Publications Archive
Executive Perspectives on Balance in Oversight and Accountability
April 2012
The Institute on Governance (IOG) is working to facilitate a dialogue on the evolving balance in accountability and oversight, reporting burden and the relationship between Agents of Parliament and the public service. The superstructure of rules, oversight and independent “guardians” has been growing since Program Review and HRDC’s grants and contributions controversy. Many of the resultant institutional arrangements and policy instruments are reaching a point of maturity.
Several years into this focus on public accountability, now is a good time to assess and reflect on the broad array of institutional arrangements in terms of their contribution to good governance, the management of the public service and the practical impact of the reporting requirement.
April 2012
The Institute on Governance (IOG) was engaged to shape a long-term dialogue amongst influential stakeholders on the evolving role of reporting in achieving balance in accountability and oversight. In addition, the IOG investigated the relationships between the different types of oversight bodies which act as ‘guardians’ of good governance in the Government of Canada, including the Agents of Parliament and the public service, and the cumulative impact of their scrutiny on government departments.
This paper constitutes one part of the IOG’s program and describes some of the current independent oversight guardians. Broadly these oversight bodies were chosen for their contribution to public administration and the overall functioning of government. For this reason, others, notably the Chief Electoral Officer, were omitted, as their oversight pertains to areas outside of public administration, while others were excluded because they were very narrow in focus, looking either at a sub-function, such as grievances, or a single department.
Project IN4M: Integrating Needs for Mental Well-Being into Human Resource Planning
October 2011
Project IN4M was commissioned by Health Canada to undertake an analysis of the common elements of needs-based human resource planning for mental wellbeing. This represents Phase I of a potentially three phased project. It has been done under the auspices of the Canadian Mental Health Association.
September 2011
The UK Economic and Social Research Council funded exploratory evaluation studies to assess the wider impacts on society of various examples of its research. The Payback Framework is a conceptual approach previously used to evaluate impacts from health research. We tested its applicability to social sciences by using an adapted version to assess the impacts of the Future of Work (FoW) programme. We undertook key informant interviews, a programme-wide survey, user interviews and four case studies of selected projects. The FoW programme had significant impacts on knowledge, research and career development. While some principal investigators (PIs) could identify specific impacts of their research, PIs generally thought they had influenced policy in an incremental way and informed the policy debate. The study suggests progress can be made in applying an adapted version of the framework to the social sciences. However, some impacts may be inaccessible to evaluation, and some evaluations may occur too early or too late to capture the impact of research on a constantly changing policy environment.
September 2011
Understanding the impact of research is important for funding bodies in accounting for funds, advocating additional resources and learning how better to achieve their aims. The Health Research Board (HRB) has funded research in Ireland for over 20 years. We analysed eight examples of HRB grants from between 10 and 15 years earlier using the Payback Framework to catalogue the impacts. They ranged from world-class academic articles and new clinical assays through to improvements in recovery time for acute myocardial infarction and development of a drug company worth over €5 million. Here we first describe the study, then examine the role of the Payback Framework in research impact assessment including examining impacts made by the HRB study itself following its completion in 2008. We discuss how that study has contributed to further development of research impact assessment methods that could be used by the HRB and others.
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