The UPL has teamed up with the Munk School’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance to launch the Who Does What paper series.
The WDW series brings together academic experts, industry practitioners, and student researchers from the UPL to examine what role municipalities are best suited to play in key policy areas, the reforms required to ensure municipalities can deliver on their responsibilities, and the collaboration required among governments to meet the country’s challenges.
“The ‘Who Does What?’ series is a true collaboration between IMFG and the Urban Policy Lab, a great example of different parts of the Munk School working together to produce important research,” says Gabriel Eidelman, director of the Urban Policy Lab. “Every paper in the series includes a primer co-authored with students from the Lab, which both helps students learn about the intergovernmental dimensions of urban policymaking, and sets the table for our expert contributors.”
Kinza Riaz, a first-year student in the Master of Public Policy (MPP) program, and UPL research assistant, is part of the research team for the WDW series’ first topic: housing. As part of Riaz’s role, she researched and compiled information on the issue of Ontario housing, breaking down the policy domain into three key areas: rental housing, social housing, and homelessness. Riaz also looked at how different independent municipal actions collaborated with other orders of government. “My main takeaways were really that policymaking is much more complex than I had initially realized. I’m really glad that this project focused on the municipal lens of policymaking in a housing context since I had really underestimated the role that local governments play in the process.”
Read more about the series on the Munk School website, and access all the reports on the on the IMFG website.