, and delivers us a 🔥Policycraft Hot Take of the Month🔥. His provocation is that the 2010s fixation on government-as-service-provider carried a blind spot about how government actually “thinks”, “learns”, and “remembers”, and in some respects even set back the capabilities of policymaking. Borrowing the metaphor of a brain, he walks through the cognitive functions a state needs to perform well (observation, modelling, memory, creativity, empathy, and judgment) and argues that COVID exposed how unevenly governments manage them under uncertainty and speed. The phrase that lingers is “collective stupidity,” his name for what happens when those functions misfire. Mulgan’s call for a “cognitive political science” is an invitation to take the thinking apparatus of government as seriously as we have lately taken its service counters.

🎓 “Evidence for the future? Strategic foresight as a source of evidence for policymaking“ by Laura De Vito and Gaia Taffoni, Policy and Society

For the academically inclined, this article takes on a question I haven’t seen policymakers discuss before: can imagined futures actually count as evidence? The authors hold strategic foresight to the same scrutiny we apply to conventional, past-oriented evidence, asking how reliable and how usable it really is, and then specify three conditions (robustness, appropriateness, and inclusivity) under which foresight earns a legitimate place in the evidence base. They test the framework against two real exercises, the UK’s Net Zero Society scenarios and the EU’s ESPAS horizon-scanning work, and land on a measured conclusion: foresight belongs within a broader, pluralistic knowledge ecosystem, complementing established methods once its enabling conditions and limits are stated plainly. It is a thoughtful corrective to both the enthusiasts who oversell scenarios and the empiricists who wave them away.

Policycraft is built on the conviction that policymaking is a profession worth treating as one. Like every profession, it accumulates a vocabulary: doctors have theirs, lawyers have theirs, and policy wonks have ours. While acquiring the terms of art is part of how you become a member in good standing, the trouble with our vocabulary is that it tends to sound more rigorous than it is. “Wicked problem” gets invoked the way “systems thinking” or “evidence-based” get invoked, as shorthand that signals you’re taking the problem seriously without committing yourself to defining what makes it serious. We complain about low “policy capacity” without saying capacity for what, in whom, at what level; we’re missing something but struggle to articulate how to find it again. We write 100-page reports filled with everything we need to say but it’s a meme that says what elected officials need to hear.

Consider this month’s issue an exercise in slowing down and thinking again. What is a “wicked problem”? What is policy capacity and how do we know when we have it (or don’t)? What good are all those reports we produce? Is the posting-to-policy pipeline real? And why can’t everyone “just”…?

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

🎓 “Policy capacity: A conceptual framework for understanding policy competences and capabilities” by X Wu, M Ramesh, and M Howlett, Policy and Society

The precursor to Policycraft was a community of practice I built in government, and the impetus for that was a concern about policy capacity across Canadian government. We, rightly, talk a lot about state capacity. I’m interested in a component of that: the skills needed to design and decide on successful policies. This article is a good level-set on what public policy capacity is, as Wu, Ramesh, and Howlett theorize a matrix of nine sub-capacities, where three competences (analytical, operational, political) intersect with three resource levels (individual, organizational, systemic). The useful provocation embedded in the framework is that most policy failures emerge from imbalances across these cells: one or two capacities get all the attention while others starve.

A question for you, reader: How would we assess Canada’s current policy capacity? The last major academic surveys are from 15 years ago, but in 1996 the federal government commissioned research on the subject that unfortunately contains some chillingly prescient lines: “[The author] observes that at a time when there is a pressing need for governments to make departures from the status quo and to consider longer-term, strategic choices, a number of conflicting factors in the environment tend to inhibit them from doing so… He concludes with a warning that the ability of governments to deal with the increasing complexity of policy issues has been threatened by a decline in the importance attached to the public service’s policy role and the loss of a generation of trained policy analysts from government.”

📚 Inside Public-Sector Innovation: How Local Governments Put Ideas into Action by Zachary Spicer, Joseph Lyons, and Tyler Romualdi

I’m a huge booster of the idea that not only do municipalities do policy work, they are capable of delivering some of the most important and innovative policy work. I was so happy to see I’m not alone in this thinking, thanks to Spicer, Lyons, and Romualdi’s new book. What I particularly love about this publication is that they enlisted actual public servants to write their own case studies, sharing tactical insight into how and why they innovated in their governments and communities. The 17 cases span changes to organizations, processes, and services across municipalities of every shape and size, from the District of Squamish to the City of Toronto, organized into three thematic sections. The editors then bookend the cases with practical synthesis on the commonalities and lessons that emerge across them all. My personal favourites were about the innovation teams in Durham and York regions, the pushback against our increasingly low trust society by the Hamilton Public Library, and the forward-looking utilities governance in Richmond.

🎓 “What is so wicked about wicked problems? A conceptual analysis and a research program” by B Guy Peters, Policy and Society

Are ‘wicked’ problems all that wicked? 🔥Policycraft‘s Hot Take of the Month (Academic Edition)🔥 pushes back on how over-used that phrase is and posits that wickedness is about more than just complexity. Peters (also the author of the 1996 policy capacity report linked above) argues the concept has become a fad in contemporary policy analysis, with all manner of difficult problems labelled “wicked” regardless of whether they meet the original criteria laid out by Rittel and Webber back in 1973 (no definitive formulation of the problem, no stopping rule for solutions, novel rather than recurring, irreversible consequences, and so on). His proposed research program tests, empirically, whether problems we routinely call ‘wicked’ actually demonstrate the full set of attributes, or whether they are simply hard. The implication for practitioners: calling everything wicked obscures useful distinctions among problem types and steers us toward one-size-fits-all solutions, when in fact more tailored approaches are usually available.

Want to read more about wicked problems? Here’s a typology from John Alford and Brian Head with thoughts on how to solve particular kinds, complete with a contingency framework that matches a collaboration approach to problem type.

💻 “Death to the policy report” by Todd Moss, Eat More Electrons

Now for 🔥Policycraft’s Hot Take of the Month (Practitioner Edition)🔥, care of energy and poverty wonk Todd Moss, who says what we’re all thinking: do those massive reports we produce actually get read and, even more critically, do they actually effect change? Moss has the credentials to make the case, having worked at the World Bank and as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs before founding the Energy for Growth Hub. He estimates that the dozen most prominent U.S. think tanks alone publish 800 to 1,500 long-form PDFs a year, the bulk of which can’t be linked to any concrete policy outcome. His diagnosis is part economic (staff time, reviewer time, editorial costs, and design costs add up to six- and seven-figure expenditures per signature report), part epistemic (much of what gets published is repackaging of content already written elsewhere), and part organizational (writing a report is the lazy answer to an, ahem, wicked problem, and a way of mistaking activity for action). The piece ends with a few questions Moss thinks every think-tanker should ask before committing to another long report, mostly variations on: who is this for, and what specifically do you want them to do differently?

💻 “Policy memes 3.0 – predictions for 2026”, Re:State

Re:State introduced the concept of “policy memes” in 2024 and has been tracking them in the UK ever since. Their working definition: ideas that spread through the policy ecosystem because they are popular and confer status on the people using them, with their popularity eventually outrunning the actual content of the idea underneath. The 2026 instalment dissects five contenders shaping British policy debates this year, from “sovereignty” (which the authors read as a relabelling of an older “resilience” meme) to “investment” (which has become a euphemism for any government spending in need of a rhetorical upgrade). Some of their predictions should sound awfully familiar to Canadian readers. What are the policy memes floating around Canada today? “Nation-building”? “Strategic autonomy”? “Economic security”? “The middle power trap”? Am I missing any?

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On a related note, the posting-to-policy pipeline is one way policy memes are created and spread. Sometimes posting-to-policy looks like a literal meme, frequently it’s a Twitter rant, but if you’re really ambitious you do your policy posting in a Substack newsletter. For better or worse, policy is conceived and socialized online now, and so policymaking has absorbed components of Internet culture.

📣 “Everyone will not just”, Tumblr post by squareallworthy

My favourite social media site isn’t known for its insight, but this post has been a guiding light in my policy career. “If everyone would just behave rationally…” I have bad news for you.

Ever heard of mechanism design? This is a new concept to me, but a pair of articles I read recently — one on the American food bank auction market and the other on transferable development rights — sent me down a rabbit hole.

We talk a lot about the perverse, or even just misaligned, incentives within government. What if we actively tried to redesign those incentives to deliver more beneficial outcomes? Taking a page from Nobel Prize-winning economics work, there may be a way to do just that within policymaking.

Sometimes described as “reverse game theory,” the premise of mechanism design is compelling: instead of predicting outcomes from a given set of rules, mechanism design works backwards from the outcome you want and asks what rules would produce it.

In theory, this is a means by which we can reduce unintended consequences by baking second-order thinking into our policy design. If we understand that, for example, banning an undesirable activity will lead to certain unwanted behaviours meant to compensate for that ban, then perhaps we should consider a policy that addresses the incentives for the undesirable activity rather than simply banning it. It’s a more sophisticated approach to addressing problems that are frequently attempted to be solved by imprecise or blunt policies.

This issue’s syllabus follows several threads out from that central idea. The mechanism design piece anchors the collection, but it connects naturally to a question that Polly Mackenzie raises in her essay on the “dark matter” of public policy: if our instruments can’t see the relationships and informal forces that actually shape outcomes, how can we possibly design rules that account for them? And Mulgan and Leadbeater’s work on systems innovation reminds us that none of these interventions happen in isolation: markets, relationships, regulations, and behaviours are all interconnected, and changing one part of the system affects everything else.

From there, the syllabus turns to the people side of policycraft. Nature, of all sources, offers a research-backed strategy for communicating evidence to policymakers that takes seriously how human beings actually process information and make decisions. Two disparate pieces push us to think about how much framing matters when we design policy: a Policy Options article on guardianship governance asks what would change if future generations had a voice in today’s decisions, while a manifesto from fifteen public administration scholars challenges us to study what government does well with the same rigour we bring to studying what it gets wrong.

The thread running through all of it is a conviction that better policy doesn’t necessarily come from working harder within broken frameworks — it comes from redesigning the frameworks themselves.

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

💻 The rules of the game: using mechanism design to deliver a better, fairer Britain by John Myers and Pedro Serôdio, British Progress

This is the best practitioner-focused article I’ve found on mechanism design: full of real-world examples, analysis that links them all, and a clear explanation of what makes this approach so valuable for public policy. Myers and Serôdio walk through proven successes (school matching algorithms, spectrum auctions, kidney exchange) before turning to a set of emerging applications in housing and urban development that should make any Canadian policy practitioner sit up: resident ballots for estate renewal in London, opt-out zoning reform in Houston, land readjustment in Japan, and Israel’s TAMA 38 program, which turned homeowners into enthusiastic supporters of densification. The housing examples alone are worth the read, but the broader argument is what stays with you: that many of our most stubborn policy problems are best tackled not through exhortation or micromanagement, but by designing rules that make doing the right thing the easy thing.

Interested in digging deeper? This Harvard Business Review article from around the time of the Nobel Prize award is thick with illustrative examples and a lay-friendly explanation of the theory: The Art of Designing Markets by Alvin E. Roth.

