Abstract
Local governments are often viewed as basic service and infrastructure providers that are neither particularly proactive nor innovative: in certain influential circles, this view has taken on the trappings of “common-sense,” and underpins the protracted undermining of public-sector organizations, a hallmark of neoliberalism. However, the COVID crisis required municipalities to act with agility and speed, belying this “common sense.” We examine 54 examples of how municipalities in Québec adapted to the pandemic. The range of adaptation and innovation that we report illustrates that local government can be flexible, agile, and innovative when necessary. Our analysis suggests that innovation is not always desired by the innovator, that the impact of a project should be distinguished from its innovativeness, and that any assessment of municipal innovativeness and its impact requires careful consideration of who it is evaluated for, who it is evaluated by, and in what context.
Introduction
There is an ideologically driven tendency to assume that the public sector—including municipalities—is less agile (i.e., less able to respond rapidly to new situations) and less innovative (i.e., less able to introduce new processes and ways of doing) than private-sector corporations and entrepreneurs. Calls for “small government” are a hallmark of the new right (Friedman 1993; Grannis 2012). Likewise, it has been argued that community innovation can be stifled by governmental bureaucracy (Marris and Rein 1967), a position taken to an extreme by libertarians of both the left and the right (Marshall 1993), particularly prominent in current right-wing populist rhetoric (Borins 2018).
Framed by the neoliberal discourse that posits individualism, small government and privatization (albeit in selective ways, Storper 2016), this “common-sense” discourse has bolstered the argument that the public sector is not innovative, that is, is incapable of adequately or rapidly introducing organizational and technological changes required to increase efficiency and effectiveness (Potts 2009; Dinhof et al. 2023). Notably, it propelled the implementation of New Public Management (NPM)—especially in the 1980s and 1990s—reducing the size of government by encouraging subcontracting and by introducing internal market-like incentives and metrics (Evans and Shields 1998).
While NPM has received critical scrutiny, and while its implementation has slowed over the last decades, little effort has been made to roll it back (Savoie 2006). More current paradigms, such as the drive toward smart cities (Townsend 2014; Green 2019; Flynn and Valverde 2020), which we view as an urban manifestation of digital-era governance (Margetts and Dunleavy 2013), are closely connected with large platforms and digital monopolies: they invite local governments to “get out of the way” as corporations test and implement their technological visions in public settings (Shearmur 2016; Flynn and Valverde 2020). Likewise for national governments (Mazzucato 2014): they are expected to facilitate innovation in the private sector by way of subsidies, fundamental research, procurement, and infrastructure, but are rarely understood as innovators in their own right.
However, over the last decade or so a counter-narrative has emerged. Researchers such as Borins (2018), Mazzucato (2014), Shearmur and Poirier (2017), Jans (2017), and Sariego-Kluge (2019) argue that public institutions can be innovative in their own right, not just in support of private-sector innovators. Public-sector innovation can be in policy, technological, service, and management spheres, and is often driven by motivations that diverge from market-derived incentives as envisaged by NPM: in particular, public service can be a powerful motivator (Perry and Hondeghem 2008; Casebourne 2014; Ritz, Brewer, and Neuman 2016). Nonmarket motivations are also highlighted in discussions of smart cities and digital governance, where values such as access and democratization can drive innovators, such as Townsend's (2014) civic hackers.
In this contentious ideological context, we examine how a selection of municipalities reacted in agile and innovative ways to the onset of COVID. Our analysis focuses on 54 examples of how municipalities in the province of Québec—where neoliberalism's impact has been felt, but public-sector intervention not wholly rejected (Gattinger and Saint-Pierre 2010)—adapted their services, management, organizational processes, and regulations during the pandemic's first year.
Although there exists a variety of nonmarket approaches to innovation, some of which are discussed below, the paper adopts an economistic approach to innovation, juxtaposing, contrasting, and differentiating innovation in the private and public sectors. Such juxtaposition is common not only in academic discussions—particularly as they relate to governance (e.g., Borins 2001; Margetts and Dunleavy 2013) and privatization (e.g., Bowyer and Chapman 2014)—but also in public discourse. Mark Andreesen, for instance, argues that the pandemic revealed a “monumental failure of institutional [i.e., Western countries, states and cities] effectiveness” (Andreessen 2020); Joe Lonsdale puts forward an argument for private charter cities, “which are free to innovate and establish better modes and methods of government” (Lonsdale 2020); and Peter Thiel has supported sea-steading to promote innovations in, and more choices of, governance (O'Brien 2018). Such opinions feed into the populist rhetoric and political decisions reported in academic research (Borins 2018) and are in keeping with the stereotype that public-sector employees are “lazy, inefficient and slow” (Marvel 2016; Dinhof et al. 2023).
Local governments and municipalities, which manage day-to-day services and activities (those enabling people, vehicles and goods to circulate, waste to be collected, and utilities to be delivered) were under pressure to adapt quickly (Deloitte 2020). Notwithstanding Andreessen's (2020) claim, solutions were implemented, ranging from increased digitization, online service delivery, local currencies, urban planning interventions, staff redeployment, and so on.
The article proceeds as follows. In the next section, we review the literature on public-sector and municipal innovation (positioning it relative to private-sector innovation), and discuss how this ties into wider discussions about public-sector governance. After presenting the data, we describe how a selection of municipalities reacted to COVID, and examine the extent to which these examples represent acceleration of pre-COVID changes, common responses to a shared problem, or wholly new approaches to an aspect of municipal activity. In conclusion, we discuss how municipalities’ adaptation to the pandemic can inform the wider discourse on government and its (in)capacity to be agile and innovative.
