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Has global environmental change impacted on the urban way of life and on urban policy? Research shows that climate change has become a major urban political issue, but what can one say about biodiversity? This paper will, firstly, examine the urban assemblage perspective, which presents itself as a new approach to urban theory. This approach has been criticized, but its remains valid as a way of making sense of emerging urban practices. Among these practices are urban policy on climate change and biodiversity. Secondly, the paper examines action plans on biodiversity in six Canadian metropolises. The conclusion asks whether taking into account global environmental change in urban planning leads to a new reshaping of large urban areas. [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]

This paper defines two key core concepts in the field of public policy: co-production and co-construction. It first examines the role of the third sector in the co-construction of two public policy initiatives, the Voluntary Sector Initiative and the Social Economy Initiative, developed under the responsibility of the federal state. Then it turns to the participation of the third sector in co-constructing public policy under the responsibility of the Quebec provincial state in six policy areas: policy to recognize autonomous community organizations, policy to recognize the social economy, daycare policy, home care policy, social housing policy and Quebec legislation to combat poverty. The policy initiatives of both the federal state and Quebec state are compared and analysed from a co-construction perspective [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the contribution of the main sources of income as well as that of taxes and transfers on the level of poverty in Quebec and in Canada. This contribution is decomposed into a product of the effects of total size and performance per dollar of each of the income sources. An important problem in this type of exercise is that the order in which the components of income are ranked can influence considerably the share of total poverty alleviation allocated to each component. A sharing rule is thus used to allocate to each income component a part of total poverty alleviation that is independent of the ordering chosen. Sensitivity tests are also applied to assess the role of the choice of poverty lines and indices. The results indicate that the more generous social programs do not always reduce relative poverty the most, and that other aspects of the tax/benefit system that are less prominent are more effective in that regard. Relative to the rest of Canada, Quebec’s social programs are both more generous and more poverty-performant; however, this is associated with taxes in Quebec that are also heavier and more costly in terms of poverty impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]