Re-Imagining Governance in Practice: Benchmarking British Columbia's Citizen Engagement Efforts

Abstract

Over the last few years, the Government of British Columbia (Canada) has initiated a variety of practices and policies aimed at providing more legitimate and effective governance. Leveraging advances in technology, the Government of British Columbia (BC) has focused on changing the way it engages with its citizens with the goal of changing the way it seeks input and develops and implements policy. The efforts are part of a broader trend among a wide variety of democratic governments to re-imagine public service and governance.

The goal of this report is to: Outline and benchmark the current state of the BC Government’s efforts in improving transparency, citizen engagement and streamlined service delivery; Inspire BC officials how to build upon the existing foundation by pointing to worthwhile practices and policies drawn from case studies and reflections of current practitioners and thinkers in the field.

For this report, we identified two central themes to position BC’s efforts. For each theme, the report provides an account of what BC is currently doing - benchmarking it with other jurisdictions.