Daniel Béland

Policy learning and policy change stand amongst the most central yet fragmented research areas in public policy research. Both have developed into independent strands of scholarship, raising the question of whether, and how, they still engage with one another. This chapter explores the intersection between policy learning and policy change by going back to their conceptual foundations and their evolution over the past decades. Through an explorative review of the literature, the chapter highlights the growing scholarly interest in the policy learning-change nexus and underscores its contemporary relevance. Building on this, it outlines a research agenda focusing on the institutional and ideational contexts in which both processes unfold. In doing so, the chapter reconnects two foundational areas of public policy research and advances a more integrated understanding of how learning shapes, and is shaped by, processes of policy change.

This article critically evaluates inclusive employment policies in the Canadian province of Quebec. Through a review of inclusive employment literature, we first find that the current Quebec policy landscape does not align with best practices. Using the policy cycle framework, we then compare the design of Quebec's employment policies to their implementation, finding that there are tensions between the two. A review of what is happening on the ground in Quebec, through an analysis of government spending documents, sheds light on the discrepancies between policy design and implementation.

International donors are transnational actors that pursue various strategies to influence policy decisions in Global South countries. In addition to conditionality, which typically involves imposing policy requirements on recipient countries as part of aid packages, such actors also use persuasion by diffusing specific policy ideas at the transnational level and within the countries they seek to influence.1 Beyond donors, the transnational field of policy influence is populated by a host of actors, ranging from scholars and academic networks to private consultants, technical assistants and think tanks who seek to shape the policy agenda and impose their problem definitions and policy solutions at the global, regional and country levels.2

The Great Depression was a turning point in the development of social programming in North America. This paper explores the politics of social policy expansion during the Great Depression in the United States and Canada through an analytical lens that combines the insights of historical institutionalism and the analysis of transnational processes. Thus, the paper focuses on the differences between these two cases as distinct entities as well as how they were shaped by, and influenced one another through, transnational processes. This combination of historical institutionalism and close attention to transnational processes adds insight to the existing scholarship on the politics of welfare state development that tends to prioritize one perspective over the other. Empirically, the paper compares these politics in two discrete social policy areas: old‐age pensions and unemployment insurance. The puzzle tackled is the following: why did the U.S. federal government create new programs in these areas during the 1930s, while Canada did not; and, simultaneously, how did these U.S. policy developments influence Canada during and beyond that decade alongside other transnational trends and processes? As argued, the distinct timing and pace of reform and the role of courts explain why Canada did not implement major public pension and unemployment programs during the Great Depression. This contrasts with the U.S., where the advent of the New Deal led to the creation of a federal pension program and a decentralized system of unemployment insurance. Over time, these policy innovations impacted welfare state development in Canada through transnational influence. Related Articles: Béland, Daniel, Marchildon, Gregory P., Medrano, Anahely, Rocco, Philip. 2024. “Policy Feedback, Varieties of Federalism, and the Politics of Health‐Care Funding in the United States, Mexico, and Canada.” Politics & Policy 52(1): 51–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12575 . Luypaert, Anouk, and Peter Thijssen. 2024. “The Comparative Politics of Solidarity: Political Party Discourse across Three Welfare State Regimes.” Politics & Policy 52(5): 935–962. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12625 . Luccisano, Lucy, and Amy Romagnoli. 2007. “Comparing Public Social Provision and Citizenship in the United States, Canada, and Mexico: Are There Implications for a North American Space?” Politics & Policy 35(4): 716–751. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2007.00082.x .