Markets, Technology, and Innovation: Where Does the Public Sector Sit?
Innovation can be understood as the successful implementation of a new product, process or way of doing: it is not merely a pilot project or an invention, but its successful rolling out in a market, among its intended users, or within a target community (Swann 2014). Akrich et al. (2002, 188) define innovation as “the first successful commercial transaction or more generally, the first positive sanction of the user”: the second part of this definition is general, applicable to nonmarket innovation and to stakeholders of all sorts (individuals, organizations, communities…).
Despite this understanding, which can encompass public, social, community, and private-sector innovation, there is an ideologically tinged tendency for the concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship to be confounded with markets and profit. From a Schumpeterian perspective, entrepreneurs—that is, actors who identify opportunities, gather resources, and introduce innovation—are understood to be motivated by profit: within an appropriate institutional framework maintained by good government, “[entrepreneurship] constitutes the decisive internal source of capitalist development” (Ebner 2006, 498), and “ involves establishing a for-profit enterprise that is built around the entrepreneur's own needs and interests” (Cantner, Goethner, and Silbereisen 2017, 193). However, Shearmur and Poirier (2017) argue that one should distinguish the Schumpeterian process of entrepreneurial innovation, which can be adapted to municipalities, from motivations for and evaluation of innovation, which are not necessarily related to profits or markets.
Given this confounding of entrepreneurship and innovation with the profit motive, in the 1980s and 1990s attempts to increase public-sector efficiency—believed to require innovative approaches to public management—hinged on introducing private-sector-like motivation into public organizations, an approach known as NPM (Evans and Shields 1998; Dimeski 2019). Gruening (2001, 5) describes the origins of NPM and how it followed on from previous approaches to administration, but also how it resulted from the rising political philosophy of neoliberalism (p. 21), especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. According to Gruening (2001, 16) one of the five undisputed characteristics of NPM is “competition in the public sector.”
Another characteristic of NPM—for which Gruening (2001) finds no compelling theoretical rationale, but which, in practice, was often included—is the increased use of information technology. This is a precursor to Digital-Era Governance (DEG), arguably NPM's successor in the early twenty-first century (Dunleavy et al. 2006a). Indeed, NPM had, by the early 2000s, “essentially died in the water” (Dunleavy et al. 2006a, 468). It has had lasting effects, however, in terms of disruption and reduction in access to services by citizens, and some of its principles (such as out-sourcing, market-like incentives, and cost-cutting) have become relevant again as public spending contracted after the 2008 financial crisis (Hood and Dixon 2015; Borins 2018; Dunleavy and Margetts 2023).
Whether DEG is a successor to, or operates in parallel with, NPM principles, it describes the way public administrations turn toward information technology to deliver services, interact with citizens, but also manage internal processes such as human resources and procurement—often in view of reducing internal labor costs, but at the expense of dependence on external IT consultants (Margetts and Dunleavy 2013). While the incorporation of information technology occurred across society as a whole, “the advent of the digital era is now the most general, pervasive, and structurally distinctive influence on how governance arrangements are changing in advanced industrial states” (Dunleavy et al. 2006a, 478).
In many respects, the Smart Cities approaches of the 2010s, which focus on introducing artificial intelligence, continuous monitoring, and algorithm-driven decision-making into urban processes (Greenfield 2013; Townsend 2014; Green 2019), can be understood as an urban manifestation of DEG's second wave, as digitization moves beyond web-based applications to social media, big data (Margetts and Dunleavy 2013), and even its third wave as it increasingly integrates artificial intelligence (Dunleavy and Margetts 2023). Smart City approaches build upon the normalization of digitized administrative processes, large databases and real-time monitoring—elements that Margetts and Dunleavy (2013) associate with DEG's second wave—and leverage these systems to “solve many of the urgent issues that accompany progressive urbanization” (Gassmann, Böhm, and Palmié 2019, xvii), though not always successfully (Flynn and Valverde 2020).
These approaches, from NPM to Smart Cities, all have in common the idea that the public sector can innovate but that this innovation can only be achieved in two main (and related) ways. First, innovation can be achieved only if the public sector behaves more like the private sector, integrating its methods, technologies, and incentive structures (Green 2019). Second, they suggest that public-sector innovation can only be achieved by calling upon the private sector: this can be consultants advising on how best to implement NPM or DEG strategies (Saint-Martin 1998; Margetts and Dunleavy 2013), IT corporations installing servers, web pages, and internal systems (Dunleavy et al. 2006b), or large tech companies taking over urban processes and associated data (Greenfield 2013).
As a result, public-sector innovation, as a concept or idea, has been closely tied to the privatization of public-sector capacity and IT—two of the five central ideas of NPM (Gruening, 2001, 16). This understanding of innovation has important ramifications: as Mazzucato (2014) argues for national administrations, and as Shearmur and Poirier (2017) argue for municipalities, one consequence is that municipalities and public administrations are rarely understood as innovators in their own right. At best they are understood as purchasers and implementers of private sector innovative solutions: indeed, Kastelle (2015, 68) reports that “one question that I often get is ‘can the public sector innovate at all?’”
To explore this question, we will examine empirical evidence gathered as municipalities reacted to the shock of COVID lockdowns: but before this, it is important to more clearly conceptualize how municipalities can be innovators in their own right.
