Assessing policy capacity in Canada's public services: Perspectives of deputy and assistant deputy ministers

Abstract: The state of policy capacity within Canada's various levels of government has for some time been the subject of discussion both within the public services themselves and among the academic research community. Drawing on the results of a 2006 survey of deputy and assistant deputy ministers working in Canada's federal, ten provincial and three territorial governments, this article presents assessments made by the most senior leadership. The survey results show that ninety per cent of deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers agree that policy capacity has changed but that the change is not uni‐directional. Both improvements and decline in policy capacity were observed, although assessments of decline were somewhat more pronounced. Moreover, improvements in policy capacity were found to be associated with a reduced focus on direct service delivery, a greater concern with long‐term planning, and the presence of a political leadership interested in innovation. Conversely, declining policy capacity was found to be linked to centralization of power, the loss of institutional memory, and “churning” within the ranks of the executive leadership. Additionally, level of government was also observed to be linked with change in policy capacity, with provincial deputies reflecting more negatively on policy capacity decline in their government than deputies at other levels.     

Gaspirali v. Il'minskii: Two identity projects for the muslims of the Russian Empire

As “music of commitment,” in the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important purpose of providing a popular-cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of Yugoslav society. The three “music movements” that embodied the new rock’n’roll spirit – New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans – used rock music to critique the country's “new socialist culture,” with the purpose of helping to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal and the reality of socialist Yugoslavia. This paper examines the New Partisans as the most radical expression of music of commitment through the works of its most important rock bands: Bijelo dugme, Plavi orkestar, and Merlin. The paper's argument is that the New Partisans' socio-cultural engagement, animated by advocacy of Yugoslavism, was a counter-logic to the nationalist dissolution of a distinctly Yugoslav fabric of a socialist community in crisis. Thus, the movement's revolutionary “spirit of reconstruction” permeating its “poetics of the patriotic” was a mechanism of socio-cultural resistance to political, cultural and moral-ethical de-Yugoslavization of Yugoslav society. Its ultimate objective was to make the case that the only way into the future – if there was to be any – rested on strategic reanimation of the Partisan revolutionary past as the only viable socio-cultural foundation of the Yugoslav socialist community.