Defying Stereotypes, Populism and Neoliberal Discourse
Municipal Agility and Innovation During COVID
Richard Shearmur (McGill University), Merdan Seker (Hochschule für Öffentliche Verwaltung Kehl), & Gérard Beaudet (Université de Montréal)
Our paper describes and records some of the innovative ways municipalities in Québec reacted to the COVID pandemic. It is probable that many other municipalities and local authorities reacted in similar ways in other jurisdictions. The paper also provides some elements to help understand and describe in what way municipalities are being innovative, and how this compares to, and differs from, private-sector innovation.
Why is it important to document and understand municipal innovation?
Documenting the innovativeness and agility of municipal authorities is important for two reasons:
First, it is easy to forget the considerable effort that local authorities and municipal workers invested to ensure that local services, libraries, courts, parks, and open spaces remained functional and safe during the crisis. Second, there are prominent voices – such as technology multi-millionaires Mark Andreesen, Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel - who downplay and disparage public administrations, such as city governments, saying they are disorganized or inefficient.
It's important to provide counter-examples to these ideologically motivated statements: the examples given in this paper do just that. Furthermore, it's important to emphasize that public administrations, unlike technology companies, manage complex systems in which many different interests must be balanced, and where the unintended consequences of innovation and change must be carefully considered. Municipalities cannot simply "move fast and break things" – if they did, tech ideologues would probably also criticize them!
So, in this paper, we provide examples and wider arguments to counter their claims.
How did municipalities innovate during COVID?
We examine submissions to the UMQ's (Union des Municipalités du Québec) municipal innovation competition that was run in Québec in 2021, specifically for COVID-related innovations and adaptations. This was held in parallel to the UMQ's regular, annual, municipal innovation competition. Fifty-four COVID submissions were received, which fall into seven broad categories:
1) Acceleration of e-government (such as moving all municipal court activities on-line. This was not so much a technological as a fundamental administrative innovation);
2) Inter-municipal cooperation (such as organizing and harmonizing COVID responses and regulations across twenty neighbouring municipalities. This is an important administrative and collaborative innovation);
3) Internal organization (such as establishing a long-term disaster management strategy that cuts across departmental silos. This is a management innovation);
4) Establishing new collaborations (such as coordinating and collaborating with local community groups to ensure service delivery to isolated people. This is a management and collaborative innovation);
5) Overall strategy (some municipalities established high-level strategies to coordinate a variety of new interventions and approaches. These are a strategic and visioning innovations);
6) Service-delivery and social programs (the province has been pulling out of some social service provision; during the pandemic, some municipalities pro-actively set up homeless shelters or organized regular calls to older adults. These are service innovations);
7) Local economy (such as setting up a local currency to encourage use of local shops and service providers. These are economic and policy innovations);
8) Public space (such as pedestrianization, cycle lanes, outside events. These are planning and design innovations).
Of course, some innovations we document in our paper are more radical than others, and some are more unique: but all are novel to the extent that they consitute new ways-of-doing or solutions to new problems within the munciipality. This is no different from private-sector innvoation, some of which is radical, but most of which is incremental.
How can municipal innovation be defined and evaluated?
A question that naturally arises is: what is municipal innovation? How can it be identified? This is an important question. Municipal innovation is not identical to private-sector innovation because there is usually no external market against which to measure it and it is typically not driven by personal profit.
Municipal innovation is usually driven by entrepreneurial employees and/or local politicians, who risk their reputations as they experiment and try to implement new ways of doing. They are not driven by profit. Rather, it is public-service motivations (i.e. helping other people, performing their public administration job well) or problem-solving (i.e. faced with an impediment or problem, they search for and implement a solution) which drive them.
There is no absolute measure of innovation in a municipality, partly because each municipality is different. Therefore, even if a solution is inspired by a similar one elsewhere (and there is a lot of networking and sharing of good ideas between municipalities), it will necessarily be adapted to local context. Thus, the best way to define and assess municipal innovation is as a new way-of-doing, a new technology or new regulation that has been successfully implemented and that has met objectives at a reasonable cost.
How can “success” be evaluated? Typically by consulting stakeholders. This is not a neat way of evaluating innovation (there are no absolute criteria), because innovation is fundamentally political. It involves choices, changes, winners and losers: hence, it requires deliberation and compromise, things that tech multi-millionaires don't seem too keen on!
These ideas, some of which may seem rather theoretical, are important because they can help public administrators and municipalities be less defensive when faced with ideological critiques such as those leveled by certain high-profile tech entrepreneurs (but also more widely). It can sometimes be difficult to articulate why and how a municipality is innovative if there is no clear way of thinking about municipal innovation and if there are no examples of what it can be. This paper, hopefully, provides some elements that will support public administrators as they explain and articulate how their own municipalities are innovative.
Merdan Seker, professor of municipal finance at the Kehl Hochschule of Applied Sciences, undertakes research on innovation in municipal administration. Until 2023, he was head of finance at the city of Offenburg. Prior to that, as head of financial management at the town of Renschen, he introduced an original budget and accounting system in response to regulatory changes.
Richard Shearmur, Professor of Economic Geography at McGill's School of Urban Planning and a registered urban planner, has been in academia since the late 1990s. Prior to that, he worked as a real estate consultant in Europe. His research focuses on the geography of innovation processes and on regional development.
Gérard Beaudet started his career as a planning consultant in the 1980s, working for governmental and municipal organizations. He joined the Université de Montréal in the mid-1990s. Author of multiple books on Québec planning and municipalities, he is actively involved in public debate concerning ways forward for urban and regional planning in the province.