💻 Invisible people by Polly Mackenzie, How to Run a Country

Have you felt a presence in your work that you’ve struggled to identify? Are there forces influencing your policymaking that can’t be described? Maybe you’ve noticed what Polly Mackenzie calls the “dark matter” of public policy: the relationships, risks, and outcomes that go unconsidered in our work but that have tremendous influence on everything around them. Our policy systems, she contends, are calibrated to see organizations, not relationships; formal structures, not informal ones; individuals, not the networks they inhabit. Informal caregivers, community enterprises, mutual aid networks, even scientists working outside universities: all doing real work, bearing real weight, but invisible to the instruments we’ve built. The proposed remedy is a shift from measuring process risk (did we follow the steps?) to outcome risk (did it actually work?). It’s a piece that names something many of us have sensed in our own work without quite being able to describe it. What would it take to build instruments that can actually see the forces shaping our outcomes?

💻 Systems Innovation Discussion Paper by Geoff Mulgan and Charlie Leadbeater, Nesta

An older paper comprised of two linked essays, this effort remains one of the most useful introductions to the importance of understanding government as a system, and understanding that which is governed by policy as a system, too: shaped by markets (à la mechanism design), by invisible relationships (à la dark matter), and by the interconnections between them. Mulgan’s essay maps out what systemic innovation actually means, how to identify leverage points, and why so many systems are victims of their own success (such as health care systems optimized for cures but poorly suited to chronic conditions). Leadbeater’s companion essay argues that products are only as valuable as the systems they are part of, using Apple, containerization, and Twitter(!) as case studies. Both authors grapple honestly with a foundational challenge: systemic innovation isn’t usually under the control of any one organization, it always involves complementary innovations, and it can go badly wrong. A relevant piece whether you’re trying to do digital government or get people to recognize that their silos are, in actual fact, a system.

🎓 How to communicate effectively with policymakers: combine insights from psychology and policy studies by Paul Cairney and Richard Kwiatkowski, Nature

An unprecedented interdisciplinary crossover event from an outlet I never thought would be cited in this newsletter: psychology and policy studies join forces in Nature. Cairney and Kwiatkowski synthesize very academic research on bounded rationality, cognitive heuristics, and emotional decision-making to produce a practical three-step strategy for anyone trying to influence the policy process. First, don’t bombard people with evidence: synthesize and frame it. Second, find the right time to act, both in terms of an individual’s receptiveness and the alignment of conditions in the political system. Third, engage with real-world policymaking rather than waiting for a rational, orderly process to appear. The authors insist their approach is pragmatic, not insidious: effective communication requires seeing the world from the perspective of your audience. They claim to not be encouraging Machiavellian behaviour in their readers, but whatever gets the job done...

💻 Guardianship governance: representing future generations in decision-making by Aleem Bharwani, Laura Spitz, and Sandra Davidson, Policy Options

Readers who enjoyed the look at Indigenous and First Nations approaches to policymaking in Issue 12 will find a natural extension here. This Policy Options article introduces the concept of “guardianship governance,” where a designated guardian sits at the decision-making table to represent the interests of future generations and the planet. The idea borrows from Indigenous governance models around the world, including New Zealand’s granting of legal personhood to the Whanganui River and Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations Act, which has reshaped how budgets and performance goals are set. At the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, two guardian positions have already been created alongside academic and community leaders. The guardians don’t hold a veto; instead they convene communities to imagine decades into the future and conduct future-back mapping exercises to align near-term budgets with long-range goals. It’s a practical model that asks a disarmingly simple question: what would change if someone at the table were accountable to people who aren’t yet born?

🎓 Towards Positive Public Administration: A Manifesto by Scott Douglas, Paul ‘t Hart and thirteen colleagues, unpublished

If you’re a public servant who has spent the last few years absorbing a steady drumbeat of criticism about government’s inability to deliver, this manifesto is for you. Written by fifteen scholars from across the field, it makes a disarmingly straightforward argument: public administration as a discipline has become overwhelmingly focused on disasters, blunders, fiascos, and failures, and this imbalance has real consequences. Citizens are ill-informed about what government does well. Civil servants operate in a political environment that derogates their accomplishments. And the scholarly literature offers far more insight into what went wrong than into the conditions under which public governance actually thrives. The authors call for a “Positive Public Administration” that systematically studies success: not to replace critical work, but to complement it. Inspired by positive psychology’s reorientation of its own field, they lay out research questions, conceptual starting points, and methodological approaches for understanding when and why policies, organizations, and collaborations produce widely valued outcomes. The authors are refreshingly honest about the traps of studying success (e.g., hero-centric narratives, selection bias, hindsight). But the core provocation holds: if the study of failure teaches us what to avoid, shouldn’t we be equally rigorous about understanding what to emulate?

I assume, like me, many of you read Mariana Mazzucato’s work on mission-oriented government and then watched it take over the last decade of public administration discourse. The idea of organizing government around big, cross-cutting missions has captured the imagination of reformers in the UK, the EU, Korea, Sweden, and beyond. The theory, in its most basic form, is compelling: pick an ambitious goal, align policy and resources across departments, and hold everyone accountable to outcomes. But how has the theory worked in practice?

This month’s syllabus digs into why the gap between mission theory and mission practice remains stubbornly wide, while also inspiring cautious optimism from the evidence starting to emerge from real-world experiments. Whether you’re a mission skeptic or a mission evangelist (or somewhere in between), there’s something here for you.

(Those of you who are aware of how Policycraft pays the bills may be curious about my thoughts on Mazzucato’s The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies. That commentary is available at the “Buy Me a Coffee Next Time You’re In Toronto” subscriber tier.)

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

💻 Why mission government failed, Joe Hill, Re:State

The UK Labour government’s experiment with mission-oriented government, heavily influenced by Mariana Mazzucato’s work, was supposed to be the template for a new kind of governing. Joe Hill’s post-mortem asks what went wrong. At the heart of his argument is what he calls “institutional romanticism”: the assumption that government can operate as a single purposeful actor when, in practice, it is a federation of small groups often working at cross-purposes. Government bodies, Hill argues, optimize for process, not outcomes, and punish failure far more readily than they reward success. The internal politics, inertia, and risk-aversion that characterize large bureaucracies were treated by Labour as obstacles to be overcome by sheer ambition rather than as design constraints to be worked around. Does this sound (heavy sigh) familiar to anyone?

Perhaps Hill’s most thought-provoking point is that there is no obvious successor to New Public Management as a governing paradigm. Mission-oriented government could have been that successor, but has struggled to translate its theoretical appeal into institutional change. If missions are not the answer, does the question of how to organize government for outcomes rather than outputs remain wide open?

💻 Unfit for uncertainty: Rethinking decision-making for missions and Beyond the waterfall state: Why missions need a different decision-making architecture, Jack Strachan, CivicWorks

This two-part analysis from Jack Strachan at CivicWorks examines how the wrong decision-making frameworks actively undermine mission-oriented government. The first piece argues that governments still rely on decision logics designed for predictable, linear problems; logics wholly inadequate for the extreme uncertainty that marks 21st-century policymaking. Essentially, when you attempt to run complex, adaptive challenges through machinery built for stability, the machinery produces the wrong answers.

The second piece discusses the concept of the “waterfall state,” a term that will resonate with anyone who has watched a policy move through sequential approval gates that strip out all the adaptive qualities it needs to survive contact with reality. The architecture of government decision-making, Strachan argues, needs to be rebuilt from first principles if missions are to stand any chance. Both pieces are chock full of links to deeper and broader thinking on the ideas raised; it’s worth dramatically slowing down your browser with tabs for all that extended reading.

💻 Challenges and opportunities of mission-oriented innovation policy in Korea and Governance of ecosystem-driven missions, OECD

Want something more optimistic, more specific, and more hands-on? The OECD has been diving deep into mission-oriented government, collecting evidence from around the world and attempting to capture best practices (and common failures). The Korea report examines how one of the world’s most coordinated innovation systems has adapted mission-oriented approaches, building on a long history of centralized science and technology policy coordination. Korea’s experience shows both the promise and the limitations: strong institutional frameworks can make mission alignment easier, but even there, simplifying prioritization across government and connecting societal missions to existing innovation infrastructure remain major challenges.

The Sweden report, meanwhile, “stress-tests” the governance of five distinct ecosystem-driven missions, covering everything from sustainable metals to public sector health reform. It’s a valuable look at what mission governance actually means when you get past the theory and into the messy work of coordinating across agencies, sectors, and stakeholders. For anyone wanting to move from “missions sound great in principle” to “here’s how they work (and don’t) in practice,” both reports are worth your time.

🎙️ Ingredients for mission-oriented government, GovMaker Podcast

To close out the missions theme, check out this podcast interview from a UK public servant Sarah Doyle, who has been in the belly of the mission-oriented beast and has lots to share. (She is also a veteran of our very own MaRS Discovery District!) The conversation covers the practical ingredients required for mission-oriented work to actually function inside government, including what kinds of teams, mandates, and institutional support make the difference between a mission that generates real momentum and one that becomes another strategy document gathering dust. As a bonus, she discusses a recurring theme on Policycraft: the role of storytelling within policymaking, and why the narrative a government tells itself about a mission matters as much as the formal governance architecture around it.

🎓 Carrot first, stick second? Environmental policy-mix sequencing and green technologies, Kinga B. Tchorzewska, Pablo del Río, Jose Garcia-Quevedo, and Ester Martinez-Ros, Technological Forecasting and Social Change

Should we use tax credits or subsidies to incentivize behaviour? Why not both? Well, actually, this research suggests you should be careful about that. Using a panel database of Spanish firms’ green technology investments over a decade, the authors investigate whether the sequencing of different policy instruments matters for outcomes. It turns out, it does. Introducing subsidies (“carrots”) before environmental taxes (“sticks”) significantly boosts the adoption of eco-innovations, particularly for small and medium firms. Introducing sticks first and then carrots? No statistically significant effect on adoption. Perhaps most striking, tax credits and subsidies turn out to be substitutes rather than complements; using both doesn’t add value and may create substantial inefficiencies. The implications are clear: if you’re designing a policy mix, the order in which you introduce your instruments matters as much as the instruments themselves. One for the “implementation details matter” file.

💻 Practice notes on including citizens in the design process, Jack Strachan, CivicWorks

Let’s make it a hat trick for CivicWorks: I simply couldn’t let this humble and generous advice on how to better include citizens and their knowledge in your policymaking pass by unshared. Strachan offers field notes on trust, “participatory scaffolding”, and shared agency that avoid the typical top-down consultation framework approach in favour of something more honest. His first point reminds me of my work at the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, where visiting a local chamber always provided me with greater insight into a policy issue than any number of reports ever could.

💻 Inside the Halloween Massacre, David McLaughlin, Governance Matters

Fill your rocks glass and settle in for a tale of how to make good policy and good politics, from Policycraft’s former public service boss, David McLaughlin. In this recent piece from his newsletter, David shares all the behind-the-scenes drama, skullduggery, and measured policymaking that went into the Conservative government’s 2006 decision to kill income trusts, a move that was economically necessary but politically explosive. Come for a deeper understanding of the push and pull between political imperatives and policy rigour, stay for the cameo from a future Prime Minister.

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If you have 5 minutes, I’d appreciate your feedback via this reader survey.

This month’s issue of Policycraft explores some fundamental questions about our mental models of public policy, from the way we orient public services to the decisions we make about what public policy even means.

