Abstract
In recent years, interest has grown in collaboration in public policy. Responding to the complex issues now playing out in cities, scholars are focusing on localized governance relations that blur boundaries between public, private, and community sectors. This article introduces discursive localism as a framework to understand better collaborative urban governance. It argues that ideas play a pivotal role in motivating collective action, channeling policy resources, and shaping governance relations. Although recent urban-focused accounts of collective action suggest a role for ideas, systematic attention to their normative-philosophical and cognitive-programmatic dimensions reveals how different policy discourses frame incentives and institutions for collaboration. Applying discursive localism to Toronto, Canada, the article describes change processes across three complex policy fields. Governance arrangements are argued to flow from the operative policy discourses, especially whether their normative and cognitive dimensions are integrated, dissociated, or fragmented.
Introduction
In recent years, there has been growing interest in collaboration in public policy. Responding to the interconnected and complex nature of the issues governments now confront, scholars and practitioners alike are focusing attention on governance processes that blur boundaries between public, private, and community sectors. That collaboration should become the object of concern comes as no surprise to urbanists whose study of fragmented and constrained municipal authorities has long placed boundary spanning partnerships on the research agenda. Indeed, the attention to collaboration flows from policy analyses demonstrating that today’s most urgent national priorities, from sustainable development to poverty reduction and economic innovation, are “wicked” in their complexity and “localized” in their expression (Head and Alford 2013; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2014). Their causes are beyond the knowledge and information of any single actor and solutions emerge through coproduction of expertise and effort in the place-specific settings where the issues most profoundly play out and sectors most easily join up. Uniquely concentrating flows of people, capital, and ideas in the global age, large cities become strategic sites of policy governance for “outcomes on key goals for the economy, society, and environment” (Maclennan 2011, p. 109). Today’s “collaborative imperative” (Williams 2012, p. 17) thus brings renewed urgency to urban scholarship’s abiding interest in collective action and governance relations.
The purpose of this article is to understand better urban governance in the contemporary context of wicked problems and complex policy initiatives. It argues that under conditions of uncertainty, ideas play an important role in motivating collective action, channeling policy resources, and shaping prospects for collaboration. This article introduces an analytical framework I call discursive localism to demonstrate how the substance and structure of ideas themselves merit greater attention in understanding politics and policy in cities. Building off the influential approach in comparative political economy known as discursive institutionalism that distinguishes between normative and cognitive ideas (Campbell 2001; Schmidt 2008), I explore whether and how the two types intersect in specific policy fields at the urban scale and argue that different discursive packages channel governance activity down particular institutional paths ranging from highly collaborative to weakly connected.
To illustrate the utility of this approach, I consider three complex policy initiatives in Toronto, Canada, over the past decade: immigrant settlement, sustainable development, and workforce development. Each of the fields involves “collective puzzling” over policy futures (Heclo 1974) while also exhibiting distinctive forms of collective action and governance relations. In immigrant settlement, Toronto presents a notable example of institutionalized collaboration, community-wide in scope and multilevel in scale. In sustainable development, the trajectory is more modest, with governance networks taking hold but confined to a particular economic sector. In workforce development, there is little evidence of any networking or collaboration. Through the lens of discursive localism, different modes of governance are seen to rest on particular packages of normative and cognitive ideas—integrated, dissociated, or fragmented.
This article uses a form of discourse analysis (Kjaer and Pedersen 2001) to understand which ideas facilitate what kind of change where. Analyzing public statements, policy documents, dialogue reports, and secondary literatures, supplemented by the author’s participant-observation at numerous Canadian urban policy gatherings in the first decade of the 2000s, 1 the case studies offer a comparative and contextual account of strategic policy knowledge at a critical conjuncture for Toronto. The focus is on the flow of ideas in shaping governance relations in three fields rather than policy implementation or outcome evaluation in any one. The analysis reveals the unevenness of change processes across policies and the particular discursive contexts that frame collective efforts at governance innovation.
Collaborative Urban Governance: Bringing Ideas In
Scholars of comparative political economy have long focused attention on the role that ideas play in politics and government (Blyth 2002; Bradford 1998a; Hall 1989). Concerned to understand how nation states and international organizations respond to major shifts in their policy environments, these writers argue that ideas make sense of rapidly changing conditions and provide route maps for reform. As Mark Blyth (2002, p. 6) summarized, “structures do not come with an instruction sheet”; in periods when such structures come apart, political and intellectual space opens and new ideas become influential in reframing policy and creating institutions. A sequential understanding of change is posited: first, ideas reduce uncertainty about the causes of crises and viable solutions; second, they supply coalition-building resources for agents; and third, they provide blueprints for governance reform. The rise and fall of the Keynesian welfare state has been a major preoccupation, producing robust cross-national analyses of crisis and change in the critical political conjunctures of the 1930s and 1980s.
