Policy Evidence and Implementation Links - January 16, 2017

This week: Think tanks' influence, being a responsible public servant, and not settling for average.

1. Rohinton Medhora, President of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), reviews Donald Abelson's Northern Lights: Exploring Canada's Think Tank Landscape. I've long wondered about think tanks and their influence over policy, though he says Abelson "...leaves Canada's think tanks as perplexing as ever."
2. I have found Kernaghan and Langford's Responsible Public Servant (available for purchase here and here and also available for free in PDF from IPAC here) to be a good foundational resource on several occasions. As the Second Edition was published in 2014 and before Kernaghan passed away in 2015, the authors wrote "The Responsible Public Servant revisited" in Canadian Government Executive. Not so much views I share as things to keep an eye on - worth a quick read.
3. My all-time favourite article by Atul Gawande, entitled The Bell Curve. The ending is stirring: "The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average? . . .Somehow, what troubles people isn't so much being average as settling for it. Everyone knows that averageness is, for most of, our fate. And in certain matters—looks, money, tennis—we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child's pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we expect averageness to be resisted."

Cheers,

David