But before we dive in, I need your help with something: I’m running my first reader survey to make sure the resources I share every month provide value. I’m making assumptions when I curate links - and some of those assumptions may be wrong! So set me straight while telling me a little bit about yourself :)

The survey takes 5 minutes and I’d greatly appreciate hearing from you. While your responses are confidential, I’ll share aggregated results in a future issue so you can see how your experience compares to others in the community.

Take the survey here.

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

💻 The Social State: From Transactional to Relational Public Services, Polly Mackenzie, Demos

This Demos paper discusses the concept of “relational public services” in contrast to traditional “transactional public services” and makes the case that shifting from the latter to the former can build community connections alongside solving immediate needs. The argument is that relational approaches can improve outcomes by giving citizens more control and confidence to resolve their own problems. In an era where we aim to optimize public services for efficiency and throughput, this asks whether those metrics were ever the right ones. I’d add another question: if the fundamental relationship between service provider and client needs to change, what does that mean for the assumptions within policies that govern it?

💻 The $115 million paperwork kludge, Noah Zon

From friend of the newsletter Noah Zon comes a piece about the frustration anyone who has come into contact with government services knows (and had me saying “Yes! Exactly!!” as I read it): our kludgeocracy. Canada’s Disability Tax Credit is meant to provide financial support to people with disabilities, but accessing it requires navigating paperwork that costs applicants an average of $115 million annually in medical assessments and form completion. This is what happens when we layer complexity onto complexity instead of designing services around actual user needs. It may be easy to dismiss administrative burden as annoying, but it can actively undermine policy intent by creating barriers that disproportionately exclude the people who need support most. Noah’s analysis shows how simplification efforts may not simplify anything, and why that pattern persists.

💻 Immigration Is Not One Thing That Has Effects, Alexander Kustov

Political scientist Alexander Kustov uses immigration as his case study to make a point about policy analysis more broadly. Treating big abstract concepts as single variables with measurable “effects” fundamentally misrepresents how public policy works. When we say “immigration reduces crime” or “immigration depresses wages,” we’re aggregating wildly different contexts into meaningless generalizations. Legal status, labour market conditions, enforcement regimes, community integration all matter. Instead of asking “does immigration have good or bad effects?”, the better question is “under what specific conditions does which type of immigration policy produce which particular outcomes for whom?” This applies far beyond immigration: every time we talk about “the effects of regulation” or “the impact of housing policy,” we risk the same category error. Policy choices matter because context matters.

💻 A new model for think tank communications (Part I) and Part II, Cast From Clay

These two blog posts from a UK strategic communications consultancy tackle a problem that extends well beyond think tanks. The traditional model of policy communication puts the report at the centre when the story should be at the centre. Typically, a researcher produces a rigorous 40-page report, a communications officer promotes said report via launch event and press release and maybe some social posts. Cast From Clay argues for a shift from the “paratext model” (where all communications are accessories to the report) to a “transmedia model” (where each channel tells self-contained substories that build the broader narrative). The key finding from their research is that policymakers want frameworks and arguments to understand complexity, not just evidence. For anyone trying to get policy ideas heard, whether in think tanks, advocacy, or consulting, this reframing is worth sitting with.

💻“Advice for advisors - 14 lessons for making government work”, Henry de Zoete, Comment is Freed 💰 (accessible via free trial)
Hat tip to Thomas Goldsmith for sharing this link.

This advice - from a former Special Advisor in the UK government to his peers - may be steeped in British political and legislative context, but there is a lot about prioritization and navigation in a political office that is transferrable to Canada. Whether you’re a political staffer, a Deputy Minister, a ‘czar’, or some other advisor to an elected official, you’ll likely find some pragmatic takeaways on this list. (I’d even go so far as to qualify some of de Zoete’s advice for 🔥Policycraft’s Hot Take of the Month🔥 status. “Do as little as possible cross-government” made me groan).

🎙️ The Functional Government Podcast, Alistair Croll

Check out this new Canadian podcast exploring digital government innovation via real-world case studies and the people who made them happen. Host Alistair Croll chats with figures like Senator Colin Deacon on entrepreneurship in government, Code for Canada’s Dorothy Eng on digital service delivery, and Ryan Androsoff on the origins of Canada’s digital government ambitions. If you’re interested in digital government, this could be worth adding to your rotation.

📣 “Everyone wants to be a pundit, no one wants to be the policy wonk”, social post by Jason,

Does this frustration feel familiar to anyone else?

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One last reminder to fill out the reader survey here - thank you!

Help shape Policycraft in 2026 by completing our first annual reader survey

As we head into year two of Policycraft, I want to make sure this newsletter is actually useful to you - not just intellectually interesting, but genuinely valuable in your work. I’ve put together a quick survey (5-7 minutes, honest) that will help me understand you, your needs, and what you’d find most helpful going forward. Your responses are confidential, but I’ll share key insights so you can see how your experience compares to others in the community. As a thank-you, all respondents will be entered into a draw to win a $50 Virtual Visa eGift Card.

If you’ve been reading for a while - or even if you just subscribed - I’d really value your input. Click here to take survey

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The theme of this month’s issue is policy failure. Given it’s the season for New Year’s resolutions, this feels particularly timely (speaking of, did you know you’re allowed to make a fun New Year’s resolution rather than a punitive one?). But focusing on failure isn’t meant as doom and gloom: in the spirit of fresh starts, this month’s links are all about learning from what went wrong, improving accountability, and trying to do better next time.

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

🎓 “Policy failure and the policy-implementation gap: can policy support programs help?”, Bob Hudson, David Hunter, and Stephen Peckham, Policy Design and Practice

Let’s start at the beginning, by understanding what contributes to policy failure: overly optimistic expectations, implementation via dispersed governance structures, inadequately collaborative policymaking, and the vagaries of the political cycle. Rather than just cataloguing what goes wrong, this article also explores how policy support programs can strengthen implementation processes. The authors identify practical intervention points across the policy lifecycle, from preparation through tracking and review, offering a framework for anticipating and addressing the common pitfalls that send well-intentioned policies off the rails.

💻 “Drawing lessons from design on how to improve policy”, B. Guy Peters and Nenad Rava, International Public Policy Association

This paper argues that design thinking principles can not only help create policy, but can make it better (and, thus, less likely to fail). Design approaches emphasize iteration, user-centredness, and prototyping, recognizing that solutions emerge through experimentation rather than perfect upfront planning. By adopting design practices, policymakers can better navigate uncertainty, test assumptions before full-scale implementation, and create policies that respond to real-world conditions rather than theoretical ideals. The framing is particularly useful for thinking about policy as something crafted rather than merely decided.

🏛️ ‘Outcomes Review’ legislative oversight initiative, California State Assembly

California State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas has launched something novel: a structured process to review whether laws actually do what they’re supposed to do. As Jennifer Pahlka notes in her analysis of the initiative, lawmakers introduce bills partly because it garners attention and helps with re-election. This initiative offers a different path to that same attention by focusing on making existing laws work. It’s a modest pilot starting with 8-15 laws in 2026, but it addresses a fundamental gap: between 2016 and 2022, California passed over 100 bills to stimulate housing production, yet permit numbers have barely budged. This program might just shift legislative culture from volume to impact. Worth watching.

🎓 “Rethinking accountability in public service delivery: the design mismatch problem and its policy mix solutions”, Yifei Yan, Policy Design and Practice

This somewhat dense academic text tackles a critical driver of policy failure: poor accountability or, more precisely, the mismatch between accountability tools and the problems they’re meant to solve. The author details how different accountability instruments need to be deployed strategically for different purposes. The key contribution is making explicit what’s often implicit: not all accountability mechanisms work for all situations, and treating them as interchangeable leads to policy designs that look like they should work but don’t. The paper offers a framework for thinking systematically about which accountability tools to use when, and how to combine them into effective policy mixes rather than hoping that any accountability will do.

📚 The Policy Playbook by Catherine Althaus, Suhit Anantula, and Pia Andrews

Australia is, to my mind, currently producing the best thinking about how to improve governance and policymaking. Written by three experienced wonks, The Policy Playbook synthesizes decades of practice into actionable guidance for policymakers navigating the full policy lifecycle. From analyzing political environments to engaging diverse voices and crafting compelling narratives, it distills practical wisdom about what works. The Australian public service has been at the forefront of evidence-based policymaking and adaptive governance approaches for some time now, and this playbook reflects that maturity. Whether you’re developing policy proposals, managing stakeholder engagement, or implementing programs, the playbook offers frameworks grounded in real-world experience rather than abstract theory. This is the resource you should read to kick-start 2026.

📹 Civic Punks YouTube channel

Speaking of starting 2026 inspired and energized, check out friend of the newsletter Derek Alton’s Civic Punks YouTube channel, where he talks to smart people and cool organizations from around the world about how to make government work better. Civic Punks is cut from the same philosophical cloth as Policycraft, in that we both think improving policymaking and governance can be fun. Not sure where to start? I found his interview with Policy Playbook co-author Pia Andrews on the future of government to be particularly thought-provoking.

📣 “If mission failure is not a failure you get scored on…” social posts by Patrick McKenzie and Alec Stapp, Twitter/X

This Twitter exchange captures a fundamental pathology in public sector decision-making: organizations optimize for what they’re measured against, and if you’re not held accountable for policy failure (only for failing to follow processes), you’ll end up with a system that defaults to inaction. The insight has particular resonance when you consider how many policy failures stem not from doing the wrong thing, but from failing to do anything at all. Patrick McKenzie’s observation about accountability structures determining failure modes connects directly to the Yan paper on accountability design: when we don’t think carefully about what we’re incentivizing, we get predictable (if perverse) outcomes. Government’s extreme risk aversion looks irrational until you realize that, from an individual bureaucrat’s perspective, it’s entirely rational given how accountability flows.

One more reminder: Click here to take the first annual reader survey and influence the future of Policycraft.

Thank you so much to the 30-odd Toronto Policycraft readers who came out to talk shop with me on November 13. It was wonderful meeting you and overhearing such smart conversations!

I plan to host more casual policy talk events in 2026, so don’t worry if you missed this one.

In addition to those events, next year will see some exciting new initiatives: a reader survey, collaborations with like-minded partners, an original essay or two, and more organized and accessible resources.

If you’ve found the first year of Policycraft to be of value, I’d appreciate you sharing it with friends and colleagues in the public policy space.

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THE 2025 POLICYCRAFT GIFT GUIDE

Policycraft isn’t just here to aid in your professional and intellectual development; this newsletter also exists to solve the most intractable (according to my husband) problem of all: what to get the policy wonk who has everything.

This month, our syllabus is a gift guide tailored to the person who is looking forward to the holidays so they can finally make a dent in their to-read list. Armed with the thinking and tools on this list, you’ll be ready for whatever wicked problems come your way in the new year.

NB: This is likely the only gift guide on the internet with no paid partnerships or affiliate links, as Policycraft is not yet big enough for me to sell out.

Books

Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services by Michael Lipsky

This seminal 1980 text coined the term “street-level bureaucrat” and revolutionized how we understand policy implementation. Lipsky argues that teachers, police officers, social workers, and other public servants who directly interact with citizens are the real policymakers, and that their daily decisions and coping mechanisms shape policy outcomes far more than any legislative intent. (Make sure you grab a copy of the expanded, 30th anniversary edition!)