Interestingly, “the ideational research agenda” (Berman 2013, p. 217) has not inspired a comparable body of urban policy scholarship (Clarke et al. 2006; Rast 2005). The dominant approaches to local development tend to foreclose such a line of inquiry. Paul Peterson’s (1981) influential study, City Limits, treated economic development as a municipal imperative, yet one without substantive debate or policy choice. Strategies were inevitably constrained by corporate priorities and intermunicipal competition. All cities relied, with varying degrees of success, on similar incentives for retaining business and attracting investment through land development, property servicing, and place marketing. This package expressed the “unitary interest” of the city in avoiding redistributive or sustainability measures perceived to harm the local investment climate. Dissatisfied with Peterson’s functional and technocratic logic, regime theorists have probed the governing coalitions that draw public and private actors together to get things done (Stone 1989, 2015). Struck by the enduring City Hall–Main Street relationship, regime theorists reveal much about the terms of developmental deals and the material benefits or side payments that sustain business–government partnerships. Once again, ideas recede into the background as an explanatory variable—municipal strategies are the by-product of various elite trade-offs and quiet compromises accompanying corporate-centered accumulation insulated from alternative economic visions or public values (Imbroscio 2013).
Of course, arguments that urban scholarship lags in taking ideas seriously could be seen as true but trivial. Historically, municipalities in North America have been “policy-takers” with modest development aims, catering to business in economic affairs, administering state-mandated social services, and giving limited consideration to urban sustainability or community development (Frug and Barron 2008; Savitch and Kantor 2002). Those interested in understanding the “big ideas” that drive public policy or reframe development choices appropriately defer to their colleagues studying federal and state/provincial governments where ideologies matter and worldviews clash.
This position now requires challenge on several grounds. The transformations accompanying globalization are unsettling long-standing municipal approaches (Pike, Rodriguez-Pose, and Tomaney 2006). The knowledge-based economy finds many cities reinventing their industrial base and seeking growth paths more socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable than those contemplated by either the growth machine or development regime (Stone 2008). “Idea generators” are entering the urban policy fray, ranging from nonprofit intermediaries and community foundations to business associations and academic partnerships (Bradford and Bramwell 2014). The conversation is substantive—exploring conceptions of urban development that balance the economic, social, and ecological dimensions of growth. For their part, upper-level governments, exhorted by their own think tanks, are starting to see cities as policy test-beds for “social innovations” in economic clustering, community sustainability, and cultural creativity (OECD 2014). In today’s “metropolitan moment” (Katz and Bradley 2013), it is clear that “fundamental questions about what constitutes ‘success’ and ‘development’ in localities and regions are being posed” (Pike, Rodriguez-Pose, and Tomaney 2006, p. 3). Urban policy making increasingly involves an array of actors in conversations that do not ignore “the city’s need to attend to its economic position, but . . . represent new thinking about how to go about fostering that position” (Stone 2008, p. 288). Important questions arise beyond the single-minded pursuit of profit and growth. What policy alternatives are framed for collective action? Can actors rethink their interests and goals? Are governing arrangements emerging to sustain cooperation and implement change?
Precisely such questions preoccupy idea-centered studies of innovation in comparative political economy (Beland and Cox 2011). Given the national level of analysis, this literature conveys a particular image of how ideas arise and influence change (Bradford 1998a). At critical conjunctures, new ideas become “weapons of mass persuasion” (Stone, Orr, and Worgs 2006, p. 542) for ideological political parties to challenge incumbent governments and their electoral coalitions and policy paradigms. Realigning elections usher in new political eras that mobilize partisan and administrative resources behind the implementation of a governing agenda (Hall 1993; Weir 1992). However, the change agents and mechanisms operative at the national level may not be locally relevant (Bradford 2010). For example, urban politics in Canada is largely nonpartisan with fractious councils and part-time politicians, municipal administrations are highly permeable and transparent and lacking in policy capacity, and local civil societies rarely feature the representative “peak associations” that organize cross-class political coalitions to drive policy innovation (Sancton 2014). Without programmatic parties, strong bureaucracies, or cohesive social partners, local change will play out differently, featuring its own idea generators, coalition dynamics, and institutional mechanisms.
Along these lines, three recent literatures on governance challenges in urban settings have drawn attention to the role of ideas in collective action. Rational choice institutionalism offers systematic accounts of how local authorities in fragmented metropolitan jurisdictions deliver public goods with the least transaction cost. Efficient governance rests on embedded social relations and informal policy networks such that common interests become well understood by local actors, facilitating cooperation without recourse to external authorities (Feoick 2013; Nelles 2012). Collaborative arrangements take hold through “trial-and-error learning” (Ostrom 1990, p. 34) that alters calculations of self-interest to generate community rules. The concern with normative and cognitive processes in collective action is extended in a related body of “planning with complexity” literature that explores “collaborative rationality” (Innes and Booher 2010). Explicitly focusing on wicked problems, these writers analyze social learning processes where multiple sectors, including lay people and professional experts, discover “new mental models” (Innes and Booher 2010, p. 199) for deliberation and collaboration. Such learning mind-sets emerge when local actors either fear external resolution of their common problems or are mandated to work together by court order or state mandate.