Municipal Innovation: What Is It?
To conceptualize municipal innovation as something other than the purchase and implementation of privately devised management, IT, or technological solutions, two things are helpful. First, it is useful to outline what motivates the innovation process—that is, what motivates identifying an idea, gathering resources, and implementing a new product, process or way of doing (Shearmur and Poirier 2017)—in the absence of a profit motive. Second, it is useful to consider how innovation can be assessed in the absence of markets, and how municipal innovation differs from public-sector innovation writ large.
Innovation in Municipal and Public-Sector Organizations
While there has been growing research on public sector innovation, such as Altshuler and Behn (1997), Mazzucato (2014), Kastelle (2015), Shearmur and Poirier (2017), Sariego-Kluge (2019), there has been relatively little work on innovation in municipal or local government organizations (Jans 2017; Shearmur and Poirier 2017; Barrett and Vodden 2022; Shearmur 2022). Although Sariego-Kluge (2019) emphasizes the difficulty in defining public-sector innovation, Shearmur and Poirier (2017) suggest that there is little reason to believe it is fundamentally different—in terms of basic process—from private-sector or other innovation.
Indeed, Shearmur and Poirier (2017, 721) suggest that if private-sector innovation is understood as “the process of transforming an idea into a product, process, or organizational form that finds a market and/or enhances firm productivity” (a Schumpeterian definition) then the key alteration required for the concept to be applicable to public sector organizations is the last part: public-sector innovation does not require markets or productivity increases to be classified as innovation. Rather, it requires successful implementation recognized as such by stakeholders (Akrich et al. 2002).
The definitional question, from this perspective, revolves around how to characterize the motivation for innovation in public sector organizations, and how to characterize the criteria of successful implementation (since there is no market to sanction an innovation's success).
Motivation for Nonmarket Innovation
There can be a variety of motivations for nonmarket innovation. Of course, more efficient use of resources (akin to productivity) can be one motivation, but problem-solving (Isaksen, Dorval, and Teffinger 2011), desire to improve public service (Ritz, Brewer, and Neuman 2016), response to citizen needs or requests (Agger and Lund 2017), and objectives linked to equity, the environment, or public engagement (Swann 2014)—all these can propel innovation in nonmarket organizations such as the public sector.
From a wider perspective, innovation can be understood as a consequence of human inquisitiveness and their instinct to problem-solve (Schwartz 2012). Within the open-source software movement, for instance, innovation has been associated with recognition (by one's peers) and with the joy of rising to a challenge (O'Shea 2020). Feminist approaches to innovation stress that it should be understood as extending beyond the economic sphere to areas of social and cultural innovation, and can be motivated by values such as justice, equity, or the environment (Pecis and Berglund 2021). Feminist innovation scholars also emphasize the cultural situatedness of innovation: for example, in order to overcome norms (such as those imposed by traditional gender roles or by colonialism), new concepts, world views, and emphases must be imagined and introduced (Horn 2020; Pecis and Berglund 2021). Closer to the municipal sphere, de Azevedo Correia and da Silva Braga (2023) show that innovation within nonprofit organizations is often motivated by the desire to improve response capacity and to better meet user expectations.
In short, the restrictive view, that innovation's motivator is profit, is untenable. Although the core process of innovation (as outlined above) remains similar—ideas must be generated, experimented with, and implemented in some way, typically guided by a committed person or small group of people—it manifests in a wide variety of ways and is driven by a variety of motives.
Evaluating the Degree of Municipal Innovation
Municipalities are structured organizations, with clear responsibilities and operate under well-defined laws and regulations. As such, they are not wholly dissimilar from other formal organizations—notably private-sector firms. Adopting this perspective, Shearmur (2022) discusses how a municipal innovation can be identified and evaluated. While there is no market to arbitrate between success and failure, nonmarket municipal innovations (which imply successful adoption and implementation) can be distinguished from inventions (which require only a one-off trial, such as a pilot project).
In terms of assessment, and since there is no market to arbitrate, he suggests that some types of problem-solving innovation in municipalities can be evaluated with respect to the problem itself: has the problem been successfully addressed using a reasonable amount of resources and without creating undue externalities? For small-scale innovations, this can be performed internally. More complex innovations, those touching upon wider municipal processes and involving numerous stakeholders, can be assessed through deliberative procedures involving citizens, users, public-sector employees, and politicians (Shearmur 2022). Such procedures can be complex and fractious (Agger and Lund 2017; Wagenaar and Wood 2018), but if expectations with respect to objectives and outcomes are clearly spelled out when the decision to innovate is taken (whether by the city council, in internal documents or, for more complex issues, after wider consultation), then success can be judged in relation to these objectives and outcomes. It should be noted that this is an internal process: an innovation's success is ultimately determined by actors within the municipality that has implemented it. This differs from private-sector innovations where the market, an external mechanism, is considered the arbiter of success.
While it is possible for municipalities to internally assess whether an innovation is successful, it is more difficult to assess its degree of innovativeness. In a technological context (for instance, the introduction of a new product) an external patenting system distinguishes major from minor innovation: engineers, and other informed arms’ length commentators, identify what is novel. By analyzing patent citations, it is also possible to identify innovations that have been more influential (i.e., more often cited). Another approach, which is not external, is one of self-assessment: innovators are asked whether their innovation is new to the firm, new to their market, or a world first (OECD 2018). Thus, even in the narrow area of product innovation, an innovation's degree of innovativeness can only roughly be assessed and often rests on the judgment of experts or of innovators themselves.
