The improbable dual capture of policy design and implementation: How a celebrity charity captured the Canada Student Service Grant

As the call for this panel observes, the interest group and policy literatures have focused on the role of groups in different phases of policy processes, assuming different motivations for engagement and different types of groups in each (Arras & Braun, 2018). Those with policy expertise and those that serve as “transmission belts” of citizen preferences are active in the design phase (Albareda, 2018), while those with capacity for service delivery dominate the competitive contracting processes of the implementation phase (Smith & Lipsky, 1995). Although policy capture can occur at either phase (Carpenter & Moss, 2014), the literature has not addressed the conditions that would enable an interest group to capture both design and implementation. Dual capture, particularly by a charity rather than a business association, may be rare, but the growing phenomenon of ‘celebrity’ interest groups facilitates this process (Pollock et al., 2019; Rindova et al., 2006).

The paper develops a conceptual model of policy capture that is more comprehensive and dynamic than existing approaches because it accounts for the agency and interactions of groups and government actors as well as contextual and structural conditions. This model is applied to the 2020 Canada Student Service Grant (CSSG) in which WE, a celebrity charity-social enterprise conglomerate, shaped the design of the program and was then awarded a $543 million sole source funding agreement to implement it. The CSSG quickly became an ethical scandal and spectacular failure, in part because WE was neither a transmission belt well connected to broader civil society nor capable of implementing the program it designed.

The analysis uses process tracing (drawing on the documentation provided to Parliamentary committees and media reports) to assess how and why capture occurred, leading the government to adopt a policy that was nearly impossible to implement successfully. The framework draws on historical institutionalism (Jacobs & Weaver, 2015; Mahoney & Thelen, 2010), reputation management (Bovens & t-Hart, 2016; Carpenter & Krause, 2011; Rindova et al., 2006); interest group and stakeholder management theories (Arras & Braun, 2018), and issue framing (Béland & Cox, 2011) to explain policy capture. The findings suggest that a combination of factors account for dual capture: 1) the environmental uncertainty created by COVID-19; 2) vigorous reputation management by WE, enabling it to capitalize on its celebrity status to shape idea frames and avoid critical evaluation; 3) framing of the issue as centred on youth volunteers, while ignoring the capacity and needs of charities; and 4) lack of knowledge by public managers of other interest groups and the charitable sector as a whole.