The successful implementation of the Canada/British Columbia
Agreement to Enhance the Employability of Social Assistance Recipients (the
“SAR”, or Four Corner” Agreement) can be explained by a revised version of
Mazmanian and Sabatier’s 1983 theory of implementation. This framework is
also able to account for some of the limitations that the initiative faced. The
analysis of the SAR Agreement is placed in the context of the on-going dilemma
of work and welfare and in the evolving ideological climate in the B.C. welfare
system from an ideology of redistribution, to one of liberal developmentalism,
emphasizing opportunity before work.
The case-study provides a history of the implementation of the SAR
Agreement in B.C. at both the policy-formulation and field levels of
government, and gives an overview of the agreement and its results. This
information is gained through reports, government documents and interviews
with officials involved in the SAR Agreement. Application of the revised
theory of implementation to the agreement illuminates the ingredients critical
to the success of the SAR initiative in British Columbia. Among the most
important determinants of success were the intensive cooperation between
federal and provincial agencies, the amount of discretion given to local officials
when combined with the expertise and resources of those officials, the correct
causal theory underlying most project designs, and the flexibility of the
agreement respond to past successes and failures. The agreement was limited by
the lack of general guidelines to provide officials with a sense of direction, by the
possibility of conflicting goals of outside agencies, and by problems with the
invalid causal theory underlying a few programs.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/5521 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Spence, Robin Kirsten |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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