In the area of social, community, or public-sector innovation external assessment of innovativeness is even harder to achieve, and in many cases may not be relevant. Nonmarket innovations often emerge in noncompetitive contexts where examples of other approaches are sought and adapted (Swann 2014): thus, a nonmarket innovation may be judged more or less radical relative to its own context (has it brought about major or minor changes?), and can—to some extent—be judged as a greater or lesser departure from previous practice. However, these judgments are ultimately subjective and differ depending on the point of view of the observer.
On occasion, expert opinion is sought to assess the degree of innovation, notably in the context of innovation awards. Thus, for instance, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities awards five annual prizes “to the most innovative environmental sustainability projects in cities and communities,” 1 and the Union des Municipalités du Québec runs an annual municipal innovation competition. 2 While juries each have their own set of criteria, amplitude of impact and departure from previous practice usually factor in.
Distinguishing Municipal Innovation From Other Types of Public Innovation
In this article, and given that municipalities are organizations with clear structures, responsibilities, and mandates, we have approached municipal and public-sector innovation as essentially Schumpeterian, but with important caveats with respect to motivation and assessment (Shearmur and Poirier 2017). However, we have not so far distinguished municipal innovation from public-sector innovation writ large.
Five items characterize municipal innovation, distinguishing it from public-sector innovation more widely.
First, municipalities are located in a specific place, in proximity to the citizens they serve, unlike, say, a ministry or national administration, which can have offices in multiple distant locations and is physically separated from most citizens.
Second, municipalities have little direct influence over wider policy or legislative contexts due to the supremacy of higher levels of government (such as provincial, state, and national governments). In a way similar to private-sector companies (except the very largest), they take the wider regulatory environment as given and react to it: only through alliances and political pressure can they, as a group, influence national policies.
Third, municipalities are typically responsible for many activities that affect citizens’ daily lives, such as local road maintenance, snow clearance, waste collection and disposal, local services such as libraries, parks, and leisure, and so on (Leon-Moreta 2016). Even if, at a wider scale, the politics and assessment of innovation can be complex and fractious (Agger and Lund 2017; Wagenaar and Wood 2018), within municipalities the assessment of innovation can often—but not always—be more direct (though still sometimes fractious) given their geographic limits and ease of access between actors. The visible nature of many municipal activities, combined with day-to-day interaction between municipal politicians, employees, and citizens (partly a consequence of territorial boundedness and small size), mean there are many informal ways for municipalities to gauge the success (or not) of an experiment or pilot project. It also means that consultations are possible and direct evidence is easier to gather.
Fourth, municipal budgets are limited due to regulations set by higher levels of government (which usually ring-fence their capacity to raise taxes and fees) and due to their reliance on transfers from higher levels of government. Given these constraints, as well as proximity to citizens (making failure more visible and politically costly), municipalities typically have less leeway to experiment than higher levels of government. They also have limited internal capacity (Barrett and Vodden 2022), making them more reliant on external expertise than larger public-sector organizations, an issue underscored by the literature on Smart Cities (Townsend 2014; Green 2019).
Finally, there is considerable networking among municipalities (Ansell, Lundin, and Öberg 2017). While this is not always effective at influencing higher levels of government (Gore 2010), it is effective at allowing innovations and policy solutions to be transmitted between municipalities (Harris and Moore 2013), partially offsetting their limited internal capacity. Research on policy transfer between local authorities emphasizes that “[local authorities’] access to existing solutions is important to allow them to learn from each other and develop solutions adapted to their specific situation” (CEC 2006, sec 5.3, emphasis added; Marsden and Stead 2011). Imported innovations are adapted to local context, and these changes and improvements (themselves innovations) are part of the adoption process.
This Study
In 2020, municipalities across the world faced an external shock which required rapid adaptation and change. Adapting to change meant that these organizations introduced new policies and approaches in a wide variety of areas. In this study, we explore how a selection of Québec (a Canadian province) municipalities reacted to COVID, and examine the extent to which, and from which perspectives, this can be characterized as innovation.
In the next section, we describe the information we analyze and our approach. We then describe our results and return to the research questions. In the discussion and conclusion, we articulate some wider implications of this study.
Data and Method
Each year since 2005 the Union of Québec Municipalities (UMQ)—a federation representing Québec municipalities—has organized a municipal innovation competition. The aim of the competition is to showcase municipal innovation in about eight categories
3
(such as sustainable mobility and infrastructure; municipal administration, culture and living together…), with innovation broadly defined as follows: A municipality innovates when it displays imagination and creativity in the realization of a project destined to improve the community's quality of life or the services offered to it, in optimizing the use of human, material, or financial resources, or in responding to new challenges.
4
This definition is not academic and lacks analytic precision: however, it is compatible with the characterization of municipal innovation articulated in the preceding section. The UMQ posits that innovation should ultimately be in the public good (improving the community's quality of life or services offered), can focus on a variety of internal management processes (human, material, or financial), or can be of a problem-solving nature responding to new challenges.
The degree to which a municipal project is innovative is assessed by a jury consisting of about seven people, including retired mayors, active academics, and retired officials involved in municipal affairs. While membership of the jury evolves, it does so slowly, ensuring institutional memory.
