Networks Are Not Enough: Urban Governance and Workforce Development in Three Ontario Cities

1. Networks Are Not Enough: Urban Governance and Workforce Development in Three Ontario Cities Allison Bramwell Postdoctoral Research Fellow Program on Globalization and Regional Innovation Systems (PROGRIS) The Munk School of Global Affairs University of Toronto allison.bramwell@utoronto.ca Presentation to the 62ndAnnual Conference of the Institute of Public Administarion of Canada Ottawa, August 23, 2010

2. How does public policy play out ‘on the ground’ in cities? • New urban challenges • Competition between cities for inward investment and human capital • ‘Wicked’ policy problems that cross levels of government and policy sectors (homelessness, pollution, social problems) • Need to balance economic development imperatives and social welfare exigencies • Emerging trends • Cities taking the initiative to chart their own courses for economic and social development • Looking for innovative and cost-efficient policy responses to complex problems • Shift from government to governance These dynamics are understudied in the Canadian context…

3. The Governance Question - “The puzzle to be solved is how cooperation can be achieved without an overarching system of command or without reliance on market exchanges”. (Stone 2004, 9)

4. Workforce Development Networks:Core Constructs • Labour markets are primarily local so policy needs to be regionally sensitive (Giloth 2004; Harrison and Weiss 1998, Melendez 2004; Fitzgerald 2006; OECD 2004, 2005, 2006) • Potential to straddle economic development and social welfare considerations by matching the supply and demand sides of the labour market (Haddow and Klassen 2006; Reich 1991) • Premised on inclusive views of community economic development • Defined as community-driven collaborative arrangements between local community-based labour market actors aimed at linking under- and unemployed workers with access to career pathways that lead to high quality, stable, ‘family-sustaining’ jobs in local firms • local governance innovations that link jobseekers with good jobs in local firms are possible where stable and durable coalitions of labour market actors exist at the local level The problem, therefore, is not workforce development itself, but building and sustaining the networks to support it. Co-ordinating the interests and efforts of local labour market stakeholders is precisely the hard part.

5. Why Workforce Development? Good case through which to empirically examine urban governance dynamics in Canada because… Local workforce development is a classic collective action problem, contingent on the politics of ideas and interests; “Workforce development issues are intrinsically governance issues” becausedecisions must be made by “interdependent, complex, loosely-linked actors and institutions with shared purposes but no shared authority” (Clarke 2004, 30-31) It is also a local governance problem, and “without attention to to local politics” any attempt at policy reform will “ultimately fail” (Giloth 2004, 2).

6. Two Research Questions • Do workforce development networks exist in the three cities under examination? 2. If so, is there variation in these networks?

7. Theoretical Framework:‘Top-Down’ or ‘Bottom-Up’? • ‘Top down’ arguments - neo-institutionalist perspectives • Macro-institutional factors shape and constrain local outcomes • Constraints include federal-provincial conflict, industrial relations, ‘hyper-pluralism’ • Need a macro-institutional policy framework (fed or prov) to support urban policy intiatives • Prediction: in the absence of a supportive policy framework, there will be little evidence of local workforce development activities • ‘Bottom-up arguments’ – theories of urban governance • Emphasize urban political agency – that cities make choices about how social and political dynamics should unfold • Focus on how networks and coalitions of community-based actors make collective strategic choices about local economic and social development (Clarke and Gaile 1998; Pierre 1999, 2005; DiGaetano and Strom 2003 • Prediction: regardless of supportive policy framework, there will be evidence of local workforce development activities

8. Research Design and Methodology • comparative cast study analysis of workforce development networks in three medium-sized Ontario cities • ‘Most similar systems’ design • control for macro-economic and macro-institutional context and size • Vary in local economic structures and demographic profiles • Data drawn from 69 interviews • Late 2005 to early 2007 with local labour market actors • Late 2007 to early 2008 with fed and provgovt reps • Dependent variable: workforce development networks • Independent variables: • Macro-institutional policy frameworks • Organization of local state-society relations

9. Measuring Local Autonomy • Feasible Agenda (Stone 1989, 2005; Mossberger and Stoker 2001) • Governance Mechanism • Role of Local Government (Stone 1989, 2005) • Network Membership (John and Cole 2000; DiGaetano and Strom 2003; Pierre 1999, 2005) • Network Structure (John and Cole 2000; Clark and Gaile 1998) • Intergovernmental Relations