Perfect for: Anyone who’s ever wondered why policy looks so different on the ground than on paper

Speaking Truth to Canadians About Their Public Service by Donald Savoie

Recommended in Issue 1

Public administration scholar Donald Savoie examines the contemporary capacity of the federal public service to deliver for Canadians, arguing that without strong state capacity, even well-designed policies will struggle to hit their marks. A critical book for understanding if the Canadian government is able to meet the challenges of the 2020s (and beyond).

Perfect for: Anyone with big ideas about what the federal government ‘should’ be doing

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka

Recommended in Issue 2

Although framed as a book about implementing technology in the American public sector, Pahlka has actually created an empathetic and clear-eyed explanation of how and why government works (or, more often, doesn’t). Reading how, with pragmatism and patience, she was able to make positive change is essential for understanding how to get anything done in government.

Perfect for: Public servants trapped in the machine but still hoping to make a difference

Red Tape: Its Origins, Uses and Abuses by Howard Kaufman

Recommended in Issue 3

This slim text gets to the root of “red tape” as a symptom of low trust and a lack of human judgment and accountability in government; the more we try to reduce unwanted behaviors, the more we become snarled in its grasp.

Perfect for: Anyone wrestling with regulatory burden and process design; those interested in the unintended consequences of well-intentioned rules

Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis

Recommended in Issue 6

Michael Lewis profiles everyday public servants whose hard work and sense of duty keeps the American government running. Charmingly, one chapter features the Consumer Price Index as a character, making a stirring case for objective data in policymaking.

Perfect for: Public servants who need to remember why they chose this work

Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means by Donald P. Moynihan and Pamela Herd

Recommended in Issue 10

This award-winning book examines how paperwork and bureaucracy can systematically exclude populations and undermine policy goals in ways that amount to policymaking by stealth.

Perfect for: Anyone working on service delivery, program design, or equity issues

The Systems Bible by John Gall

Referenced in Issue 11

A cult favourite text offering the core wisdom that “a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked”. This is essential reading on how systems actually succeed (and fail).

Perfect for: The skeptic who knows complexity can’t always be controlled

Law’s Indigenous Ethics by John Borrows

Author featured in Issue 12

Influential legal scholar John Borrows explores the renewal of Indigenous legal traditions and their emerging relationship with Canadian law, offering frameworks for governance beyond the Indian Act.

Perfect for: Professionals working on, or trying to inform their work with, reconciliation and Indigenous approaches to governance

Tragedy in the Commons: Former Members of Parliament Speak Out About Canada’s Failing Democracy by Alison Loat & Michael MacMillan

Based on over 80 exit interviews with former MPs across all parties, this book reveals what really happens inside Parliament and why so many politicians leave disillusioned. Loat and MacMillan (founders of the Samara Centre for Democracy) document the reality of life as a backbencher: minimal influence on policy, rigid party discipline, and a system that wastes political talent on partisan theatre rather than substantive governance. Essential reading for understanding the incentive structures that shape (and constrain) political decision-making in Canada.

Perfect for: Bureaucrats who need to understand why ministerial priorities shift so erratically and why MPs seem more interested in Question Period zingers than committee work; early career wonks who want to know why good policy doesn’t get legislative air time

Subscriptions and Memberships

Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de politiques

Canada’s foremost journal examining economic and social policy. Published quarterly by University of Toronto Press since 1975, it’s interdisciplinary, bilingual, and directed at policy researchers who need rigorous evidence and analysis on Canadian policy problems.

Individual digital and print subscriptions available at utppublishing.com/journals/cpp/subscribe

Perfect for: The policy professional eager for peer-reviewed research relevant to the Canadian context

Works in Progress

Fresh, contrarian takes on governance and policy with a technical bent, now available as a beautifully designed physical magazine. Brings deep, rigorous thinking about systems, infrastructure, and institutional design to your coffee table.

Physical magazine subscription available at worksinprogress.co/print

Perfect for: The technically- (or aesthetically-) minded wonk

Membership or donation to a favourite think tank

Give a win-win gift by investing in the Canadian think tank of your recipient’s choice: while only the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and C.D. Howe accept individual memberships, shops as diverse as the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the Fraser Institute, and the Broadbent Institute accept charitable donations.

Perfect for: Anyone who values civil society input into policymaking

Other Must-Have Items

A ticket to Public Policy Forum’s Annual Testimonial Dinner

Perfect for: Wonks in need of inspiration; anyone who wants to see and be seen in the Canadian public policy circle.

Noise-cancelling headphones to survive any return-to-office mandate

Perfect for: The Ontario Public Service

Productivity-enhancing technology

The Overton Index – The public policy research equivalent of Google Scholar (recommended in Issue 11)

Miro or Mural – For collaborative consultation, policy design, and visual thinking

Tableau – Powerful data visualization

NVivo – Qualitative research software for consultation analysis

Claude or Gemini 3 – The best AI tools for graduate-level research assistance

Perfect for: The future of policycraft

Bullshit Bingo: The Management Bollocks, Business Bullshit, Nonsensical Buzzwords and Ludicrous Office Jargon Bingo Game by Robert Frosdick

😉

Have a very happy holiday season! Policycraft will return in January 2026.

Before we get to the meat of the newsletter, just a quick reminder about Policycraft: The Implementation Phase (a.k.a. a casual meet-up in Toronto next week). Hope to see some of you there!

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Indigenous Approaches to Policymaking: An Exploration and Invitation

This month’s edition of Policycraft is structured a bit differently, as I want to invite you into my process and see if we can learn together. I’ve been exploring Canadian First Nations approaches to policymaking for some time, finding myself navigating what appears to be a notable gap in the literature. While Indigenous scholars have produced rich legal analyses of sovereignty and rights, there’s surprisingly limited writing that directly addresses the art of policymaking through an Indigenous lens. Below, I’ve shared some of what I’ve learned so far, but would like to invite my readers to contribute their own insights and offer their own resources as part of an evolving conversation, either in the comments or directly with me.

THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

The natural starting place for this exploration is the “seven generations” concept: the principle that decisions should consider their impact seven generations into the future. Influential legal scholar John Borrows offers a particularly helpful articulation of this philosophy in his piece for the National Centre for First Nations Governance, where he weaves together the seven generations concept with the seven grandfather teachings (wisdom, love, respect, bravery, humility, honesty, and truth) to imagine governance beyond the Indian Act. His work demonstrates how traditional teachings can inform contemporary governance challenges while maintaining cultural integrity.

Some international scholarship can offer complementary perspectives, particularly work coming out of Australia. A common thread is how, by excluding Indigenous ways of ‘knowing’ (including knowledge-generation/collection), critical information is left out of policymaking, thus undermining its efficacy.

Back in Canada, one scholar has proposed to adapt the established Indigenous Research Framework into an Indigenous Policy Research Framework. This approach addresses how policy studies have been complicit in maintaining colonial knowledge production practices in relation to Indigenous peoples, and proposes principles for ‘decolonizing’ policy research.

Ethnographic research can provide ground-level insights into how these principles operate in practice. The University of Victoria’s Indigenous Governance Program is producing such work, including this MA thesis examining the policymaking values of an Indigenous civic organization, the Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society in Edmonton. Bent Arrow’s governance model demonstrates how traditional teachings - including the Medicine Wheel and Natural Laws of love/kindness, honesty, sharing, and strength - can structure contemporary service delivery. Their approach is also illustrative of how Indigenous policymaking values frequently emerge from lived practice rather than abstract theory.

Beyond the environmental and natural resource extraction policies that tend to dominate much Indigenous policy discourse, First Nations are asserting control over fundamental aspects of governance that the Indian Act has historically constrained. Take, for example, data sovereignty. The principles of OCAP (ownership, control, access, and possession) establish how First Nations’ data and information will be collected, protected, used, or shared - supporting strong information governance as a means to data sovereignty.

What I’ve understood from this incomplete review is how Indigenous policymaking approaches consistently emphasize relationships, reciprocity, and long-term thinking over a transactional, short-term orientation. These aren’t simply different methods for achieving similar ends; arguably, they represent fundamentally different understandings of what policy is for and how it should function in society.

I invite readers who have encountered other examples of Indigenous policymaking frameworks - whether from Canada or elsewhere, in scholarship or in practice - to share their findings. I’m particularly interested in work that bridges the theoretical and practical, showing how Indigenous knowledge systems translate into concrete policy mechanisms and outcomes.

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📚 “Introduction: The Concept of Policy Style” by Jeremy Richardson in British Policy-Making and the Need for a Post-Brexit Policy Style*

Attempting to understand the differences between non-Indigenous Canadian forms of policymaking and that of First Nations governments naturally raises the question of how policymaking is approached in different national or cultural contexts. Comparative policy analysis is a well-established form of scholarship, and many readers may have likely encountered Jeremy Richardson’s name from a notable 1982 work comparing policy styles in Western European countries. Here, in the introduction to his 2018 book, he re-visits his analysis of the British policy style and traces how it has seemingly calloused in recent years. A worthwhile read as we reflect on how policy styles have evolved in the past - and so may be capable of change in the future.

*NB: Rather than directing you to purchase this book in order to read the introduction, I’m sharing a PDF’d version of the unproofed draft helpfully posted by the author on his ResearchGate profile (a.k.a. the academic’s PirateBay).

🎓 “Anticipating and designing for policy effectiveness” by Azad Singh Bali, Giliberto Capano & M. Ramesh, Policy and Society

Good policy design isn’t merely about choosing the right tools, it’s about anticipating how those tools will perform in the real world. This paper argues that effective policies require anticipating their appropriateness along three dimensions: analytical (can the instrument solve the problem?), operational (is it feasible to deploy?), and political (is it acceptable to the public?). The authors apply this lens to both the choice of policy instruments and the capacity of implementing agencies, making the case that anticipation (foreseeing the future and preparing for it) should be central to how policies are designed, executed, and assessed.

💻 Getting the Public on Side, OECD

This recent report from the OECD tackles a challenge every policy professional knows well: building public support for necessary reforms. The outcome of their research is a Public Acceptability Tool to help policymakers more accurately assess whether proposed reforms align with public perceptions. For Canadian policy thinkers navigating everything from climate change to health system reform, this offers a practical framework for integrating public acceptability into the policymaking process from the start.

💻 Reasons not to work at think tanks, by Joe Hill, Re:State

In a refreshingly honest recruitment pitch, Re:State’s Policy Director flips the script on think tank job advertisements by laying out all the reasons you shouldn’t apply to his organization. From the reality that you’ll need to argue unpopular positions publicly to the fact that salaries can be modest, this piece cuts through the usual “intellectually stimulating” platitudes to describe what the work actually entails. Consider this a valuable gut check on whether the sector’s realities match your expectations.

(Personally, I loved working at a think tank, and so wish Canada’s ecosystem was larger and more robust, particularly for early-career researchers and wonks who would benefit from the wealth of learning opportunities afforded by this kind of workplace.)

📣 “Do you like public policy?” social post by Neil Chilson, Twitter/X

Sigh.

I've been known to complain about policymakers who don't engage in "systems thinking" - that is, being able to see that their area of focus as part of a larger system with cause and effect that should be taken into consideration when making decisions. It's become something of a mantra: think systemically, map the interconnections, understand the feedback loops.