In 2021, exceptionally, a new category was included relating directly to COVID. Submissions were invited with respect to (i) administrative responses to COVID; (ii) circulation and use of municipal territory and spaces in response to COVID; (iii) accompanying citizens during the crisis. Fifty-four submissions from 34 different municipalities were received. Each submission consists of an abstract, a description of the innovation, a description of the specific issue it addresses, a self-assessment of its long-term potential, a self-assessment of how it meets the innovation criteria, and an assessment of its impact. Most also include photos or short appendices where appropriate.
The authors of this article have had access to this material. Each innovation is public knowledge within each municipality, as are the submissions within each of the three categories that were retained as finalists by the jury.
Although not central to our analysis, we distinguish between more or less innovative projects based on the jury's assessment. Indeed, the jury has publicly classified submissions into three classes: (1) submissions that were not shortlisted (least innovative); (2) submissions that were shortlisted but did not win an award (innovative); (3) award winners (most innovative). The jury arrived at this classification after reading the material we analyzed, deliberating twice (once for the shortlist, once for the award winners), and discussing each shortlisted innovation with its creators. This is the best assessment of innovativeness that we have. It is problematic because the shortlist must include at least two, preferably three, submissions from each of the three categories: it is, therefore, possible that highly innovative submissions in a crowded category are dropped, whereas less innovative submissions in a less crowded category are shortlisted.
Therefore, a second approach to assessing innovativeness is adopted to verify that, in the authors’ opinion, no key innovation is misclassified. Each submission has been read by each of the first two authors and independently classified according to its degree of innovativeness (a subjective judgment drawing upon each author's experience and knowledge) on a scale running from 1 (not innovative) to 10 (highly innovative) 5 . After averaging scores (the maximum deviation between them is 2) all innovations shortlisted by the jury scored 7 or higher. Four of the 46 nonshortlisted projects also scored 7 (projects FF, AA, W, and G, Appendix 1), the rest scoring less.
The innovation competition invited submissions under three COVID-related categories. However, these categories are broad and our reading of the submissions led us to distinguish eight different areas of innovation (Table 1). While 34 innovations fit clearly into one of our eight categories, 20 cut across two categories. Our categorization was constructed inductively by analyzing submissions and relating them to areas of municipal activity that emerge from the literature and from our experience. Each of the eight categories is discussed in the results section, with examples of innovations that fall under them.
Classification of 54 Submissions.
Note: The Tot. column includes double counts (20 submissions are cross-classified, see Appendix 1). Counts below the diagonal are not shown.
In our discussion, we distinguish—in a general way, and based on the approach just described—between innovations that are more (shortlisted, or scored 7 by the authors) or less (not shortlisted, or scored below 7 by the authors) radical. However, we recognize that all submissions are innovative in the sense that each constitutes a departure from normal procedures for the municipality in question, Nevertheless, some are minor, imitative, or of limited scope, whereas others are closer to the cutting-edge of municipal practice and/or more innovative and creative. We will proceed using examples in support of our analysis.
Analysis: How Did Municipalities React to COVID and to What Degree Was This Innovative?
The 54 examples of COVID-related municipal projects were submitted to the UMQ under three categories. Although these categories constrain the type of project submitted, two items should be noted. First, there is no screening of submitted projects: these categories merely indicate the prizes that will be allocated, with each municipality submitting their project in the category to which they think it best corresponds. Second, some projects fall under at least two categories or don't easily fit any.
Table 1 presents a matrix that summarizes the categorization adopted in this article: it contains 74 entries, comprising one entry for each of the 34 projects that fit relatively unambiguously into a single category, and two entries for the 20 projects that comprise elements of two categories (Appendix 1).
In the rest of this section, we describe each of the eight categories, providing examples of projects they capture.
E-Government Acceleration
An area where municipalities innovated during COVID is e-government (i.e., using and implementing technologies that are the focus of DEG). As in all categories, some projects are highly innovative, whereas others represent important—but imitative or minor—reactions to COVID.
A highly innovative project under this category is the complete transfer online of all municipal court activity in the town of Repentigny (E) 6 . The transfer had been evoked prior to COVID, but the crisis turned this vague project into an urgent one. Within three months, by 1st June 2020, all court proceedings had been transferred.
Although this innovation appears technological, none of the technologies are new. Rather, the innovative character of this project rests in the multiple administrative changes and new procedures required to ensure respect for everybody's rights, to maintain confidentiality where necessary, to ensure legally valid record-keeping, to ensure proper presentation of witnesses and evidence, and so on.
As Green (2019) emphasizes, technological innovation in municipal settings—if it is going to succeed—requires an in-depth understanding of the procedures being altered, of the reason for their existence, and of the people and departments that are responsible for them. Transferring the entire municipal court online is a good example of this type of fundamental administrative shift, and of how technology is secondary relative to the extent and complexity of procedural changes. Municipality F initiated a similar, though less comprehensive, change to its municipal courts.
A number of other municipalities introduced e-government changes such as shifting consultative processes online (A, B) or improving service and information delivery on municipal web portals and social media (C). Other municipalities implemented human resource policies to ease the transition to remote work (K, L).
An interesting project was implemented in Drummondville (WW). Here, it was municipal librarians who developed online solutions, first for e-book delivery, and then for other cultural activities usually undertaken at the library. During the first weeks of COVID, a temporary subscription system was set up allowing the loan of digital books, the stock of which was expanded. As the lockdown continued, online content was created, such as book readings and craft activities for children, and creative writing for adolescents and adults; book readings were also made available over the telephone (for those lacking internet or computers); and, when COVID restrictions permitted, contactless loans and returns were implemented. While each specific action was useful, it is the development of an integrated program, which evolved as the pandemic evolved, that constitutes this project's agile and innovative aspects.
