Policy Update: What Apolitical members are working on

Ensuring you’re across the latest developments in policy can be a struggle. Apolitical tries to keep you up to date. Here are four key recent developments you may have missed, submitted by members of the Apolitical community.

We asked you: What’s your department worked on or published recently that you’d like other public servants to know about?

Update 1:

We have worked on community conservation areas around our park.

**— Larissa, communications officer **

Update 2:

In partnership between YWCA Canada and YMCA Canada, we recently published a report on Preventing a Lockdown Generation: A Plan to Support Canada's Youth in Post-Pandemic Recovery.

**— National Director of Public Policy & Strategic Communications, YWCA Canada **

Update 3:

We published a rapid assessment of how 120 countries globally fared in their management of COVID relief spending. Each country’s scorecard assesses the level of transparency, oversight (from legislators and auditors), and public participation in emergency spending packages.

Globally, governments spent more $14 trillion on COVID relief but two thirds provided limited or minimal information on the packages, half bypassed legislatures in the budget process, and only a quarter conducted expedited audits.

The report includes best practices from around the world, which public servants could leverage to make their government's COVID spending more open and accountable.

**— Cynthia Romero, Director of Communications, International Budget Partnership **

Update 4:

COP 26 is fast approaching and increasing governments around the world are making commitments to transition to net-zero emissions. The question of how they will actually achieve this transition, and how public servants can best support this, is therefore rising in salience.

Given that these transitions directly impact people’s lives and involve significant trade-offs that touch on public values, many are deeply contested. Decisions around this, unless based on an understanding of public attitudes towards risk, and the priorities of different sections of society, are unlikely to be successful.

Public engagement is, therefore, a critical component in building a collective public mandate for climate policy. It brings with it the opportunity to create a better, fairer and more inclusive society in which individuals and communities are actively involved in shaping the policies and decisions that affect them. While the importance of public engagement around climate policy is relatively well acknowledged, it is less clear how public engagement processes should be structured and designed to ensure the transition to a net-zero world is socially just, sustainable, and impactful.

To explore how public engagement on climate change could be better understood and improved, we embarked on a journey to unpack this. Through our report on ‘Public Engagement for Net- Zero: A Literature Review’, we developed a framework to understand what effective public engagement around climate change could look like. And through our companion report ‘Public Engagement on Climate Change: A Case Study Compendium’, we unpacked that framework in practice, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches across a range of examples from around the world.

— Chandrima Padmanabhan, Senior Associate, Europe, Centre for Public Impact

👋 What are you working on right now? Let us and the Apolitical community know by filling out this form.

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)