Journal of Medical Internet Research - International Scientific Journal for Medical Research, Information and Communication on the Internet #Preprint #PeerReviewMe: Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint. Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn. Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period. Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author). Background: Two decades of research have highlighted persistent income-related health inequities in Canada across municipal, provincial, and national levels. While there is broad consensus among researchers, advocates, and health professionals that social determinants are the primary drivers of health, the empirical foundation supporting this remains relatively limited. A current renaissance in health system data access offers an opportunity to assess the multilevel impact of social factors on health inequalities, yet this potential remains underused. Objective: This project aims to examine how social, economic, and political conditions shape health inequalities and investigate how structural and intermediate determinants explain disparities across national, provincial, city, neighborhood, and individual levels. Methods: We will create the Canadian Social Determinants Urban Laboratory (CSDUL), a multilevel, longitudinal, virtual data environment that integrates 15 existing databases from Statistics Canada, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium, and DMTI Spatial. Guided by the World Health Organization social determinants of health framework, CSDUL will initially cover 2011 to 2015 due to data completeness and expand as additional years become available. CSDUL builds on Statistics Canada’s Canadian Population Health Survey and will link survey data to administrative and health records, including hospital discharges, ambulatory care, mortality, cancer registries, and longitudinal tax files. Area-level indicators will be added using historical postal codes and geospatial boundaries. Organized through a hub-and-node model, CSDUL includes a central hub and 5 research nodes. We will develop and validate area-based indicators to study social determinants at micro (individual), meso (neighborhood, city, and province), and macro (national) levels. A core deliverable is to assess the strengths and limitations of survey and administrative data for health research and derive variables accordingly. After developing CSDUL, we will replicate World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe income-related health inequality analysis for urban Canada and analyze the impact of social determinants on outcomes. We will apply a 2-fold Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition between the lowest and highest urban income quintiles. A major strength of CSDUL is its capacity to analyze how diverse determinants shape health across subgroups (eg, gender), identifying key drivers of health outcomes. Results: The indicators to be used in CSDUL are being developed and validated by the contributing nodes. In collaboration with node 3, we are constructing measures of social capital using DMTI Spatial Points of Interest data. A prototype version of CSDUL incorporating a limited set of indicators has been developed in Statistics Canada’s Research Data Centre. We anticipate receiving the finalized indicators from the nodes by August 2025 to September 2025 and aim to complete the decomposition analysis by December 2025. Conclusions: Multisectoral interventions are most effective when they are customized to meet the unique needs of specific subpopulations using robust and multilevel data sources such as CSDUL.

How did transnational actors interact with social policy in Africa before and during the pandemic? How should they interact with social policy in Africa in the post-pandemic era? This chapter examines these broad questions from a perspective that recognises that transnational actors, just like other non-state actors, are significant policy players in African social policy as they deploy material and ideational mechanisms in their interaction with domestic players. The COVID-19 pandemic affected the regular ways of doing things and impacted the relationship between transnational actors and African countries. How were transnational actors involved in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa? What should be the roles of transnational actors in a post-COVID Africa? Will it be just business as usual again? The chapter addresses these specific questions through the lens of institutional theory. We argue that the pandemic and related changes affecting multinational and bilateral organizations point to the need for institutional reform.

This volume provides a systematic discussion of social policy reform in sub-Saharan Africa in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The following Conclusion relies on existing social policy scholarship to draw lessons from other parts of the world that might be helpful in the African context before translating them into clear policy recommendations. As suggested in the volume’s chapters, context matters significantly for lesson drawing and, in today’s post-COVID-19 context, simple policy borrowing from other regions is not what should be emphasised. The attention to the specificities of the African context is thus central to our policy recommendations, although readers interested in a specific country might need to further adapt them to its concrete cultural, institutional, and political settings.

From decolonisation and nation-building after independence to structural adjustments to the implementation of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and, more recently, of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, social policy reform in sub-Saharan Africa has witnessed gradual changes but also more sudden and dramatic episodes caused by global crisis, including the recent worldwide pandemic. This Introduction to The State and the Imperative for Social Policy Reform in Africa explains how the volume explores social policy changes that have been made before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and changes that need to be made towards protecting individuals, families, and communities against exposure to insecurity, poverty, and other vulnerabilities throughout the lifecycle. The Introduction is divided into three main sections. The first section offers a brief overview of social policy development in sub-Saharan Africa since the colonial era. The second section provides a short discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath on the African continent. Finally, the last section offers an overview of the chapters that comprise the volume.