This month, we share tools for incorporating systems thinking into policymaking, including how to tackle complexity through cross-government collaboration and focused coordination from the centre. But we also feature a contrarian take that challenges the orthodoxy: maybe governments do too much systems thinking, in the vain belief that if they can map it, they can control it.

Other links examine how policy design can inadvertently reward dishonesty, explore what “f-words” make civil service advice truly valuable to decision-makers, and demonstrate a remarkable new tool for tracking how research actually influences policy.

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Policycraft: The Implementation Phase

Coming out of the pandemic, being part of real-life community has become a core value for me. This means not only showing up for community being created by someone else, but trying to seed my own. That's why, to mark Policycraft's one-year anniversary, I'm hosting a meetup in Toronto.

This is networking with substance: policy talk over drinks, commiserations over shared challenges and, hopefully, connecting with like-minded people who have a vision for the future of our profession. (Make no mistake, it’s also intended to be fun).

All are welcome - bring your wonky friends and colleagues, even if they aren't Policycraft subscribers. I’m looking forward to putting faces to readers, and to hearing all about what you're working on in the real world.

Date: Thursday, November 13, 2025

Time: 5:30pm - 7:30pm

Location: Sin & Redemption Pub, Toronto

Please RSVP via Luma by November 6.

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

💻"Magical systems thinking", Ed Bradon, Works in Progress

We start our investigation into systems thinking with a contrarian take. This piece dismantles the idea that we can engineer our way out of complex policy problems through sophisticated systems mapping and analysis. The author traces how Jay Forrester's World Dynamics model spectacularly failed to predict our actual future, despite its mathematical elegance. The real insight here isn't that systems thinking is useless, but that we've been doing the wrong kind. Maybe Forrester's problem was applying the engineer's "hard" systems thinking to what Peter Checkland calls "soft" systems: the messy human activity where "valid different perspectives on the issue or situation interpret information quite differently".

🏛️ Steering from the Centre of Government in Times of Complexity: Compendium of Practices, OECD

This OECD compendium offers a more optimistic take on functional systems thinking, positioning the centre of government as the critical node for managing complexity. Rather than mapping every interconnection, it focuses on how centres of government can serve as bridges between political priorities and administrative execution, stewarding cross-cutting policies that no single department can handle alone. The approach acknowledges complexity without claiming to control it, using the centre's unique position to coordinate rather than command. Think of it as systems thinking with humility: recognizing that the system is bigger than any one actor, but that strategic coordination points can still influence outcomes.

🏛️ "Systems thinking for civil servants", UK Government Office for Science

Here’s a refreshingly practical guide that doesn't promise to solve everything. This UK government toolkit acknowledges upfront that systems thinking works best for genuinely complex problems - those where stakeholders disagree, the environment is dynamic, and you're aiming for sustained change at scale. It includes a useful diagnostic to help civil servants distinguish between complicated problems (which you can solve with traditional approaches) and complex ones (where systems thinking might help). The framework maps systems tools to familiar policy development stages, making the approach accessible without overselling its capabilities. It’s also notable for what it doesn't claim: that mapping the system means you can control it.

🎓“New development: Addressing wicked policy problems through cross-government collaboration—Insights from the UK context”, Olga Siemers and Ileana Daniela Serban, Public Money & Management 💰

This study from the UK shows that successful intra-government collaboration requires leaders' sustained attention, careful management of power dynamics, and genuine public engagement. But here's the catch: the very complexity that makes collaboration necessary also makes it incredibly difficult to execute. Departments face competing incentives, misaligned accountability structures, and the challenge of thinking beyond their institutional boundaries while still fulfilling their mandates.

The most interesting finding? The system of government itself might be leveraged as a tool to manage complexity: not by eliminating silos, but by creating structured ways for them to work together when it matters. It's systems thinking applied to the machinery of government by using the existing bureaucratic ecosystem more strategically rather than trying to redesign it from scratch.

💻"The honesty tax", Kelsey Piper, The Argument

A devastating critique of how public policy design can punish honesty and reward those willing to lie. The author's key insight is that this misconduct isn't necessarily about individual moral failing, but poorly designed systems that make lying the rational choice. When rules are widely ignored because they're, for lack of a better word, stupid, we end up "selecting for liars" rather than fixing the underlying problems. The Biden administration's mixed signals on marijuana use for federal employees perfectly captures this dynamic: honest disclosure led to firings while those who stayed quiet kept their jobs. A sobering reminder that the gap between written rules and real rules can erode social trust in ways both big and small.

🎤"Mastering the art of free and frank advice", speech given by Andrew Kibblewhite, New Zealand Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet

New Zealand's former Head of Policy Profession Andrew Kibblewhite delivers a masterclass on what makes advice truly valuable to decision-makers. His framework of "f-words" (free, frank, fearless, full, future-focused, and fallible) offers a sophisticated take on the civil servant's role that goes well beyond just "fearless advice and loyal implementation." The insight that advice should be "fallible" is particularly striking: acknowledging uncertainty and building in feedback loops is better than false confidence.

Kibblewhite tackles the tension between providing robust advice and maintaining ministerial confidence, arguing that great advisors earn the right to be challenging through their responsiveness and political savvy. His warning about the drift away from written advice is prescient: oral briefings may feel more agile, but they leave ministers (and the public) vulnerable when decisions go wrong. The speech also grapples thoughtfully with how freedom of information laws can inadvertently discourage frank advice, a dilemma that will only intensify as transparency expectations grow.

⚙️The Overton Index, Overton.io

A fascinating resource that tracks over 21 million policy documents from 30,000+ organizations worldwide, automatically identifying citations to academic research and creating a map of how insight and commentary flow into real-world decision-making. Think of it as the policy equivalent of Google Scholar: finally making the "grey literature" of government reports, think tank publications, and policy briefs searchable and analyzable at scale.

What makes this resource particularly valuable for policy practitioners is its ability to reverse-engineer influence; you can see which research actually gets cited in policy documents, track how long it takes for academic findings to reach policymakers, and identify gaps where good research isn't breaking through. For researchers trying to maximize policy impact, the Index is a goldmine for understanding what works and what doesn't in the evidence-to-policy pipeline. It also reveals the geographic and linguistic biases in policy citation patterns, offering insights into whose voices are heard in global policy conversations.

Policycraft was always intended to be a way to build community. After all, public policy is fundamentally about people - the communities we serve, the colleagues with whom we collaborate, and the networks that help us do better work. That's why, as we approach the newsletter's first anniversary in November, I'm considering hosting a casual meetup in Toronto to start bringing this community into the real world.

Whether you're a regular reader or this is your first issue, I'd love to hear from you about a potential get-together. Think post-work networking with substance: policy talk over drinks, connections made over shared challenges, and maybe some solutions sketched on napkins. Please let me know your interest via this quick Google Form here.

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A few months ago, I shared Springboard Policy's excellent advice about how to ask for an informational interview. Now, they've turned the tables and have guidance for those of us whose brains are being picked. If you've ever found yourself fielding coffee requests from eager policy newcomers, this guide will help you make those conversations more valuable for everyone involved.

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THIS MONTH'S SYLLABUS

📚 Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, by Donald P. Moynihan and Pamela Herd

Is the "administrative burden" a form of policymaking? That's the compelling argument in this award-winning book from Georgetown University scholars Donald Moynihan and Pamela Herd. They define administrative burden as the paperwork, bureaucracy, and complicated regulations that confuse and prevent applicants from accessing the government programs to which they're entitled. These burdens aren't just bureaucratic irritants - they can systematically exclude certain populations and undermine policy goals in ways that amount to policymaking by stealth. If you're still working through your pile of beach reads, check out this 45-minute lecture from Moynihan filled with compelling personal stories, illustrative examples from around the world, and practical strategies for reducing administrative burden.

💻 Reviewing Reviews: Lessons from past independent policy reviews, Institute for Government

Old reliable the Institute for Government has produced another gem-packed lessons learned document, this time on policy reviews. So your government has finally agreed to conduct a review - but how do you design one that actually generates useful recommendations? And perhaps more importantly, what do you do with the results once they land on your minister's desk? This guide walks through everything from scoping and timing to managing stakeholder expectations and ensuring implementation. Essential reading if you're commissioning, participating in, or trying to learn from policy reviews.

🎓 Three Habits of Successful Policy Entrepreneurs, Paul Cairney, Policy & Politics

Once you navigate past some academic discussion of the multiple streams approach, there is genuinely practical advice for influencing policymaking from Stirling University's Paul Cairney. The three habits? Pay attention to policy processes (not just content), invest in relationships across the policy ecosystem, and frame your ideas to fit the political moment. Cairney draws on examples from tobacco control to climate policy to show how successful policy entrepreneurs think strategically about windows of opportunity. Useful whether you're trying to get a new idea on the agenda or understand why some policies succeed where others fail.

💻 Not Just Putting Out Fires: Building Capacity for Long-Term Public Governance, Nicholas Chesterley, PolicyReady.ca

Public servant and behavioural economist Nicholas Chesterley draws on his latter expertise to tackle why governments struggle with long-term thinking in their policymaking. His four-part solution: measure what matters beyond GDP, institutionalize future-focus through dedicated teams and decision guardrails, build commitment mechanisms, and embrace experimentation over perfectionism. Perhaps missing from this prescription? How to manage future-forward policymaking through electoral cycles.

⚙️ Policy Analyst Learning Map, Canada School of Public Service

During informational interviews and mentoring sessions, I'm frequently asked about the skills toolkit prospective or burgeoning public policy professionals should be developing. This interactive tool, designed for Policy Analysts in the Government of Canada, provides a far more comprehensive answer than I could ever give in a coffee chat. It maps out everything from foundational knowledge (economics, political science) to practical skills (briefing, consultation design) to emerging competencies (behavioral insights, data analytics). While many of the linked resources are training programs open only to federal employees, there are enough public resources to make this worth exploring for anyone charting a path in policy.

🎓 What Is the Law? A System for Statutory Research (STARA) with Large Language Models, Stanford Digital Economy Lab

Can AI help clean up "policy clutter"? This Stanford research introduces STARA, a system that uses large language models to help researchers navigate the complex web of statutes, regulations, and legal precedents that shape policy implementation. While the paper focuses on legal research, the implications for policy analysis are intriguing - imagine being able to quickly map how a proposed policy change might interact with existing regulations, or identify potential conflicts before they become implementation headaches. Early days yet, but worth watching as AI tools become more sophisticated and policy-relevant.

It goes without saying that I’m never not thinking about the state of government’s policymaking capacity, but this edition of Policycraft is particularly full of discussion and research on the subject. The big takeaway is how focused on individual capability-building our efforts at improving policymaking tend to be; understanding policy capacity primarily as the number or skill of public servants. Less considered is the organization’s ability to design, test, and implement effective policy - and usually forgotten is the system’s capacity to incentivize and shepherd consistently strong policy work that delivers results.

One dimension of a system’s policy capacity that bears emphasis is its relationship with public trust. If the goal of policymaking is to solve public problems but our policies fail to meet that goal, public trust in government’s ability to deliver is diminished. Normally, in a democracy, that results in a change of political government. But policy capacity includes the work of both elected officials and public servants. What happens when consistent and dramatic policy failures result in a loss of trust in our system of governance?

When we think about how best to strengthen our profession, the stakes should therefore be broader than just personal development or policy innovation; the community’s responsibility to professionalize is arguably an integral component to the health of our democracy.