The third framework introduces ideas through emphasis on agenda setting, distinguishing between local and national levels by emphasizing the obstacles to shared purposes in fractious urban settings. In such contexts, agenda setting other than the familiar corporate-centered priorities requires extraordinary “civic capacity” (Giloth 2004; Stone et al. 2001). Ideas give structure and meaning to urban policy agendas, motivating actors to recognize interdependence and work together. The interplay of ideas and incentives in civic capacity can take three principal forms: “large purposes” that articulate community-wide aspirations for broad-based change, “selective incentives” that provide material benefit to sector-based partnerships, and “small opportunities” that allow for more limited forms of mutual gain through information sharing or dialogue (Mossberger 2009). In their analysis of urban education policy, Clarke et al. (2006, pp. 21, 26) traced the “rhetoric[s] of reform” across four cities demonstrating how contested problem definitions and “segmented agendas” stall multiethnic reform coalitions.
Each of these three local policy frameworks acknowledges an important role for ideas in collective action and collaborative governance. However, explanatory gaps remain. Rational choice models leave the content of embedded norms and operative ideas underspecified. Complexity planning approaches detail social learning processes but are less clear about the incentives that sustain commitment. Civic capacity identifies the importance of shared agendas and different motivations for joint work, yet as Clarence Stone (2008, p. 292) acknowledged, “it is not enough to talk at a general level about ideas and policy entrepreneurs.” Distinguishing between those local agendas that generate policy innovation or governance change from those that do not requires more systematic analysis of how new ideas supply incentives for collective action. As Karen Mossberger (2009, p. 51) observed, urban policy research ought to “compare the role of large purposes, selective incentives and small opportunities in fostering cooperation and achieving the capacity to act.”
“Discursive institutionalism” offers a way forward with its dual focus on “the substantive content of ideas and the interactive processes by which ideas are conveyed and exchanged through discourse” (Schmidt 2008, p. 305). This framework conceptualizes two distinct levels and types of ideas and proposes that their framing as policy discourses influences outcomes. At the normative level, ideas are “public philosophies” expressing values and sentiments that speak to community-wide aspirations and collective views about appropriate civic priorities. At the cognitive level, ideas are “programmatic statements” about cause and effect relationships and techniques for devising solutions to policy problems. Asking how these different levels and types are put together in practice and acquire momentum, discursive institutionalism speaks directly to the broad scope of complex policy initiatives in cities, encompassing both visions of community well-being and instrumental consideration of what works where. The dual focus is especially helpful at the local scale where existing studies of complex policy initiatives confirm (Giloth 2004) that reform efforts are often sidetracked by “issue displacement,” and “attention shift” that constrain innovation. Collaboration in cities thus rests on “different ideational bases” (Stone, Orr, and Worgs 2006, p. 542) than those supplied by political parties or state bureaucracies, and these scalar distinctions between the national and local context are analytically significant in interpreting change.
For this reason, we call our approach discursive localism, acknowledging its roots in comparative political economy’s discursive institutionalism while also making explicit the specificity of the urban scale. Discursive localism captures three distinguishing features of local change processes: policy discourses that are amalgamations of purposes and strategies rather than the by-product of cohesive political ideologies; change agents who are boundary crossing civic entrepreneurs rather than partisans with explicit political affiliation or organizational loyalty; and policy innovations housed in governance entities at arm’s length from traditional government departments.
From the perspective of discursive localism, the most powerful discourses are those that join the normative and cognitive ideas in mutually reinforcing packages. These we call integrated policy discourses. They express large purposes widely perceived as both legitimate and feasible, situating evidence-based policy programs in wider narratives about civic identity and community meaning. They can empower broad coalitions and institutionalize collaboration in governance structures. However, such integration of levels and types may be more the exception than the rule. As Vivien Schmidt (2011, p. 51) explained, when these interactions are absent, the influence of ideas “can be more difficult” and change more piecemeal and bounded. As normative and cognitive ideas become “unhinged” and move along parallel discursive tracks, they represent dissociated policy discourses (Weir 1992, p. 169). Such discourses may clarify benefits of joint work to certain sector-based groups but they will not persuasively frame community-wide missions nor inspire broad-based collaboration. A third scenario finds the two ideational components of policy discourse working at cross-purposes: normative-philosophical visions are at odds with cognitive-programmatic proposals. Here collective action “can go very wrong” (Schmidt 2011, p. 51), with reforms stalled altogether. This final category we label fragmented policy discourses as they supply few opportunities for network building, leaving governance gaps with both values and strategies ill-defined and recognition of interdependence absent.
Discursive localism thus enables us to identify different pathways along which new ideas, at moments of uncertainty in the politics and policy of a city, empower agents to make change. Existing approaches to urban change acknowledge a role for ideas but almost always as a second-order variable dependent for influence on the networks or institutions that carry them (Stone 2015). Discursive localism does not deny the importance of such organizational resources in change processes. Rather, it argues that the power of networks and durability of institutions rests much more on the underlying structure of ideas than existing urban policy research allows. Assessment of the cognitive and normative fit between ideas is the necessary starting place for analysis of the viability of urban policy reforms. Depending on how ideas are discursively packaged, particular incentives for collective action take hold that generate more or less support for collaborative governance. Through discursive localism, Karen Mossberger’s important call to compare the role of different incentives in fostering cooperation can be taken up. Table 1 encapsulates the connections among ideas and governance capturing three distinct urban-scale change pathways.
