Policy Studies in Canada

Book excerpt: The study of public policy in Canada is well rooted in traditional legal-historical analysis of Canadian government and political economy. However, the current emphasis among political and other social scientists on policy issues, and the proliferation of theoretical concepts that such an emphasis has generated, are relatively recent developments. In fact, it is only since the 1970s that a separate field of policy studies has emerged in Canada. In Policy Studies in Canada twenty-one leading scholars in the field of Canadian public policy trace the progress of a quarter century of research and publication in the fields of policy studies and policy analysis.