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Programming note: Policycraft is taking break for the month of August and will return on September 1.

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🎓“An infrastructure for building policy capability – lessons from practice”, Sally Washington, Policy Design and Practice

A fascinating bit of thinking, born from the pandemic, that re-imagines policymaking capability as infrastructure and examines both its ‘supply side’ (leadership, people, engagement) and ‘demand side’ (politics, essentially) components. A critical insight is how capability isn’t just a matter of skills and talent, but the systems that enable good government.

🎓“Policy effectiveness and capacity: two sides of the design coin”, Ishani Mukherjee and Azad Singh Bali, Policy Design and Practice

Building on the notion of policy capability, this introductory article from a special issue of Policy Design and Practice explores the relationship between policy effectiveness and policy capacity (which the authors call “a necessary coupling”). Worth considering is this table, that defines capacity not only at the individual and organizational level, but the system level:

⚙️Business Case Development Framework, Queensland Government State Development, Infrastructure and Planning

The Queensland Government in Australia has made public a three-part toolkit for developing business cases in the public sector, complete with templates. As a bonus, they link to other helpful guides on everything from cost/benefit analysis to social impact evaluation. (You can also find completed business cases for real projects elsewhere on their site).

💻“Policy making in the era of artificial intelligence”, Institute for Government

A quick take from the esteemed IFG, on the implications of AI for policymaking. There are a number of great insights here, but a highlight is this question for policymakers: “What valuable information do I have that is not written down on the internet?”. Building on that, how can we create, nurture, and share our tacit (a.k.a. AI-proof) expertise? Professionalization, mentorship, and in-person work all likely play a role - but what would you add to that list?

🎓“How Do Policymakers Update Their Beliefs?”, Eva Vivalt and Aidan Coville

How persuadable are policy thinkers? This somewhat recursive paper dives into the differences between policymakers, policy practitioners, and policy researchers’ beliefs and how they are (or are not) moved by new data. The bias identified here is towards ‘good news’ over bad, which tends to increase the gap between beliefs and evidence.

📣“One simple trick”, social post by Matt Mittelsteadt, Twitter/X

AI and cyber policy wonk Matt Mittelsteadt has a depressingly timely tip for maintaining fairness and rigor in your work.

I have a bee in my bonnet this month, prompted by a specific op-ed published in a major newspaper – although it could have been prompted by many op-eds I’ve read recently. This piece spoke to a policy challenge on which I am currently working, and suggested that the first step towards a solution is…

A task force.

Once I’d gotten my uncharitable reaction out in the group chat, I started to think about how this point of view is a great example of a major challenge in Canadian policymaking: the choice to pretend that many policy questions have not been solved.

From traffic congestion to housing to clean energy and beyond, we not only know the answers but have seen them successfully addressed either in the past or in other jurisdictions. Yet when asked to act, Canadian political and policy leadership reverts to the mean of studying or discussing the problem as though the universe has yet to reveal its mysteries.

What causes this behaviour? Genuine ignorance of the answers? Our cultural allegiance to the status quo? Low expectations of the voting public? The kneejerk “Canada is simply too unique” response to foreign case studies? Insufficient policymaking capacity and sophistication? A frustrating soup of all of the above?

To paraphrase a meme, we need a full-scale moratorium on task forces until we can figure out what is going on. Perhaps with a Royal Commission…?

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This month’s issue has a heavy emphasis on evidence-based policy, both how to do it and the criticisms and complications that arise from assuming “an engineer’s view” of the sophisticated machines that are society, the economy, and politics. Below, you’ll find practical guides as well as commentaries that can help level up your use of evidence.

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🎓 Designing and delivering randomised trials for social policy – King's College London

🎓 What Works, Faster – King’s College London

Interested in applying the ‘gold standard’ of research to your policy design? King’s College London has published two practical pieces on randomized control trials for social policy, including how to reduce the amount of time necessary for evidence evaluation to deliver policy answers faster. Interested in how reality complicates this kind of research? Read on…

💻 Vital City – Issue 7: Does Evidence Matter? When research meets the real world

Bookmark this online urban policy magazine based in New York for your next rainy weekend (or beach getaway, if you’re a truly committed wonk). This issue on evidence in policymaking collects short essays from 19(!) thinkers that approach the problem by drawing on both academic research and hands-on experience in government. (Many of the pieces are in conversation with this article on the “engineer’s view” in policymaking). Two highlights include Elizabeth Glazer’s “What Really Drives Policy?” and Jennifer Pahlka’s “The Limits of Death Star Thinking”.

⚙️ Toolkits – The Institutional Architecture Lab

A hot topic in governance today is the collapse of longstanding public institutions, and the downward spiral of low capacity delivering poor outcomes leading to public distrust. The Institutional Architecture Lab has developed a trio of toolkits dedicated to helping policymakers both renew existing, and build new, institutions that are more resilient to this challenge. While their Playbook is the most practical document, the guide to building legitimacy for your institution is a must-read.

🏛️ Universal Credit Programme Final Lessons Learned – UK Department for Work & Pensions

Recommended by friend of the newsletter Noah Zon, this lessons learned document from a 15-year universal credit initiative contains clear-headed and universally-applicable advice for public servants who design or run public-facing programs. The most refreshing takeaway? How important taking care of your team is to success.

💻 Exploring Policy Innovation: Tools, Techniques + Approaches – Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship

In a piece from 2018, the former iteration of the Brookfield Institute collected expert thinking on the question, “What are the factors that impact successful policy innovation and development?”. Their answers are both academic and practical, and include some insight into the differences and overlap between policy innovation and public sector innovation. The report has a lot of great graphics, including this one illustrating common flaws within the traditional policy development cycle:

📰 "I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened." by DJ Bracken, Huffpost

This first-person piece about how the author accidentally became an expert on Utah school lunch debt policy is a wonderful illustration of the value of different perspectives in policymaking and advocacy: “I still remember sitting in a meeting with actual policy analysts and education officials, feeling like a child who had wandered into the wrong classroom, while simultaneously realizing that I somehow knew more about certain aspects of the lunch debt situation than these lifelong professionals did. It wasn’t because I was smarter or more dedicated, but simply because I’d been looking directly at a specific problem they only encountered as part of a much larger institutional landscape.” (This article is also a great lesson in “you can just do stuff”, one of the fundamental principles for a satisfying and impactful life.)

📣 "We need to change the emphasis of 'evidence based policies' – social post by Steven Klaiber-Noble, Twitter/X

Policycraft’s Hot Take of the Month is back! While we’re discussing how to design, generate, speed up, and integrate evidence into policymaking, software designer Steven Klaiber-Noble is thinking of what comes next: generating evidence from in-play policies and programs. However, he pits experimentation against observational analysis, while previous authors in this issue would argue we can’t do policymaking well without both.

This month’s edition of Policycraft contains links to two very different, but very practical, toolkits: one on building the capability to solve complex problems and another on storytelling for systems change. I’m still working my way through the former, the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) Toolkit, given the wealth of external readings and resources linked within. The ideal way of absorbing it may be to use it - any Policycraft community members want to plan the most fun work retreat of all time?

We also have an injection of the social sciences into policy thought, via insights from the field of economics, tips for quantifying your public consultation readouts, and the neglected value of the null result in policymaking.

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

⚙️ Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation Toolkit, Building State Capability, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Policy feedback loops were discussed in a previous edition of Policycraft, but with minimal comment on how to get them up and running. The Building State Capacity initiative at Harvard is here to help, having created an in-depth toolkit for designing, standing-up, and running similar structures that help teams work through and take action on complex problems. This eminently practical 60-page document includes worksheets, videos, process maps, further reading, and much more. Imagine what a ‘tiger team’ of your smartest colleagues could do with this method when applied to one of Canada’s most pressing challenges.

⚙️ Storytelling for systems change, Centre for Public Impact

If you’ve worked in policy or politics long enough, you recognize how much a story can sway political decision-making. Politicians love telling stories, and they can be moved by a particularly telling or poignant anecdote in ways data rarely moves them. So how can we as policy thinkers and influencers use storytelling as an advocacy tool? The Centre for Public Impact, in collaboration with the Dusseldorp Forum and Australian social impact initiative Hands Up Mallee, have developed two reports dedicated to understanding and dissecting how storytelling can impact systems change. The reports aren’t structured like a traditional white paper, but contain a useful depth of information on their research methods, insights, and links to other storytelling resources.

💻 “Economics still matters for policy”, Economic Forces

Economist Brian Albrecht has a list of eight economic insights for policymakers, which he is slowly turning into more detailed posts (the first, on how prices are signals, can be found here).

He succinctly identifies the appropriate relationship between economics and policymaking, noting that his list “...won’t tell you what your policy goals should be, and they won’t resolve fundamental political debates—that’s not the role of economics. What they will do is help identify which policies might actually achieve their stated goals and which are likely to backfire.”

🎓 “Learning from the public: Using qualitative research methodologies in consultations”, Dr. Poornika Ananth, University of Bath

Crafting stories from qualitative data is one way to boost its persuasive power, but it’s not the means of getting the most out of your consultations. This is a short but practical brief for civil servants looking to use qualitative research methods in public consultation, including recommendations for adding a quantitative element through coding and dedicated software.

💻 “Policy needs null results”, Chalmermagne

One of the great lessons of aging is that knowing when not to act is as important as knowing when to act. Researcher Alex Chalmers makes the case that this wisdom is also true in policymaking - making a reflexive policy response so government can be seen to be ‘doing something’ may not just fail to solve the initial problem but may yet create new ones. When might policy restraint be called for? Can we resist the legislative bias toward action?

📣 Noble lies in policymaking, social media post by Alex Chalmers, Twitter/X

Alex Chalmers is also the source of this month’s Policycraft Fun Thought Experiment To Run With Your Colleagues Over Drinks (...we’ll workshop that title). What do we pretend is true even as the evidence tells us otherwise? How about: good intentions in policymaking matter as much - if not more - than a policy’s outcomes.

This month’s Policycraft is interested in policy instruments: those that are available to us, those we choose to use or ignore, and how we can combine them to make better policy. We have a double dose of academic Michael Howlett, first assessing what we understand about policy instrument ‘mixes’ and then, in Policycraft’s Hot Take of the Month, making his case that the use of evidence is simply not present in the Canadian policy style. I am very interested in your thoughts on his conclusions.

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Many of you responded with frustrated recognition to the concept of “everything bagel policymaking”, introduced in a previous issue of Policycraft. Think tank REFORM has released a short piece, “Everythingism: An Essay”, that details the UK experience of this phenomenon. It contains some wild examples (if you don’t already know about the bat tunnel, buckle up) but ends on an optimistic note: the authors believe that “everythingism” is not a fundamental feature of government and so a return to focus and prioritization in policymaking is possible.

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If you’re a student, recent graduate, or are looking to make a career change in the policy world, I highly recommend Springboard Policy’s recent “A policy wonk’s guide to informational interviews”. It’s full of frank and practical advice to making the most out of these conversations (including how to land one in the first place).

Springboard is likely familiar to many of you as the publisher of PolicyJobsTO, a newsletter we all feign ignorance about to our managers. Last week they expanded their reach to Ottawa with the launch of PolicyJobsOTT. Come for the job listings, stay for the revelation that Ottawa has its own style of pizza(??).