Ideas and Urban Governance.
The rest of the article applies discursive localism to interpret the course of three recent complex policy initiatives in Toronto. The early 2000s was a time of uncertainty for the city as it was buffeted by exogenous shocks, notably continental free trade, federal and provincial downloading, and an unwanted government amalgamation (Horak 2013). Talk of crisis was heard in high-profile policy gatherings to review and reset the city’s fortunes. Toronto was “a once-great city on the verge of decline” (Toronto City Summit Alliance [TCSA] 2003), falling behind on “key indicators of prosperity and social well being” (ICF Consulting 2000, p. 72). At “a unique and critical time” (Ideas that Matter 2003, p. 19), civic leaders called for “big thinking about our collective future” (Gilbert 2001, p. 21). In demand were “imaginative ideas” that would “no longer treat economic, environmental and community issues separately” but inspire “new partnerships and institutional arrangements” (Crombie 2001, p. 11; ICF Consulting 2000, p. vii).
Priorities identified for collaboration included immigrant settlement, sustainable development, and workforce development. In immigrant settlement, mounting evidence of declining economic outcomes for newcomers, combined with high-profile incidents of racially controversial remarks from several leading Toronto politicians, underscored the need for change (Bradford and Nesbitt-Larking 2015). With workforce development, a decade of intergovernmental and business–labor conflict left Toronto leaders seeking labor market collaboration (Bradford 1998b). In environmental matters, Toronto’s sprawling growth and fossil fuel dependence required “a new moral compass to guide us into the next century” (Gilbert 2001, p. 32). A sense of crisis and uncertainty prevailed in the early 2000s in these three fields and over the next decade calls for innovation gathered momentum in each. Through the lens of discursive localism, the case studies below track the ensuring paths of change, revealing how ideas, agency, and governance generate policy-specific logics of collaboration
Collaborative Governance in Toronto: A Discursive Localism Perspective
Immigrant Settlement: Large Purposes for Institutional Collaboration
Ideas: Integrated policy discourse
Canada has long taken pride in being a country built on immigrants and a world leader in welcoming newcomers. Immigrant settlement is central to narratives of nation-building and social cohesion, joining economic and cultural goals in a “societal endeavour” (Biles, Bernstein, and Frideres 2008). The first country to enact national multicultural legislation, Canada’s federal government positions diversity as a “national asset” and “basis for leadership in an increasingly complex world of economic globalization” (Rimok and Rouzier 2008, p. 201). At the normative-philosophical level, multicultural values are embedded in a “national infrastructure” (Good 2009, p. 232) envisioning a political community where all citizens, no matter their origins, can express their traditions or values without discrimination as long as these practices do not infringe constitutionally protected individual rights. Canadian public opinion, in contrast to many other OECD countries, remains supportive of immigration and immigrants.
Over the past decade, Toronto—Canada’s pivotal immigrant receiving city—has mounted an urban-scale “societal endeavour” for settlement and integration (Bradford and Nesbitt-Larking 2015). With its motto of “Diversity Our Strength,” Toronto’s municipal leadership expresses the city’s public philosophy that “diversity is healthy, adds value, and should be fostered” (Good 2009, p. 97). Such norms and values are reinforced at the cognitive-programmatic level by an impressive array of policy researchers and service advocates (Stasiulis, Hughes, and Amery 2011). Contributions range across the economic and social dimensions of diversity while connecting to civic narratives of city-building and urban autonomy. In economic terms, business-oriented research clarified the case for immigration as a comparative advantage for Toronto in a globalizing economy, not only to address skills shortages but also to tap foreign markets. In social terms, action research on the settlement frontlines demonstrated the need for culturally appropriate services along a continuum of housing, language training, education, and health care. Reports on Toronto’s poverty documented the multiple barriers facing recent immigrants and established a baseline for targeting services to high-needs neighborhoods. Influential community foundations launched diversity programs, with working papers linking immigrant settlement with economic development and social inclusion. The federal government established the Center of Excellence in Research on Immigration and Settlement to help connect the various research streams and focus policy advocacy across levels of government.
Although Toronto’s policy research resonated with normative images of Canadian multiculturalism, the municipal perspective also challenged prevailing national frameworks. Arguing that immigrant settlement was increasingly “deadlocked by a Constitution that has bred unproductive federal-provincial wrangles and stand-offs, with cities disappearing in the dust” (Broadbent in Sewell 2004, p. xiii), the issue was positioned as a focal point in a civic campaign for greater municipal recognition within the federation (Broadbent 2008; Good 2009). The business philanthropist Alan Broadbent and longtime urban activist and former Toronto Mayor, John Sewell, published popular books that placed immigration at the center of a “New Deal for Cities” (Broadbent 2008; Sewell 2004). The Toronto Star endorsed the New Deal campaign, renewing its tradition of journalistic advocacy with expanded coverage of Toronto’s multiculturalism and support for municipal empowerment (Rodgers 2013). Publisher-editor John Honderich was appointed as the Mayor’s Special Ambassador on the “cities agenda” helping the New Deal and immigrant opportunity “become a kind of brand, a digestible and legitimate way to frame discussion of urban policy” (Rodgers 2013, p. 63).
