In Memoriam

Dr. A. R. (Rod) Dobell

A Titan of Canadian Public Policy and Administration

Dr. Rod Dobell, a founder of the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria, died on February 26 2024 at the age 86. As his long-time student, colleague, and friend, Rod had an enormous influence on my life as a public policy researcher and instructor. He was a remarkable public intellectual, and an incredibly kind and generous human being. 

Rod Dobell was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and took BA and MA degrees at the University of British Columbia in economics and mathematics before going on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for his PhD in economics (1965). After a five-year appointment as Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University, he returned to Canada as Associate Professor of Mathematics and Political Economy, and subsequently Professor of Political Economy, at the University of Toronto. In the early 1970s, the first schools and institutes in public policy were emerging in Canada and the United States. At the UofT he served as a member of the founding faculty of the Institute for Policy Analysis, where he worked with graduate students and public servants to develop and apply various methods of quantitative policy analysis for addressing policy questions. He directed a research project that analyzed and recommended a system for financing post-secondary education in which students' loan repayments depended on their future earnings, and developed some of the first working models for longitudinal microsimulation methods in the analysis of social policy. 

Rod then alternated between academia and public service. During the period 1971-1976, Rod worked for the Government of Canada alongside the two men that JSGS is named for — Al Johnson and Tommy Shoyama. First serving as Senior Advisor (Long Range Planning) to the Deputy Minister of Finance, then as Deputy Secretary (Planning Branch) with the Treasury Board Secretariat, Rod was responsible for designing and implementing the program, planning, and budgeting system for the Government of Canada which remains foundational to the expenditure management and performance reporting system to this day. Many of the officials working for Rod during that time became well-known leaders throughout the federal public service. I have the honour of having inherited just a small part of his vast library of materials accumulated during this period, which is housed here at JSGS. Examples include otherwise unavailable archive material such as an org chart from the 1973 Department of Finance that includes names such as Johnson, Shoyama, and Dobell amongst others that would be recognized by students of the history of Canadian public policy. 

Rod’s career mapped onto the evolution of the modern fields of public policy and public administration. Rod was among the founding faculty at the UVic School of Public Administration, serving as its first director from 1977-1984 after a two-year appointment to the OECD in Paris as Director of the General Economics Branch. The UVic School was then a very new entity, and one of four new graduate programs at the University of Victoria. As one of four such programs in public administration across Canada at the time, Rod hired several leading edge scholars and started to develop his abiding interest in Indigenous and environmental issues. The first major project I worked on with him was “the Social Learning Project”, a large international collaborative effort in the early 1990s aimed at understanding how governments and civil society were dealing with acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change.

He then served a seven-year term as President of the Institute for Research on Public Policy and facilitated several innovative programs of research. He returned to the University of Victoria in 1991 to take up the first appointment to the Francis G. Winspear Chair for Research in Public Policy. It was during this time that I first came to work for Rod as a research assistant, a relationship that lasted over thirty years. I undertook a PhD in public policy under his supervision, finally graduating in 2013 so he could finally retire (having nominally retired in 2002 - those being the days of mandatory retirement at 65 for university professors). His version of ‘retirement’ differed from others, though, as he remained actively involved as Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the UVic Centre for Global Studies where he was much-beloved fellow and animateur – his curiosity about any policy issue, its connection to many other issues, and his willingness to engage in exploratory dialogue never dimmed and was boundless. For this reason, CFGS named its boardroom the Rod Dobell Room of Dialogue in 2022, a fitting way to remember him. In fact, he only handed in his office keys in August 2023. I did take the opportunity in recent years to publish an article with him on “The Limits of Policy Analytics: Early Examples and the Emerging Boundary of Possibilities”.

His accomplishments are too numerous to address in total. As just two examples: in the early 1980s, Rod served as Director of Research for Parliamentary Task Forces on Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements (the Bureau Task Force) and on Pension Reform (the Frith Task Force); and he was the founding President for NAMI-Canada, the Canadian section of the North American Institute, exploring the emerging structures of a North American community. 

Over the course of his extensive academic career — interspersed with numerous forays into policy work — Rod Dobell developed his specific research interests in the philosophy and processes of public administration and policy formation, including the way in which collective decisions are influenced by changing views of scientific evidence and democracy, as well as in changing structures for consultation and public participation. His most recent work looked at social capital and social cohesion in the stewardship of cultural and natural capital. 

In 2011, a symposium was organized in Rod’s honour, which resulted in the published volume A Subtle Balance: Expertise, Evidence, and Democracy in Public Policy and Governance, 1970-2010. Editor: Edward A. Parson. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015. I was honoured to add a chapter, inspired by some of the many conversations we had over the years about the intersection of computer technology and policymaking, speculating on “The Future of Computer-Supported Policy Analysis: Collaboration, Openness, Collective Intelligence, and Competition” — some of which, more than a decade later, still rings true. 

Justin Longo, March 2024