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

🎓 The Knowns and Unknowns of Policy Instrument Analysis: Policy Tools and the Current Research Agenda on Policy Mixes by Giliberto Capano and Michael Howlett, Sage Open

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of policy instruments, or want to think more deeply about how to use the tools available to you as a policymaker, this overview is a great place to start. As a bonus, the authors reference two concepts explored in previous Policycraft issues: greenfield policy research areas and the challenge of implementation.

💻 The Role of Standards in Shaping Effective Public Policy, A. Tomlinson, S. Johal, and N. Dragicevic, CSA Group

The Canadian Standards Association Group here makes the case for standards as a policy instrument. They argue that standards as a tool encourages evidence-based policymaking, a greater focus on outcomes, and promotes efficiency and innovation in markets, among other benefits. It may be worth considering where standards could fit in your personal policy instrument toolbox.

🎓 Words not deeds: the weak culture of evidence in the Canadian policy style by Andrea Migone, Michael Howlett, and Alexander Howlett in Policy and Society

In our second Michael Howlett article of the month, the authors argue that the rejection of evidence in policymaking isn’t a quirk or a recent development, but in fact a marker of the Canadian “policy style”. They leave us on a deeply cynical note: “Changing Canadian policy-making in a way that would enhance the use of evidence or alter the country’s evidentiary culture would require a much more directed and sustained effort on the part of all the country’s governments and administrations to put aside their interests and differences, a not impossible but highly unlikely occurrence, to say the least.”

🎤 The end of the civil service generalist is welcome, Institute for Government

A recent panel discussion hosted by the Institute for Government is bringing back the age-old generalist vs. specialist debate: Tamara Finkelstein, the Permanent Secretary at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has declared the “policy generalist” an “outdated concept” for her government. Her fellow panelists agreed, but also carved out a significant caveat - there is such a thing as “specialists in the business of government.” With improving state capacity, attempts to reduce the reliance on outside consultants, and getting government back in the business of building as hot topics of the day both in the UK and Canada, there is no more relevant time for this discussion. Is a return to specialization the future of the profession, given the anticipated seismic shifts in the way our governments need to operate? (Full disclosure: Policycraft is the product of a policy generalist/dilettante.)

📚 Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service by Michael Lewis

As an antidote to the cynicism, disagreements, and hot takes linked above, enjoy Michael Lewis’ charming new book that profiles everyday public servants whose hard work and sense of duty is what keeps the American government running. There is one notable exception, however: a chapter featuring not a human being but the Consumer Price Index, in which the author makes a stirring case for objective data and evidence in policymaking.

💻 We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It, The New Atlantis

This new series from The New Atlantis isn’t policy related per se, but is arguably directional in how policy thinkers should be enriching their practice: we live in a deep world of scientific complexity, hidden infrastructures, interlocking supply chains, and technology indistinguishable from magic - and yet most of us have no idea how this world works or how to maintain it. (See, ah, recent events). Called “How the System Works”, the first two articles in the series - on the food supply chain and drinking water - tackle the foundational infrastructures that allow our society to both survive and thrive. How much do we as policy thinkers actually understand about the functioning of the world we seek to shape?

📣 How to write a Piketty Critique, social media post by Matt Darling, Twitter/X

If you find yourself in the privileged role of reviewing a public policy book, you may want to keep in mind economist Matt Darling’s template for bad faith criticism and then do the opposite. Inspired by reviews of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, you won’t be able to un-see the pattern once you recognize it.

Recently, I read two articles (Sam Freedman, “The Policy Paradox” and Francis Fukuyama, “We Need Policy Implementers, Not Policy Makers”) that made explicit a problem that’s been nagging at me and, likely, many of you: Why does it feel like we know all the solutions but either the process or the politics - or, more often than not, both - hold us back?

There has been content featured in Policycraft on both the origin and spread of policy ideas but, as Fukuyama and Freedman argue, more ideas may not be what’s necessary today. Instead, we need to study the barriers to existing (good) ideas and focus action on removing those so ideas can actually be implemented.

This line of thought brought me back to when I conducted a “lessons learned” exercise for the Government of Manitoba. The goal was to capture the best practices of their COVID-19 Vaccine Implementation Task Force (VITF), and understand how it enabled that province to have the highest per capita vaccination rate in the country in the summer of 2021.

The character of the public servants who gave so much of themselves to vaccinate the province was both strategic and tactical; innovators and do-ers; adaptable, measured, and with good judgement. Listening to them, it was the opposite of the paradox Freedman outlines: we generally knew what we had to do (the policy solution) and we moved heaven and earth (politics and process) to implement it.

The VITF and related teams were public servants from a variety of competencies across diverse Ministries, and included people who have gone on to major leadership roles - too many, unfortunately, outside of government. I can only speculate on their frustration, knowing what the government was capable of achieving only to see a return to business as usual upon the VITF’s dissolution. (A experience, it should be noted, that was not unique to Manitoba).

I dare not ask where the report created from this lessons learned activity landed; if anything has become clear over the past few years, Canada-wide, it’s that the sacred knowledge of how to get shit done in the public sector is at risk of being lost.

This month, I invite the Policycraft community to reflect on this: how well does policy implementation fit into our profession? Are we actively teaching how to do it effectively and - perhaps most importantly - do we still know how?

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Did this welcome note leave you thirsty for more Manitoba content? Policycraft recommends Universal Language, a film about Winnipeg set in an alternate universe Canada. There’s a scene set in a government office that is likely to resonate with more than a few subscribers.

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🗞️Three Principles for Running a White House Office, by Santi Ruiz, Statecraft

If we’re getting serious about getting things done, Tom Kalil’s whiteboard is a great source of tactical inspiration. In this edition of Statecraft, a newsletter that interviews US and UK public servants about how they achieved a specific policy goal, Ruiz goes deep on three mottos from a former White House staffer that helped his team turn policy ideas into policy action:

• “People never follow up.”

• “Talk to who owns the paper.”

• “If you want people to do something, make it easy.”

Policycraft recommends subscribing to Statecraft, in part because they interviewed the guy at NORAD who tracks Santa.

🏛️OECD Recommendation on Public Policy Evaluation: Implementation Toolkit, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

In 2022, the OECD adopted a Recommendation on Public Policy Evaluation, aiming to set a first-of-its-kind international standard. This year, they followed up with a toolkit for implementation that details how to institutionalize policy evaluation, ensure its quality, and deliver impact. 🍁Canada mention: The toolkit cites the federal government’s Policy on Results as an example.

🎓Ideas as coalition magnets: coalition building, policy entrepreneurs, and power relations, Journal of European Public Policy 💰

Are you a policy entrepreneur who is trying to build a coalition behind one of your big ideas? Understanding how big tent groups coalesce behind policy ideas is a great place to start.

⚙️Open Governance Research Exchange, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

The OGRX is a digital library of case studies and research on how to solve public problems - and a handy tool for running your own j-scans and sourcing tested methods on data analysis, nudging, citizen engagement, and more.

🎓Innovating and changing the policy-cycle: Policy-makers be prepared!, Government Information Quarterly 💰

This article is a gem uncovered from the OGRX archive, which looks at how technology has placed new expectations on the role of policymaker - specifically, citizen engagement and use of data. The authors focus on how developed and developing countries can learn from each other how to manage this shift, but their insights are relevant domestically, too.

📣“The reason ‘policy’ is a discipline of sorts…” social media post by Brian F. Kelcey, Bluesky

A very short thread that puts forth a philosophy of policy as a discipline (a.k.a., policycraft): the connection of seemingly disparate things. Arguably true not just of trends and ‘factors’, but ideas and interpersonal relationships, too. Are you practicing the craft if you’re not making these connections and embedding them within your work?

📣“What’s the ‘anti-reading list’ in your field of expertise?”, social media post by Alec Stapp, Twitter/X

A fun question to pose at your next after-work drinks: are there foundational texts in policymaking or in your field of policy thinking that belong on an anti-reading list; as in, it’s important to understand why they shouldn’t be consulted, particularly by a non-expert audience?

If you’re looking for an opportunity to support the career development of future policy leaders you might be interested in an upcoming event run by the University of Toronto Undergraduate Public Policy Students’ Association (UPPSA). They’re hosting a career Discovery Fair on March 2 and are looking for both public and private sector organizations to set up a table and chat with their members about careers in public policy for a couple of hours. If your company/team is willing to volunteer some time, please reach out within the next week and I’ll connect you with UPPSA for more information.

If you attend, make sure to swing by the EY table and say hi!

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💻“Untouched Policy Areas” by Thomas Hochman, Green Tape

Thomas Hochman at Green Tape (an excellently-named permitting policy Substack) muses on the concept of policy areas that don’t have enough people working on them, a.k.a. greenfield space for young or ambitious wonks looking to make their mark. He cites three from his area of expertise that feature innovative policy approaches from the past that may be worth resurrecting and revising for the 21st century.

A question for the Policycraft community: What might be some untouched policy areas in Canada? Are there forgotten ideas that could find new life in a new context? Perhaps concepts like public ownership/private operations models for infrastructure and land, the use of technology to enable traceability in public finances, or a ground-up re-think of K-12 education. Where might there be room for you to be a policy entrepreneur?

💻Fiscal Policy in the Great Election Year, International Monetary Fund

Chapter 2 [link will open a download box] of this major work from the IMF’s Fiscal Monitor is a 2024 Albie Award for Best Work on Political Economy winner. (The Albies are selected by longtime Policycraft academic crush, Daniel Drezner of Tufts University). While the ideas and commentary therein are ostensibly focused on fiscal and innovation policy, they have major implications for the industrial policy trend, education policy, foreign aid, and the social impacts of innovation that would benefit from being addressed via the fiscal policy toolbox. It’s a report worth exploring even if technology policy isn’t your métier.

💻Briefings by UKDayOne

This recommended read isn’t about the content of any individual briefing, but their format: an excellent example of how you do policy commentary for advocacy purposes well. From the in-depth number crunching to the second-order consequential thinking to the FAQ, UKDayOne’s mini-reports demonstrate how to communicate a policy position with legitimacy and substance.

🏛️Final Report: Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Pay for Success Project by Roca, Inc, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Third Sector Capital Partners, Inc.

Hype around pay-for-performance, public/private social intervention programs is high, but evidence based on real-world performance can be lacking, particularly if outcomes don’t meet expectations. Refreshingly, the partners behind a Massachusetts program to reduce male youth recidivism and improve employment outcomes have released a thorough, quantitative report that is frank about what worked, and what didn’t, with their project. It’s a valuable piece of research for anyone hoping to more successfully design something similar.

⚙️Policy Engine, created by Max Ghenis and Nikhil Woodruff

Policy Engine is a US-based, open source tool that helps individuals, researchers, and policymakers compute and assess the impact of public policies (particularly tax and benefit changes). You can play around with its simulator to create a policy reform and see how it impacts different types of households, and interacts with other taxes and benefits. Are there any Canadian wonks with a coding background and a dream who might want to try building something similar here?

📣“There’s no feedback loop between policy and implementation”, social post by the Niskanen Center, Twitter/X

A picture is truly worth 1,000 words (even if that picture also contains words):

This image is sourced from the Niskanen Center’s recent report on US state capacity; the commentary on feedback loops and policy outcomes starts on page 35 and can be easily transposed to the Canadian context. File under: not new, but evergreen.