Agency: Community-wide coalition
The integration of normative-philosophical and cognitive-programmatic ideas evolved through a local immigration policy network translating values into action. Leaders from the political, business, community, and research sectors “found it relatively easy to cooperate with one another” (Good 2009, p. 118). Immigrant representatives and local democracy advocates joined together in protesting the provincial mega-city amalgamation as well as federal funding cutbacks (Siemiatycki and Isin 1997). They supported calls to empower “Toronto to tailor its own educational policies and programs to satisfy the unique needs of our diverse communities” (Ideas that Matter 2003, p. 19). Business leader Dominic D’Alessandro (2004), himself an immigrant settling in Toronto, wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for recognition of the “special role of Canada’s largest metropolitan centres as partners in immigration policy” and “a ‘bottom up’ approach.” Summarizing key findings from the immigration research communities, D’Alessandro detailed a 5-point urban action plan that he described as critical to both “successful nation building and for maximizing the economic potential of Canada” (p. 1).
Despite the absence of elected officials from among the city’s ethnoracial minorities, a municipal network of councilors and several Mayors have supported “an impressively broad range” of initiatives (Siemiatycki 2008, p. 42). Overall direction came from the Diversity Management and Community Engagement Unit, located in the City Manager’s Office, to coordinate and monitor departments and agencies on employment equity and human rights (Ramkhalawansingh 2012). For outreach, municipal departments built an extensive network of diversity-focused advisory bodies and task forces tapping the expertise of immigrant communities themselves for policy development. In 2013, City Council updated its pioneering “Immigration and Settlement Policy Framework” with a “Toronto Newcomer Strategy” and “ Newcomer Leadership Table” cochaired with the United Way Toronto, and the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. Membership includes some 20 civic organizations and the three levels of government. Through this network, discussions have emerged about developing an Immigrant Charter for Toronto. Toronto’s “innovative partnership based model” rested on a “high level of civic awareness” (Birrell and McIssac 2006, p. 124).
Governance: Institutional collaboration
Toronto’s business community and philanthropic organizations have taken active roles in collaborative governance (Bradford and Nesbitt-Larking 2015). In immigrant settlement policy, they have led a city–region alliance of civil society organizations and business networks, and participated in intergovernmental partnership councils at the neighborhood level.
In 2001, more than 40 civic leaders created the TCSA. With a mandate to combine resources across sectors to tackle large-scale city problems, the TCSA chose action priorities based on whether a common fact base and community-wide consensus existed. Immigration was an evident “first mover” for the TCSA. In 2003, the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) was established, with representation from private-sector employers, occupational regulatory bodies, universities and community colleges, immigrant serving agencies, and all three levels of government. Over its first decade, TRIEC successfully matched thousands of skilled immigrants with employment opportunities, gaining recognition for its innovative metropolitan approach to a complex problem of national policy consequence.
TRIEC’s Intergovernmental Relations Committee is a meeting place for representatives from federal, provincial, and municipal governments to identify opportunities for collaboration. In 2005, the federal and Ontario governments negotiated the first Canada-Ontario Immigration Agreement that joined the three levels of government through an infusion of $920 million in new settlement service funding for Ontario (Seidle 2010). Local Immigration Partnership (LIP) councils were established for multisectoral governance at the neighborhood level to integrate programs, enhance services, and guide policy reform. Initially allocated 17 partnership councils, Toronto, in 2012, reorganized the LIPs into four regional quadrants linked more closely with the 2013 Toronto Newcomer Strategy. Similar to TRIEC, the LIP model has been recognized as a promising model of policy collaboration in Canadian federalism.
In immigrant settlement, Toronto’s agenda was forged through an integrated policy discourse joining values and strategy. The framing inspired broad mobilization among Toronto’s economic, cultural, and social policy networks that was institutionalized in new governance structures. Strategically positioned at the intersection of Canadian multicultural values and urban autonomy campaigns, immigrant settlement in the first decade of the 2000s became integral to Toronto’s renewed civic purpose.
Environmental Sustainability: Selective Incentives for Sector Coordination
Ideas: Dissociated policy discourse
Sustainable development is a big idea proposing reconciliation of three dimensions—an ecological imperative to live within biophysical carrying capacities, a social imperative to ensure justice and equity through access to public services and protecting vulnerable groups from disproportionate risk exposure, and the economic imperative to ensure that basic needs are met while providing opportunity for future generations. Such complexity qualifies sustainable development as a wicked problem; as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) concedes, “No one understands how, or even if, sustainable development can be achieved; however, there is a growing consensus that it must be accomplished at the local level if it is ever to be achieved on a global basis” (Robinson 2009, p. 166).