Intermunicipal Cooperation
Although only two projects fall into this category, it is important precisely because it is rare. During the pandemic, most municipalities focused on their own services and responsibilities, while looking to the provincial government for guidance. In two cases, municipalities proactively pooled resources and information: in the institutional context of Québec, such intermunicipal cooperation is rare, except as formal service and equipment-sharing arrangements (Garneau 2016).
The Laurentides County (H), comprising twenty small municipalities, set up a crisis management committee that gathered all key actors (public safety, provincial and federal representatives, municipal representatives, and key institutions) and also set up a group to coordinate first responders. These arrangements allowed responses and resources to be coordinated across municipalities and co-constructed a joint understanding of the crisis’ nature, its evolution, and how to respond. This reduced contradictory messaging and allowed local COVID-related regulations to be harmonized across municipal boundaries.
In the other case, a municipality (G) took on a leadership role, organizing a series of webinars gathering municipalities from across Québec to share best practices.
Internal Organization
Whereas numerous municipalities focused on service delivery, some also focused on the internal operation of the municipality as an organization. Many organizations—private, public, and community—displayed this type of agility during COVID. Examples in this category document how some municipalities displayed such agility.
Thus, one municipality (I) introduced a workplace health and wellness program providing employees with support and tools to manage stress and isolation. It included online social activities to break isolation, interactive virtual conferences on stress, access to a health and wellness platform, and so on. It also included video clips produced by psychologists, as well as an assistance program that provided individual access to a psychologist. Municipality K introduced similar, though less extensive, measures.
The town of Lévis (Q) demonstrated how a prior organizational innovation came into its own during COVID. Lévis had, prior to COVID, implemented a short-term disaster-preparedness plan to ensure coordination between politicians, managers, and services (such as finance, service to the population, civil security, etc.). This plan, set in motion the day the pandemic was declared, transformed into a more permanent administrative structure during the pandemic's first few weeks. The disaster coordination team served as central coordinator—in particular keeping channels open between elected officials, the executive, department heads, and civil security—and closely monitored the pandemic's evolution, ensuring the town was prepared as the pandemic evolved.
A final change in internal organization that we highlight is rapid redeployment of staff. Thus, Gatineau (R) describes how 50 of its staff—no longer working at their desks—agreed to patrol parks during the pandemic's early stages, talking to people, answering questions, and informing them of public health instructions. These instructions were constantly changing, so meeting people, listening to their confusion, and providing up-to-date information were important. Under usual circumstances, redeploying staff in this way can be difficult because of union rules and job descriptions: this is a small example of municipal employees’, managers’, and unions’ agility when facing the COVID emergency.
New Collaborations
An important aspect of some projects submitted to the UMQ is the development of new collaborations. Some of these new collaborations occurred within the municipality—either across siloed departments or between municipal departments and community actors and organizations. Others occurred between specific municipal services (while falling short of the higher-level intermunicipal cooperation described above).
Thus, one rural municipality (O) of about 7,000 people actively reached out, on a recurring basis, to 54 community organizations active on its territory to understand their activity and offer support where possible. Its public safety department worked with surrounding municipalities to coordinate the implementation of security measures and collaborate in setting up a training program for community organizations and staff. Municipality P also actively coordinated its departments with community groups working on its territory. These new collaborative approaches are similar to Lévis's strategy (Q), but less formal and not involving administrative changes.
Another municipality in Québec's periphery (N), with a population of just over 10,000, organized over 50 outdoor activities during summer 2020, which led to new collaborations between municipal departments involved in economic development, culture, leisure, park management, and public safety. These collaborations carried over into winter 2021 as further outdoor activities were planned.
Overall Strategy
This category is wide in scope. It groups municipalities which, in their submissions, describe comprehensive strategies implemented to deal with COVID. Many of these strategies include items that fall under more specific categories, but these items are not highlighted: rather, they are part of municipalities’ overall, multifaceted, responses.
A municipality close to Montreal, (Z), describes an overall crisis management strategy, focused on vulnerable populations and on limiting the spread of the virus. This involved information-sharing, redeploying staff, redeploying vehicles, distributing food, multilingual messaging, outdoor activities in parks, and so on. Other towns (X, AA) describe how they maintained services during COVID by opening new communication channels with their inhabitants over telephone, e-mail, and social media; setting up teams to provide immediate responses to citizen queries and comments; streaming City Council meetings; setting up online volunteer platforms to match volunteers with requests; setting up online platforms to improve the visibility of local stores and their capacity for online sales; phoning older adults to ensure they are not too isolated; etc.
Such strategies, while comprehensive and covering many important aspects of municipal activity, are nonspecific. They do, however, show the wide variety of municipal responsibilities and illustrate how some municipalities addressed transversal questions of service delivery during the pandemic.
Service Delivery and Social Programs
Many municipalities shouldered community and social responsibilities during the pandemic. While social services are not part of their mandate in Québec (S4, Loi sur les compétences municipales, C47.1), provincial cost-cutting combined with municipalities’ proximity to citizens and community groups have increasingly led them to take on this role (Croteau 2021; Barrett and Vodden 2022; Porter 2023). Although the submissions we analyze are not representative of all Québec, it is notable that 19 of them focus on service delivery, mainly to vulnerable and older people.
