摘要：Introduction After Canada committed to the 2016 Paris climate agreement, the federal and provincial governments announced the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change. This broad governance document outlined a renewed long-term goal of reducing greenhouse gases, though there were a number of significant policy-level challenges (e.g., developing a carbon pricing system). A similarly ambitious domestic approach to climate change was undertaken following the 1996 Kyoto climate change agreement, but this largely failed. These shortcomings, past and present, can be attributed in part to policy capacity deficits (Howlett 2009). While there are many examples from other fields, the 1996 and 2016 time posts are timely because they also correspond to two significant Government of Canada commissions tasked with understanding and bolstering policy capacity. Under the Chretien government, the Deputy Minister Task Force on "Strengthening our Policy Capacity" led by Ivan Fellegi challenged departments to respond to the new public management reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. Included in the Task Force's 1996 recommendations was the need for more specialized policy analysis skills, horizontal policy coordination, and greater public participation in the policy process (Howlett and Well-stead 2012). This initiative led to a number of tangible outcomes: namely, policy training programs and the creation of the Policy Research Initiative. (1) Concern about policy capacity also garnered interest from provincial governments (in particular Ontario, Manitoba, and Alberta) who commissioned policy capacity studies (Riddell 2007; Howlett and Wellstead 2012). Parallel to this interest, there was considerable output by the Canadian public administration research community. However, the uptake of this scholarship by government agencies has been very limited.