Over the past three decades, sustainable development ideas have been advanced through a lively transnational community of action researchers and government representatives who act as “norm entrepreneurs” for the cause (Skogstad 2011, p. 17). Networks, such as ICLEI, C-40 Large Cities Climate Initiative, and United Nations Agenda 21, have diffused values and visions of sustainability while also providing learning opportunities for local leaders. Urban officials have been exhorted “to act on climate change out of a moral and collective obligation” (Gore 2010, p. 34). However, researchers have cataloged a host of formidable barriers in translating sustainable development’s global principles into holistic strategies at the local scale (Robinson and Gore 2005). Most local governments in North America continue to fall short in mounting integrated development strategies that reconcile the ecological, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability (Dale, Dushenko, and Robinson 2012). Despite being home to the ICLEI World Secretariat and benefiting from former Mayor David Miller’s activism in international environmental networks, Toronto’s embrace of sustainability ideas has been tentative and selective (Robinson 2009).
In this complex policy field, the links between normative-philosophical and cognitive-programmatic ideas have proven difficult to forge (Gilbert 2001). While sustainability advocates initially believed that conceptual breadth and ambiguity would be conducive to finding common ground, recent research describes an implementation gap as “silos, stovepipes, and solitudes” (Dale, Dushenko, and Robinson 2012) reinforce sector orientations and channel behavior down narrower paths. In Toronto, municipal measures have been taken to improve air and water quality and conserve energy, but these have not been embedded in “a culture of sustainability throughout all areas of policy development” (Cities Centre 2010, p. 1). Discrete policy innovations have been vulnerable to political backlash and fiscal restraint. Advocates for sustainable development report that the “current structure for implementation of Toronto’s environmental agenda is flawed” with integrated policy ideas and holistic approaches blocked by a lack of interdepartmental collaboration and public transparency in a “siloed bureaucracy” (Toronto Environmental Alliance [TEA] 2008).
Sustainable development in Toronto is an example of what we call a dissociated policy discourse where values and strategies fail to match up. At the normative-philosophical level, international networks advanced principles about reconciling environmental, social, and economic goals. At the practical level of cognitive-programmatic ideas, the high-level concepts never resonated in municipal policy networks. Diffuse normative support for sustainability values has not translated into a workable policy consensus around holistic development. Collaboration is evident in Toronto’s environmental affairs but the framing and mobilizing are less encompassing than in immigrant settlement.
Agency: Sector network
In its comparative review of sustainable development policy in North American municipalities, the TEA (2008) cataloged what it saw as Toronto’s policy weaknesses: an absence of horizontal policy units to integrate measures, few arm’s-length advisory commissions, and no annual sustainability report cards from “green ribbon committees” of businesses and community leaders to drive progress. Institutional innovations, such as sustainability roundtables in Seattle or Calgary with the representation and legitimacy to drive reforms, have foundered in Toronto (Fowler and Hartmann 2002; OECD 2010). An “environmental justice movement” that connects the social and economic dimensions of sustainability across the city–region is typically the driver for multisectoral approaches, and in Toronto these frames and forces remain “missing connections” (Ollevier and Tsang 2007).
In such circumstances, not all of the three sustainability priorities will advance, and in Toronto, only the economic dimension has motivated concerted action. In fact, this framing dates back to the late 1990s when an environmental task force divided between those whose support for economic development was conditional on equal attention to ecology and equity values, and those who privileged economic growth to the virtual exclusion of environmental justice goals (Fowler and Hartmann 2002). The latter position prevailed, clearing the path for the City to promote the greening of urban economic development. While environmental regulations remain contentious and environmental justice ideas marginal, Toronto’s “green market economy” has found policy traction, launched through the aptly titled municipal document, People, Planet, & Profit (City of Toronto 2007b). Technology-oriented entrepreneurs and environmental researchers have embraced the City’s efforts to “develop a strong green industry cluster and existing business base” (City of Toronto 2007a, p. 5). The Toronto Board of Trade identified “clean tech” as one of Toronto’s globally significant industries, recognizing the Toronto Stock Exchange as a leader in financing green energy companies. Toronto’s green industry cluster presented the city with its “the greatest opportunity for wealth and job creation since the arrival of the computer and the internet” (Cities Centre 2010, p. 5).
Governance: Project coordination
In 2007, Toronto formalized its “Green Economic Development Strategy” calling for economic “collaboration and partnerships among and between business, labour, academia and government” (City of Toronto 2007a). An inventory of Toronto’s clean tech sector listed 1,700 companies in fields such as smart grids, electric vehicles, clean air and water technology, solar and wind power, and waste technology (City of Toronto 2012a). The City’s Environment and Energy Division implemented measures “to pull environmental products and services into the market” (City of Toronto 2009, p. 2). Municipal procurement policies supported green power suppliers, and a range of financial incentives were available to commercial, institutional, and industrial enterprises for energy efficiency retrofits, “eco-business zones,” and commercialization of environmental research (OECD 2010). The provincial Green Energy and Economy Act offered further investments and the City’s sector flagship, the “Better Building Partnership” delivered 2,200 projects over 20 years leveraging nearly $700 million in public–private contributions (Environment & Energy Division 2013). Between 2008 and 2014, the Greater Toronto Civic Action Alliance hosted business and government partners around clean tech sector priorities of energy efficiency and green procurement.