Before we dig in, a quick housekeeping item (literally): I recently had the immense luck and privilege to purchase my first home, a milestone very much out of reach for many young and new Canadians thanks to decades of poor policymaking. I’m looking down the barrel of approximately six weeks of renovations and move-related activities, so if you have a submission for the next edition of Policycraft now is the time to share it. I’m currently trying to understand unique First Nations’ approaches to policymaking - insight and resources on that topic are especially welcome!

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

💻Solving the Everything Bagel Problem by Russell King, Medium

In April 2023, Ezra Klein authored a piece in the New York Times that coined the phrase “everything bagel liberalism”. He lamented the well-intentioned but burdensome tendency of liberal American policymakers to append multiple policy goals to a single initiative, lowering the likelihood that the primary goal will be achieved. It’s an idea that has been rattling around the brain of your Policycraft curator in the modified form of “everything bagel policymaking”, a force not exclusive to a single political ideology or party but to policy thinkers in general. How might attempts to create ‘win-win’ scenarios instead burden and ultimately undermine policy effectiveness? What do true ‘win-win’ scenarios look like, and how do we identify when we are in a false one? The short article linked provides a succinct overview of some common drivers of everything bagel policymaking, as well as alternatives.

Disclaimer: Everything bagels are the best kind of bagel so this whole concept might need a re-brand.

💻“Policy prototyping is something you can do, and might already be doing” by L. Nelson Hamilton, Medium

A quick read on how to get to clarity in policy discussions by employing a ‘prototyping’ approach; one in which you think about the policy as a design. This concept may be particularly valuable when you aren’t the individual or the team making the policy, but you are responsible for figuring out how to deliver it.

🎓“Toward an Understanding of the Political Economy of Using Field Experiments in Policymaking” by Guglielmo Briscese and John A. List, National Bureau of Economic Research

Everyone1 loves an NBER working paper for good reason: they’re frequently timely, insightful, and free to access. This one examines the impact of policy field experiments on policymakers’ opinions; essentially, when experiments defy their expectations, policymakers cool on their use. Taking their analysis one step further, the authors contrast this finding with US public opinion on policy experiments, which is generally positive - but unfortunately impacted by growing skepticism surrounding the institutions that conduct them.

💻Policymaking by any other name by Zachary Spicer, PolicyReady.ca

Municipal policymaking is easily overlooked as a contradiction in terms or a role not suited to mere creatures of the provinces. This piece pushes back against that indifference, exploring the idea of who a policymaker is through the lens of municipal governance. Spicer shared ideas for “re-considering the municipal policymaker” and includes implications for policymakers in other orders of government.

📚Red Tape: Its Origins, Uses and Abuses by Howard Kaufman, Brookings Institution

If you can find a copy of this slim 1977 text, I recommend giving it a read. While his examples are deep in the time and place it was written, Kaufman gets to the root of “red tape” as a symptom of low trust and a lack of human judgement and accountability in government; the more we try to reduce unwanted behaviours and actions, the more we become snarled in its grasp, preventing the kind of governance we want. To wit,

“In some respects, this is a discouraging diagnosis if you want to reduce red tape because it forces hard choices on you. How much of what you want should you give up to lighten your red-tape burden? Or… how much red tape should you tolerate to get satisfying amounts of what you want?”

📣“My working model of policy change” social post by Eli Dourado, Twitter/X

If you’re looking to create policy change from the outside, is it better to get the median voter on board or not? A conversation-starter in under 600 characters.

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Thank you so much for the warm welcome you’ve given Policycraft. Last month I asked the void,

And hundreds of you answered, “Yes!”

In issue 2, you’ll start to see a pattern emerge for this newsletter. In each edition I aspire to include links that are a combination of:

Instruction (focused skill-building and tangible how-tos)

Illustration (case studies, examples, or research)

Rumination (philosophical or theoretical commentary and criticism)

As always, I encourage you to reply, comment, and share your thoughts on what you’ve read in Policycraft.

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THIS MONTH’S SYLLABUS

📝 “Policy Profession Standards”, The Policy Profession, His Majesty’s Government

The concept of policy-as-a-profession has some precedence in the public sector, most notably the UK Civil Service’s Policy Profession function, which aims to build the skills and capabilities of their 33,000 policy professionals. In 2021, they released their Policy Profession Standards, a competency framework for their public service. The linked deck is a short but clarifying read as they understand the pillars of their profession, in their context, to be Strategy, Democracy, and Delivery.

📚 Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Palkha

Real-life colleagues of your Policycraft curator have already heard my raves about Jennifer Palkha’s book, but the gospel still hasn’t spread far enough in Canada for my liking. Although framed as a piece about implementing technology in the American public sector, what Palkha has actually done is explain in an empathetic yet clear-eyed way how and why government works - or, more often, doesn’t. It’s an absolutely essential book for understanding how to get anything done in government and, one hopes, an inspirational text for any public servants trapped in the machine but still hoping to make a difference.

Further reading: Palkha’s Substack, Eating Policy.

🎤 “How to Translate Research Findings into Policy”, transcribed speech by Doug Elmendorf, Institute for Progress

This short speech contains an eminently practical series of five recommendations for researchers and academics to have a greater impact on policymaking. Elmendorf comments not only on communication effectiveness (limit your jargon, surprise) but also how to play the long game in a way that can improve the profession itself.

🗞️ “Death by a thousand roundtables” by Alex Chalmers and Anastasia Bektimirova, Chalmermagne

A rip-roaring piece of criticism directed at the think tank and advocacy side of the profession; the authors write from a UK perspective but their comments are relevant here in Canada (your Policycraft curator has been guilty of some of these ‘genres of work’ in her career). Think of this as almost a reverse-checklist for making your policy commentary and recommendations more powerful; a ‘how-not-to’ to take your work from “conversation” to “feasibility”.

Further reading: This article comes recommended by friend of the newsletter Tom Goldsmith, who has his own Substack you should check out, Orbit Policy’s Deep Dives.

🎓 “Up-zoning New Zealand: the localisation of a globally mobile policy idea” by Eleanor West, Economic Policy Centre, Urban and Spatial Economics Hub, University of Auckland Business School

Policy ideas, like fashion, have trend cycles. (Last month’s Policycraft featured commentary on the currently back-in-vogue industrial policy). With housing crises gripping Canada and much of the Anglosphere, you’ve likely heard a lot about Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) advocacy. While it may be clear as to how a problem captures the attention of the media, public, and politicians, how does the solution spread? This case study attempts to trace a policy idea - up-zoning, enacted in New Zealand in 2020/1 - from its popular emergence on the other side of the world a dozen years earlier.

🗞️ “The Soda That Went Pop” by Now I Know

One of the best ways to learn is to do so from the mistakes of others. Now I Know, a long-running “interesting facts” newsletter, recently published an explosive example of Canadian public policy gone awry. In the early 1970s, provincial regulation aimed at environmental responsibility inadvertently turned then-newfangled 2-litre bottles of pop into incendiary devices. Policycraft confirmed this tale with a Boomer (hi, Dad!) who not-so-fondly recalls when two litres of Coca-Cola painted the inside of his pantry. The lesson? Listen to expert stakeholders, and be wary of overloading your policymaking with too many objectives (sometimes a bottle of pop should just be a bottle of pop).

Welcome to Policycraft, the free monthly newsletter that curates fresh and insightful thinking on the profession of public policymaking from Canada and around the world.

Many professions have a shared sense of themselves as such; they have associations, conferences, journals, and an understanding that staying up to date with the literature is essential to their development. 

Policymaking, less so. 

Policy work is not confined to elected officials, political staff, or even the public service. Policy thinkers are everywhere: for- and non-profits, academia, industry, and activism. Sadly, the walls between these gardens can be high, limiting exchange and community. But we’re all in the same line of work: developing solutions to make the lives of Canadians better.

What makes a policy professional? Likeminded academic Iris Geva-May believes it includes a capacity for systems thinking, a body of knowledge both theoretical and practical, and a set of analytical ‘tricks of the trade’. You likely already “think like a policymaker”, applying those professional skills to your area of interest or expertise. But how often do you apply them to the practice of policymaking? 

The vision that behind this newsletter is that there is value in policy thinkers from all walks of life having a shared sense of being one profession; in our having space to develop techniques, innovations, and insights about what makes good policymaking independent of subject matter siloes; in forming a community through which we can debate and discuss our professional standards and philosophies. Fundamentally, that there is value in building our craft: policycraft.

Policycraft is intended to support Canadian policy professionals in just that task: providing space for meta-analytical introspection about the work you do as a policy thinker, helping you keep up to date with new approaches and research, and inspiring you to think about yourself as belonging to a recognizable profession.

Who should subscribe? You’re in the profession (or aspiring to be), whether public or private sector. You aim to design or influence policies that actually solve problems and enhance Canadians' lives. You’re interested in upskilling your craft as a policy thinker, not just your knowledge of a specific subject area. You’re keen to share your thoughts and experience, and to engage with a community of policy professionals.

If that describes you, you’re in the right place. This is Policycraft: Your profession, curated.

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SYLLABUS 

💻“When Revolving Doors Are Good, Actually”
by Noah Zon, PolicyReady.ca 

Your Policycraft editor can speak from experience on the benefit of building a policy career in both the public and private sector. Springboard Policy impresario Noah Zon makes a compelling case for more regular exchange between the two solitudes, both for the betterment of the profession and good public policy, generally.

💻 “Canada’s policy ecosystem is in need of major updates”
by Neil Bower, Max Bell School of Public Policy

This is a brief but impassioned piece about how policymaking in Canada needs to change. One of the suggested reforms? “Policy-makers need to keep pace with the evolution of policy instruments.” The author’s emphasis is on digital and data, but “policy instruments” as a concept extends beyond technology.

🎓“Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Challenges for Public Administration”
by Genevieve David, Canadian Public Administration 💰

Regardless of your industry, you will likely have been inundated with hype about how AI is going to revolutionize it (your Minister is definitely obsessed with AI). But where to start? This recent article in the CPA journal provides a framework for approaching AI in the public sector.

💻“Should Governments Steer Private Investment Decisions? Framing Canada’s Industrial Policy Choices”
by Steve LaFleur, Institute for Research on Public Policy

Populism, supply chain shocks, and trade wars have made industrial policy a hot topic since the early days of the pandemic. The IRPP has assembled a steering group to study industrial policy options in the Canadian context, and provide advice on how it might be done well. Their initial report is especially worth a read given that this crew of experts don’t all agree on the merits of industrial policy.

📚Speaking Truth to Canadians About Their Public Service
by Donald Savoie

In public administration scholar Donald Savoie’s new book, he takes on the capacity of the federal public service to deliver for Canadians. State capacity may be considered a problem of public administration, but without it even well-designed policies will be challenged to hit their marks.

Is that pile of books on your nightstand already too tall? (Real.) Check out a preview 💰 in the Globe and Mail.

💻“Incapacitated: Why Canada has a state capacity problem - and how to fix it”
by Sean Speer, Public Policy Forum

Can’t get enough of the state capacity discussion? Policycraft, too. This report from PPF tackles the concept, including how the centralization of policymaking and improvement of its oversight may be critical to rebuilding capacity.

Thank you for reading the first issue of Policycraft. If you found it of interest, please subscribe for free below.

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