Municipalities KK, UU, MM, OO, LL, AAA, BBB, and ZZ, for instance, all implemented measures to ensure service delivery to vulnerable people, such as setting up homeless shelters; delivering food baskets to immunity-compromised and older adults; organizing regular phone calls to check up on older adults; providing general psychological help to community members; and, in some instances, retaining the services of a psychologist. Many municipalities shifted some of their services online and used social media to reach out to their populations, overlapping with e-governance projects.
Most of these interventions rank as minor innovation: although these services and programs were not typically offered before the pandemic—and are therefore new to each municipality—they are not particularly innovative. This brings to the fore a crucial distinction that we will return to in our discussion: measures that are critically important to the population and/or local government are not necessarily innovative. Implementing appropriate (even if well-understood and noninnovative) measures can often be more relevant to stakeholders than innovation.
Local Economy
Some municipalities presented projects focused on the local economy, mostly assisting local stores to increase their online presence and sales (S, V, II, JJ). These interventions were often accompanied by local pick-up and/or delivery options, sometimes involving community volunteers.
Two local economy projects stand out. Cowansville (T), a town of 10,000 people, introduced a currency to encourage local shopping. While local currencies are not new (North 2006), they remain unusual. In this case, the currency, which could only be spent in Cowansville stores and local services, involved a 20% subsidy—$120 Cowansville dollars could be purchased for $100 Canadian. The measure was successful in maintaining a customer base for local businesses. It was accompanied by a crowdfunding campaign to help families in need: publicity surrounding the local currency served to promote the social measure.
Lévis (U) implemented a wide-ranging plan to support local businesses of all sorts. The plan involved information-gathering (four surveys were undertaken to capture businesses’ evolving requirements); a special business assistance program for small- and medium-sized enterprises; interest-free loans repayable over three years, with a one-year moratorium on repayment; an online shopping platform for local businesses, accompanied by local promotion of the site; and a team to directly assist companies seeking to prevent workplace COVID transmission.
Public Space
The final category of projects is the most visible: interventions in the public realm, altering how public spaces are used. Most municipalities in this category (BB, CC, DD, EE, GG, JJ) pedestrianized streets, especially toward their centers, to allow outdoor meetings and interactions which respected COVID distancing requirements. Pedestrianization was often accompanied by cultural activities, landscaping, and by other modifications such as new cycle lanes or wider sidewalks (e.g., taking over parking spaces for pedestrians, even when streets remained open to traffic). In some cases, parks were reimagined, and cultural and physical activities were organized to get people out of their homes and into safe outside spaces during confinement.
Municipality HH provided information about a variety of itineraries people could walk, introducing activities and artwork along the way; similarly, municipality II ran an information campaign, consisting of a detailed map of walks that could be undertaken within the municipality, suggesting viewpoints, heritage buildings, and places to stop (thereby also supporting local businesses). Finally, municipality FF undertook extensive work setting up new cycling corridors to encourage mobility at a time when public transport was considered risky and when more people were cycling.
In this category, the measures described are not especially innovative—pedestrianization, outdoor activities, and bike paths are hardly new. Yet, in the car-dominated North American context, where such measures are contested (especially closing streets, reducing parking space, and introducing bike paths), these projects demonstrate what is possible (Kohn 2022).
Discussion and Conclusion: Agile Municipalities
In this article we present examples of how Québec municipalities reacted in an agile and often innovative way to the COVID pandemic. Of course, many other types of organization adapted rapidly to COVID (Boiral et al. 2021): presenting these examples is relevant because it provides detailed counterevidence for claims such as those made by Lonsdale (2020) and Andreessen (2020) which feed antipublic-sector stereotypes—in particular portraying it as slow and noninnovative—as explored by Borins (2018), Marvel (2016), and Dinhof et al. (2023).
Despite parallels, municipal innovation differs from private-sector innovation (Shearmur and Poirier 2017). In particular, municipalities do not have an incentive structure that financially rewards those involved in the changes we describe. Rather, the effort and time that municipal workers, officials and politicians devote to ensuring the delivery and improvement of services are driven by a sense of public service (Perry and Hondeghem 2008; Casebourne 2014; Ritz, Brewer and Neuman 2016) and problem-solving (Isaksen, Dorval, and Teffinger 2011), in response to perceived community needs and demands (which can include increased efficiency and effectiveness, but which are not limited to that).
Can the Measures Implemented by Municipalities Be Described as Innovative?
Municipalities which submitted projects to the UMQ COVID innovation competition all understood their projects to be innovative. In some respects, they are: each project was new to the municipality and was implemented in response to an unexpected and novel situation. As emphasized by feminist scholars, whether or not a new process or way of doing is innovative depends on the point of view from which it is being assessed: the fact that municipalities altered the way they do things—and therefore innovated within their own frame of reference—means that all changes and adaptations described in this article are innovative in some sense.
From an external point of view, though, some projects are more innovative than others: some measures had been implemented in other municipalities before the pandemic; and some projects only represent minor interventions or small departures from previous practice.
An important aspect of innovation is adoption. Some of the measures described above are specific to the pandemic and have little meaning outside of it (such as providing COVID-related information): so, while such measures are novel (i.e., they had not been implemented before) they are not strictly speaking innovative since there is little prospect of long-term adoption. This is not the case for all measures. Some innovations, such as Repentigny's transfer of municipal court processes online, are irreversible: while it remains possible, postpandemic, to be heard in person, it is no longer necessary. Similarly, the metamorphosis of Lévis’ short-term disaster plan into longer-term administrative changes is permanent: though the disaster plan is deactivated, procedures are now in place to implement it when required.