Unlike immigrant settlement, challenges of sustainable development in Toronto have not been framed as a large civic purpose. A dissociated policy discourse separated the economic and social dimension of sustainability channeling innovations down the sectoral path of a green technology market. Governance rested on economic ideas about cluster building and selective incentives to grow clean tech and renewable energy. Although not multisectoral in discourse or strategy, a robust economic network coalesced “to apply a green overlay to the Toronto region’s competitiveness agenda” (OECD 2010, p. 25).
Workforce Development: Small Opportunities for Informal Cooperation
Ideas: Fragmented policy discourse
In today’s knowledge-based economy, labor market policy puts education and skills at the intersection of economic and social policy. Given the complexity of matching the demand and supply sides of the labor market, policy attention has focused on urban or metropolitan strategies attuned to localized industry profiles. At this scale, workforce development “means substantial employer engagement, deep community connections, career advancement, human service supports, industry-driven education and training, and the connective tissue of networks” (Giloth 2011, p. 8). In those countries with integrated strategies, public policy is guided by a “high-road” vision of economic and labor market restructuring (OECD 2012). The premise is that economic viability depends on productivity enhancing investments with gains and benefits shared among all contributors. Rather than cutting costs, businesses seek competitive advantage in product and service quality through the added value of an educated, skilled workforce equipped for innovation.
Adoption of high-road workforce development assumes acceptance of certain norms about the way economies ought to function and the purposes of labor markets. These include the proposition that workers are a long-term asset rather than disposable cost, that firms have a shared interest in the skills and security of the workforce, and that government’s responsibility is to promote longer term thinking for a “skills ecosystem” among business, labor, researchers, educators, and service providers. In a skills ecosystem, high-road values find cognitive-programmatic expression in the convening activities, data gathering, and policy work of intermediary institutions—local workforce development boards—that match labor supply and demand.
In Canada, no such multilevel policy framework exists (Bramwell 2012). Although labor market policy has been devolved from the federal to provincial governments, the endeavor remains a patchwork in Ontario: “a field imbued with precarious values and therefore difficult to coordinate” (Klassen 2000, p. 156). Firms hesitate to invest in their workers for fear of poaching, workers remain largely on their own in maintaining their employability, and governments struggle to promote collective learning mind-sets. Numerous studies report a “curious disconnect” between the business benefits of the high-road path and the limited training investments of Ontario employers (Saunders 2009; Simon 2013). Questions persist about the quality and accessibility of labor market information amid concerns that the different levels of government are not aligning data. Over the past decade, rather than building policy capacity, governments have defunded key organizations advocating for high-road workforce development innovations. Not surprisingly, Ontario municipal associations talk only about “beginning the conversation” for “a common understanding about the interplay between economic security, public assistance, and workforce development” (OMSSA 2010, pp. 10, 13).
Agency: Diffuse join-ups
Ontario’s fractious policy history has constrained Toronto’s recent workforce development initiatives. Tensions persist, on one hand, between federal and provincial governments with shared policy authority and, on the other, between the labor market’s business and labor associations crucial to program implementation. On the intergovernmental front across the 1990s, Liberal and Conservative governing parties wrangled over the jurisdictional transfer from the federal government to the province, and a related federal-provincial effort to devolve program authority to a business-labor-led training board was derailed by disputes over governance structures and representation. Partisan differences were reinforced by labor market actors unable to focus on shared workforce development challenges either within sectors or across the metropolitan economy.
Without an appropriate frame for collective action, the field has not produced boundary crossers to direct change and mobilize coalitions. Numerous dysfunctions in the local policy approach are well documented (City of Toronto 2012a): economic development services aimed at employers disconnected from employment services for workers and jobseekers, inadequate local labor market intelligence on emerging trends, and the absence of a system-wide perspective leaving services “ fragmented, confusing, duplicated and exceedingly difficult to navigate” (City of Toronto 2012b, p. 10). On the labor market’s supply and demand sides, the fragmentation of the employment services and division among government departments have left employers and jobseekers alike navigating a “mish mash of service entry points” discouraging both from “working with the very organizations that provide services they could benefit from” (City of Toronto 2012b, p. 25).
Two local labor market policy networks, the Toronto Workforce Innovation Group (TWIG) and Intergovernmental Committee for Economic and Labour Force Development, have worked quietly for more than a decade convening workshops to build consensus and intersectoral relationships. They inject a cross-national learning perspective through knowledge exchange and site visits with foreign cities where workforce development collaboration exists. Yet, as one TWIG (TWIG 2010, p. 4) dialogue session concluded, applying the lessons remains difficult when “government is missing from the conversation and ought to provide leadership and strategic direction.” With Toronto’s labor market actors, “too much of their work is of too small a scale and operates on too short a time horizon” (Zizys 2014, p. 55).
