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Project Summary:

One of the most common approaches to the study of public policy is the multi-stream framework. Actors known as "policy entrepreneurs" play an important role in this approach. The idea of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is borrowed from the world of business. In the public policy literature, policy entrepreneurship is primarily seen as actions by actors to bring about change in policy by navigating policy proposals through institutions, not as involving efforts to change institutions. This is despite the well-developed position in the business and economic development literature that sees entrepreneurship as being the result of actions by business people and institutions that support those efforts. As a result, governments, including those in Canada, have devoted significant resources to building “eco-systems” of institutions that support innovation and entrepreneurship by businesses. In other areas of the public policy literature, there has long been recognition that public policy requires support in terms of intellectual resources and institutions. Much of this policy capacity literature seeks to evaluate whether or not states have the institutional capacity to generate the evidence that they need to engage in policy-making, evaluate that evidence, and then apply it to the task of policy-making. This project brings the literature on policy entrepreneurship together with the literature on policy capacity, arguing that when policy actors work to create an institutional eco-system capable of generating the evidence necessary to further policy-making on a given issue, to evaluate the evidence and then to put it to work in policy-making, it is policy-entrepreneurship on a meta scale. The present HPRC ethics application deals with the first part of a larger project that will put this theoretical structure to work, by studying the creation of The Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Program (introduced in the 2021 Federal budget). The hypothesis of the entire project is that the successful creation of this program can be explained by the meta policy entrepreneurship undertaken by the Trudeau government in its first six years in power to build a gender-conscious policy entrepreneurship eco-system within the federal government. The first part of the project looks at the creation of the above noted gender-conscious policy entrepreneurship eco-system. The Second part of the project will look at how bureaucrats and politicians used the gender-conscious policy entrepreneurship eco-system, to advance the proposal for the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Program.

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Funded

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PI

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