11. Results • Feasible Agendas and the Role of Local Government • WFD part of planning process in Hamilton and Ottawa • Funding from municipal govt to establish WFD network • But not able to sustain local political attention • Not attempted in KW • Constituent Networks • Constituent networks defined as local sub-networks that organize and represent sub-sets of local actors or ‘constituent groups’ who share common goals and objectives – e.g. employment service providers, immigrant support providers, economic development networks • Act as important intermediaries to facilitate community-wide networks • Each city had 2 or 3 constituent networks that organize dsub-sets of WFD actors but none succeeded in developing linkages to build a community-wide WFD network • Local Intergovernmental Relations • Local fed and provgovt reps highly involved in Hamilton and KW but not Ottawa • Involvement of non-local fed and provgovts reps and politicians weak in all three cases

12. Three Governance Failures • DID find evidence of WFD networks and DID find variation BUT none were “success stories” • In none of the cases was a durable and sustainable locally-driven workforce development network that facilitates the matching of workers with high quality jobs in local firms, successfully established • Difficult to attract and sustain both local and non-local political attn • Hard to keep on municipal agenda with plethora of competing concerns – WFD is complex • Local WFD actors report trying to get buy-in from prov politicians and policymakers but being told they need to come up with a unified community strategy first • BUT support of local fed and provgovt reps was crucial to getting discussions about WFD off the ground

13. Notes from the trenches… Workforce development efforts in Ontario are “between a rock and a hard place” (confidential interview). “we’ve always cried out for the fact that we have our own needs and we want to respond to those needs in a unique fashion” but there “isn’t a lot of policy there around driving communities…There are no meetings between the community and the provincial policymakers to say ‘look, if you want to put a plan together, set out your priorities, let’s put a template together of issues that we can pursue and talk to various partners to make sure there’s buy-in, that’s not really coming down from that level’” (confidential interview).

14. ‘Top-Down’ and ‘Bottom-Up’:Two Theoretical Explanations Revisited • On the face of it, ‘top-down’ neo-institutionalist predictions most accurate - Local WFD efforts deeply constrained by barriers operating at prov level • City govts “policytakers , not policymakers” (Lazar and Leuprecht 2007, 2) • Three governance failures – not able to sustain a community-wide WFD network in absence of policy framework that provides funding mechanism • BUT found that WFD networks did exist in all 3 cases and that they varied according to local factors • Patterns of interaction between local constituent networks • “bedrock” of local governance – get different actors to come to the “table” • SO support for urban governance theories that emphasize political choice and impact of state-society relations

15. Conclusions: Networks Are Not Enough • It is in the nexus betweentop-down policy frameworks and bottom-up self-organizing networks where governance failures – and successes – are most accurately accounted for • combination of top-down and bottom-up variables necessary to support sustainable community-wide workforce development strategies • ‘Bottom-up’ variables: constituent networks, support from local govt, civic leadership or “champions” • ‘Top-Down’ variables: policy frameworks that provide mandate, funding, legitimacy, and flexibility for localities to design their own approaches to their own particular problems

16. Last Words…Urban Governance in Canada • Models of urban governance are not as foreign to the Canadian context as some analyses would have predicted • Did NOT find evidence of sustainable governance innovations in workforce development BUT DID find evidence of a shift from government to governance • Nascent structures significant because they existed despitemacroinstitutional constraints to locally driven workforce development strategies • Found new patterns of interaction between local state and non-state actors, and between different levels of government • Features of local governance particular to Canadian case • Urban governance in European cities often supported by macroinstitutionalpolicy frameworks, and more fragmented and variable in U.S. cities • Canadian cities operate somewhere in the middle, in the ambiguous nexus between top-down policy frameworks and bottom-up self-organizing networks • local governance in Canadian cities is a fragile, evolutionary, and incremental process • on their own, without energetic civic leadership and political buy-in at municipal or provincial levels, local networks are not sufficient to drive local governance innovations, but they do demonstrate the ability to generate the energy and ideas that may frame future governance processes.