Public Policy Dissertations

Below is a list of dissertations both in progress and completed by our students across various substantive fields of research:

Education Policy

  • Celine Mulhern, “Globalization and the Selective Permeability of Public Policy Making: The Case of K-12 Education in Ontario 1990-2003.” September 2007.

Environment, Energy and Public Policy

  • Nathan Lemphers, “Beyond the Carbon Curse: a Study of the Governance Foundations of Climate Change Politics in Australia, Canada and Norway.” October 2019.
  • David Houle, “Carbon Pricing in Canadian Provinces: from Early Experiments to Adoption (1995-2014).” September 2015.
  • Heather Millar, “Managing Uncertainty: Risk Narratives and Learning in Provincial Hydraulic Fracturing Regulation in Canada 2006-2016.” November 2018.
  • Julia Bognar, “Powering Policy: The Role of Discourse Coalitions in Renewable Energy Transitions.”
  • Eve Bourgeois, “Municipal Climate Change Adaptation in the Province of Quebec.”
  • Sarah Hartley, “The Risk Society and Policy Responses to Environmental Risk: A Comparison of Risk Decision-Making for GM Crops in Canada and the United Kingdom 1973-2004.” July 2005.
  • Matthieu Mondou “Policy-making Dynamics and Emergent Technology: the Evolution of Biofuel Policy in the United States, Germany, and the European Union.” January 2015.
  • Ben Cashore, “Governing forestry, environmental group influence in British Columbia and the US Pacific Northwest.” July 1997.

Indigenous Peoples and Public Policy

  • Minh Do, “A Consultation Dance: The Promise of Deliberation, the Reality of Indigenous-Crown Negotiation in B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Process.”
  • Adrienne Davidson “Flexibility in the Federal System? Institutional Innovation and Indigenous Nations’ Self-Determination in the US and Canadian Far North.” April, 2018.

Migration Policy

  • Nick Fraser, “Shared Heuristics: How Organizational Structure Shapes Asylum Policy.” November, 2019.
  • Geoffrey Cameron, “Religion and Refugees: The Evolution of Resettlement in the United States and Canada.” June 2018.
  • Busra Hacioglu, “Policy Ambiguity, Municipal Governments, and Syrian Refugee In/exclusion in Turkey.”
  • Anika Ganness, “Immigrants’ Encounters with State Child Welfare Systems across Immigrant Integration Regimes.”

Public Policy and the Global South

  • Steven Denney, “Does Democracy Matter? Political Change and National Identification in South Korea and Beyond” September 2019.
  • Igor Valentovich, “Development & Pluralization of the Media of Security Sensitive Ethnic Minority Groups: The Experience of South Eastern European States.” March 2014.
  • Caroline Hossein, “The Politics of Microfinance: A Comparative Study of Jamaica, Guyana and Haiti.” September 2012.
  • Irene Poetranto, “Closing the Net? Analyzing States’ Capacity for Information Controls.”
  • Carmen Ho, “The Politics of Malnutrition.”

Public Policy in Canada

  • Jerald Sabin, “Contested colonialism: The rise of settler politics in Yukon and the Northwest Territories.” April 2016.
  • Carey Doberstein, “Governing by Networks: the Policy Implications of Civil Society Participation in Decision Making” June 2014.
  • Nicola Hepburn, “Minding the Gap between Promise and Performance: The Ontario Liberal Government’s Research and Innovation Policy, 2003-2011.” September 2014.

Research, Development and Innovation Policy

  • Matt Wilder, “Canadian Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective.” November, 2018.

Social Policy

  • Anna Kopec, “Homelessness and Citizenship: Political Consequences of Anti-Poverty Regimes.”
  • Alix Jensen “Skills for Whom? Access Bias, Active Labour Market Policies, and Automation in 21st Century Welfare States.”

Tax Policy

  • Matthew Lesch, “Playing with Fiscal Fire: The Politics of Consumption Tax Reform.” December 2017.
  • Dylan Marando, “Tales from the Tax Code: How tax expenditures are confronting, and being confronted by, the ghosts of politics past.”