Assessing policy robustness under the COVID-19 crisis: an empirical study of the environmental policymaking system in Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT

Desirable robust systems retain functional reliability and legitimacy in times of crisis and show minimal sensitivity to these events. As a multifaceted crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic posed various challenges to policymaking systems around the globe. In this study, the authors evaluate changes within the environmental policymaking system in Ontario, Canada, during this crisis and analyze them in light of the robust policy design literature and its links to the broader concept of policy design success and failure. These changes are evaluated using an empirical hypothesis testing approach designed to assess the variations of key indicators in the administrative and public participation domains of Ontario’s environmental policymaking system during and before the COVID-19 pandemic. The results indicate that the system has failed to retain its functional reliability, and thus its robustness, during this crisis. The authors conclude by contextualizing these results in light of the more recent history of environmental policymaking in the province and its impacts on Ontario’s environment and offering suggestions for future research building on this empirical example.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• environmental policymaking
• policy robustness
• polycentricity

Acknowledgement

We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [grant number RGPIN-2018-04345].

Notes on contributors

Nayyer Mirnasl

Nayyer Mirnasl is a multidisciplinary researcher cooperating with the Conflict Analysis Group at the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. With backgrounds in physics, city and regional planning, and geography, she is interested in research issues at the confluence of science, policy, and society. Her areas of research interest are environmental sciences and policy, geospatial modelling and analysis, and natural resources management. Before joining the Conflict Analysis Group, she was a graduate student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo, where she successfully completed her research on water quality modelling in an agricultural watershed in southwestern Ontario.

Simone Philpot

Simone Philpot is a postdoctoral fellow in the Conflict Analysis Group in the Department of Systems Design Engineering, at the University of Waterloo and an affiliate researcher at the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation. She merges insights from the decision sciences with participatory modeling to examine linked socio-environmental challenges and to design interventions to address conflicts arising from them. Simone focuses on modeling techniques that help people explore and communicate their own values and preferences in environmental and planning decisions and is interested in how new technologies will change shared decision-making practice.

Aidin Akbari

Aidin Akbari is an interdisciplinary, independent researcher with a background in city and regional planning and environmental studies. Aidin is interested in analyzing social-ecological systems, with a specific focus on transboundary resource conflicts, ecosystem services and land use change, biodiversity loss, and environmental governance. He completed his graduate studies in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo in 2020, where he carried out a spatial scenario-based ecological impact assessment study on the habitat quality of an endangered species of the Canadian Prairies.

Keith W. Hipel

Keith W. Hipel is University Professor of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo where he is Coordinator of the Conflict Analysis Group. He is the Former President of the Academy of Science within the Royal Society of Canada, Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Fellow of the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Hipel’s major research interests are the development of conflict resolution, multiple criteria decision analysis, time series analysis and other decision-making methodologies for addressing complex interdisciplinary system of systems engineering problems lying at the confluence of society, technology and the environment.