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In 2007, the World Health Organization published a global guide on innovations to the built and social environments that would ensure active aging for seniors. This guide suggests that municipalities adopt an "age-friendly city" approach, i.e. by improving the infrastructure, equipment and services used by seniors, particularly in terms of leisure, health and transportation. This paper aims to assess the scope of the measures put in place by the various social actors of two communities that have implemented the VADA process in New Brunswick, Saint-Quentin and Grand Falls. On a theoretical level, our framework is based on the model of environmental gerontology, which acts on the territorial governance process. Advocating a qualitative approach, our analysis method consisted of conducting semi-directed interviews with stakeholders and partners involved in the VADA process and holding focus groups with seniors. Despite the aims expressed by the elected officials, our results show that the approach fell short in improving the quality of life of seniors due to difficulties related not only to a lack of shared leadership, to the new responsibilities that fell on local actors, to communication consultation and demobilization issues, but also to a lack of knowledge of the project, both on the part of social actors and seniors, and to the current pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the concept of an ecological transition is still being defined through an ambiguous process, it also becomes an increasingly urgent municipal governance issue. In places where this governance is multiscalar and the responsibilities are shared among a number of juris- dictions, the absence of a stable and operational definition of a transition adds to the chal- lenge of defining and implementing effective interventions. This paper presents the results of a partnership research with the borough of Rosemont--La Petite-Patrie, in Montreal, that aimed at tackling two questions : "what is an ecological transition at an infra municipal level ?" and "how can it be implemented ?" The analysis of our partner's documents and interven- tions led to the creation of two typologies. The first typology classifies the topics with the concept of ecological transition, while the second identifies the policy instruments used to act on these topics. The results led us to identify three challenges related to the inframuni- cipal governance of ecological transition : conciliating the living environment-focused approach of the borough and the principles of a just transition, finding new levers for shared responsibility issues, and applying incitative tools and planning regulations (discretionary and/or regulatory) more thoroughly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the analysis of how a metropolitan governance issue, under the dynamics of public stakeholders, is addressed from the bottom up by local representatives and then redefined from a top-down perspective by the central State, this paper examines the territorial construction of a public problem in the Greater Paris area. The case of the Greater Paris area reveals deep rifts between the city centre and the outskirts with the central State's difficulty to decentralize development authorities in the capital region, as well as the centrality of the institutional variable in the construction of the public problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the construction of a public transport policy on an agglomeration scale through the case study of Lyon, France. Its metropolitan government structure evaded the problem of serving large social housing areas. The founding sequence of Lyon's intercommunality sheds light on the politicization of « communautés urbaines » observed during their first decade of existence in France. The specific city of Vaulx-en-Velin was granted several thousand social housing units. The municipal councillors meant to use them in order to provide modern urban equipment. But, within the new intermunicipal arena, the exacerbation of hierarchies among elected officials undermined the resources of municipal communism. The trajectory and the resources available to Vaulx-en-Velin's elected officials predisposed them to use conflictualized reading grids of the social world, in order to endorse a role as representative of the town's working classes. The intermunicipal politicization's de-singularized the service of neighbourhoods, in order to transform it as a local public problem that calls into question the global treatment of urban working classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies reveal a diversification of methods in contemporaneous Public Administration. This study takes systematic stock of and compares the research methods used over one decade of published research in two national journals in Public Administration. Research papers published in Canada, as well as in Australia, have apparently not followed methodological developments in the wider Public Administration community. Our systematic review revealed minor differences between these two communities : interviews and qualitative content analysis are popular in both samples, whereas quantitative methods remain basic. This particularity is not shared by Canadian political science research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk management is a process that should have a positive impact on a public organizations’ performance. As such, it is desirable to offer an accurate portrait of the process and to review how its application is related to generally recognized best practices. This research paper is based on data from an annual questionnaire on the application of the Public Administration Act compiled by Quebec’s Treasury Board Secretariat (2004- 2013). Within the performance regime established by the Treasury Board Secretariat, risk management should gradually be adopted, as demonstrated in this document. Large organizations should be encouraged to adopt the proposed processes more quickly. To a certain an extent, organizations dedicating resources, designating process owners or applying best practices as management support should also be more mature as far as their risk management processes are concerned. There is a slow but upward trend regarding all indicators of risk management maturity (process, policy, scope of applications) studied. Overall, large ministries and organizations tend to adopt risk management tools quicker than small ones, although small organizations have been known to catch up on their initial slower start. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]