Many of the measures implemented by municipalities during COVID can be seen as demonstration or pilot projects. This is true, in particular, of the way public space was repurposed. Few, if any, of the pedestrianization projects implemented in 2020 and 2021 remain (Kohn 2022). Cars have now regained their “rightful” place. Yet people remember how convivial it was to meet in the city center or to use the main street as a village square. Likewise, the provision of food baskets and reaching out to lonely people (older adults in particular) demonstrated the possibility of more caring communities. These projects demonstrate that alternatives are possible, and may have longer-term effects as they contribute to evolving attitudes and expectations.
Are All Innovations Desired?
The term “innovation” carries with it considerable normative baggage, particularly that innovation is desirable (Godin 2020). However, as Seelos and Mair (2012) and Schwartz (2012) explain, there can also be value in stability and in preserving systems, norms, products and institutions that function well. Furthermore, Rogers (2002) describes a category of innovations that are preventive, entered into reluctantly as a means to possibly avoid an unwanted future condition.
Although none of the examples we present appear, a priori, to be unwanted by the municipalities themselves, their increased involvement in developing and delivering social programs can be read as a forced innovation, implemented under duress to mitigate anticipated social problems (Rogers 2002) caused by the province pulling out (Croteau 2021; Porter 2023). The idea of innovation undertaken reluctantly by the innovator may also be relevant to municipal innovations mitigating the effects of climate change (Gore 2010): they are reacting to an unwanted external process and their effectiveness is impossible to gauge (because they are designed to prevent events which may not occur locally).
Evaluating degree of innovativeness, already difficult in an economic setting, is especially fraught in nonmarket settings. This is evident in two ways. First, our methodology—relying on the jury's evaluation backed by our own judgment—is open to bias and critique since a small number of people (the jury plus the authors) have acted as adjudicators. Second, even though each municipality considers their project innovative, these projects may not be innovative when viewed from a different perspective. For example, some European readers may be surprised that pedestrianization is considered innovative in a North American context: from the perspective of cities such as Bordeaux or Strasbourg, pedestrianization of downtown streets is an accomplished fact. However, from a North American perspective, it takes political courage to implement pedestrianization, which is still a contested and innovative decision that breaks with current practice (Kohn 2022).
Finally, the impact of a project (on specific stakeholder groups or users) should be carefully distinguished from its innovative character. Whether the municipal take-over of social responsibilities is innovative is irrelevant to vulnerable people requiring the services provided. From the perspective of its beneficiaries, we presume (though we would need to verify) that maintaining and augmenting services during COVID was important and impactful. Likewise, evaluating whether or not street pedestrianization is innovative is distinct from evaluating its impact on safety, sociability, and pollution levels.
Our results suggest that the desirability or not of an innovation depends on the perspective and positioning of the stakeholders for whom the evaluation is performed, echoing observations and conclusions drawn from feminist innovation analysis (Pecis and Berglund 2021).
Limits and Areas of Further Investigation
In this study, we present a series of measures that 34 Québec municipalities implemented during the first year of COVID. These measures are not representative: they are those which municipalities themselves considered innovative and effective, and should therefore be read as examples. They allow us to make claims about what municipalities can do, and about what the 34 municipalities in our study have done. To the extent that these examples tie into wider themes in the literature, they can be corroborative. They can also serve to refute broad claims and ideologies that suggest public-sector organizations cannot be agile or innovative.
To conclude, we highlight four observations which call for further investigation.
First, the term “innovation” is relative: our examples describe activities, policies, and projects that municipalities themselves consider innovative, though they may not be considered so by other observers or stakeholders. The way that innovation is assessed within municipalities, particularly its success or failure, merits further scrutiny (Potts 2009; Shearmur 2022).
Second, the perspective from which an innovation is considered is important: it is possible for an innovative project to be a failure from some perspectives (e.g., pedestrianization is rejected by many business owners, Kohn 2022). Conversely, a project that is not innovative may be successful for those who benefit from it (e.g., the social measures introduced by municipalities under COVID). In this sense innovation is necessarily political: the municipal politics of innovation (who benefits? who finds it desirable? who doesn't? how are these questions adjudicated?) is a fruitful area for further investigation (Wagenaar and Wood 2018).
Third, some innovations are undertaken reluctantly by innovators who are forced into change by circumstance or by other actors (as opposed to entering into innovation for positive reasons or to address problems identified internally): the downloading of social responsibilities onto municipalities has necessarily led them to innovate, but only to avert the consequences of provincial withdrawal. Examining new municipal responsibilities (such as mitigating the effects of climate change) through this lens could lead to a better understanding of processes that facilitate such preventive innovation (Rogers 2002).
Finally, many of the projects implemented during COVID were temporary, and can best be understood as pilot projects. They have shown what is possible: as such, they may participate in longer-term attitudinal changes even if, for the time being, they have been rolled back. The longer-term effects of temporary municipal changes during COVID should be tracked.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-uar-10.1177_10780874231221469 - Supplemental material for Defying Stereotypes, Populism, and Neoliberal Discourse: Municipal Agility and Innovation During COVID
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-uar-10.1177_10780874231221469 for Defying Stereotypes, Populism, and Neoliberal Discourse: Municipal Agility and Innovation During COVID by Merdan Seker, Richard Shearmur, and Gérard Beaudet in Urban Affairs Review
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the Observatoire Ivanhoé-Cambridge, Université de Montréal (grant number n/a).
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