Governance: Informal cooperation
Without the high-road consensus supporting workforce development, Toronto’s labor market efforts are weighted heavily toward supply side interventions targeting unemployed workers for counseling and placement. Delivered through 18 employment centers, the jobseeker outreach fails to connect with the demand side of the labor market where employer investments drive the education and skill requirements required for career ladders within industries. Toronto’s approach responds more to outdated conceptions of short-term frictional unemployment than the structural forms of unemployment arising from technological change and innovation-based competition. Acknowledging this reality, the City of Toronto, in 2012, published Toronto’s “first workforce development strategy” articulating a vision and related practices (City of Toronto 2012b). Working as One: A Workforce Development Strategy for Toronto took stock of the problems, emphasizing that “progress will be incremental” and guided by a “pragmatic focus.” The document identified possibilities for advancing what City officials now termed “‘a made in Toronto’ system” (City of Toronto 2012b, p. 1).
First, existing and future municipal infrastructure projects in transit, housing, or recreation will incorporate “integrated employment plans” matching workers with opportunities. In 2013, such joint plans were underway in 12 sectors, notably, the Regent Park Revitalization. Second, the City described several “gateway partnerships” for simplifying employer engagement with workforce services, both by integrating municipal programs and by leveraging existing relationships forged through TRIEC and the clean tech cluster. Third, new outreach proposals included a Workforce Development Performance Dashboard and sponsoring of an annual Workforce Development Week to promote networking and information sharing. Fourth, pilot projects for workforce planning at the neighborhood level were launched to integrate labor market supply and demand and cultivate policy champions. Fifth, several policy conversations began in community foundations and think tanks about workforce governance through sector councils and intergovernmental agreements similar to those that built collaboration in sustainable development and immigrant settlement.
In workforce development, the policy discourse in Toronto has been fragmented and divisive. In the absence of a “cohesive vision” (Zizys 2014), precarious norms and contested agendas feed tentative stakeholder engagement and disjointed programs. Governance arrangements “that triumph under such conditions will tend to be small in size, limited in mandate, and have humble expectations associated with them” (Klassen 2000, p. 152). Unlike immigrant settlement or sustainable development, no policy discourse inspires collective action around either large purposes or selective benefits. Lacking what City officials call a “big picture” of how the different pieces and multiple players fit together, policy development features “small opportunities” for sharing information and nurturing relationships.
Table 2 draws together the discursive localism analysis of Toronto’s three complex policy initiatives, highlighting case-by-case variation. Integrated, dissociated, and fragmented discourses generate field-specific patterns of collective action and collaborative governance.
Ideas and Governance in Toronto.
Note. TRIEC = Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council; LIPs = Local Immigration Partnerships.
Conclusion
This article has made a case for a more rigorous incorporation of ideas into studies of localized policy making and collaborative urban governance. It did so by engaging with research traditions in comparative political economy, arguing that national level frameworks interpreting change processes through an ideational lens can be adapted for analysis of complex policy initiatives in large cities. Although recent urban-focused accounts of collective action have suggested a role for ideas in resolving dilemmas, this article’s closer attention to policy discourses showed how meaning systems and incentive structures condition and channel local governance reforms. Describing interactions among different types of ideas and tracing their particular effects on interests, the approach we call discursive localism sharpens the understanding of collective action and refines the interpretation of institutional innovation (Mossberger 2009). Not all new ideas result in “great transformations” (Blyth 2002) and discursive localism offers insights into which ideas matter where, underscoring that change processes are contextually specific, varying not only by national system or policy field but also by city–region as well.
Hopefully, this framework sets a direction for further research in a rapidly evolving urban policy environment where challenges of national consequence increasingly converge. Our analysis and findings from Toronto suggest two promising lines for urban analysis inspired by discursive localism. First, meaningful differences in the policy alignment of normative and cognitive ideas underpinning local collective action and collaborative urban governance could be tracked across cities. Toronto’s flagship project is immigrant settlement. Other cities—for example, Portland or Vancouver in sustainable development and Chicago or Cleveland in workforce development—will similarly coalesce around their own distinctive idea sets and civic purposes (Imbroscio 2013; Rast 2005; Slavin 2011). Discursive localism can strengthen appreciation of local political cultures and the conditions and processes through which they shape urban policy priorities. Second, from a methodological perspective, this article’s “thick description” of cross-policy variation in a single setting could be supplemented by quantitative studies that code data from multiple cities to gauge the distribution and intensity of ideas held by multiple urban actors (Clarke et al. 2006, p. 121). Elaborating the discursive localism framework along either of these comparative and methodological lines would contribute to building causal models of ideational influence on urban policy and governance.
Nearly 20 years ago, Susan Clarke and Gary Gaile (1998, p. 4) wrote that globalization “is constituted and enabled by an array of local practices rather than broad, unspecified sweeps of technological and economic changes.” This article reminds that such local practices always rest on ideas about what’s appropriate and viable for this place at this time. Discursive localism explores big ideas in local context, bringing into focus the mix of frames and forces that drive policy change in cities.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my panel colleagues Allison Bramwell, Susan Clarke, Jon Pierre, and Jill Simone Gross for their insights and suggestions. Thanks also to Jen Nelles, Grace Skogstad, Caroline Andrew, Vivien Schmidt, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.
Author’s Note
This is a substantially revised version of a paper presented at a panel on collaborative urban governance at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition, August 29-September 1, 2013, Chicago, Illinois.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.