Tribunals and Guidelines: Exploring the Relationships between Fairness and Legitimacy in Administrative Decision-Making
The objective of this paper is to address two questions: why do administrative tribunals such as the Immigration Refugee Board resort to developing guidelines, and what are the principles and values which legitimize these initiatives? The role of tribunals in policy-making and/or policy-implementing raises important questions. For example, to whom are tribunals accountable for the development and application of guidelines where the functions of a tribunal - especially the adjudicative functions - are intended to be independent of government?The authors seek to understand better the dynamics of tribunals’ role in the policy process. They propose a classification of guidelines based on the function they perform in administrative proceedings and provide an analysis of the normative framework underlying guidelines. The authors explore how a legal analysis of guidelines might shed on the theory and practice of public administration. The authors conclude that in the absence of a nuanced understanding of the legal status of guidelines, the relationship between administrative practice and the rule of law remains uncertain and unstable.
Policy‐making and administrative discretion: The case of immigration in Canada
: Decisions in complex and controversial policy areas are often left to civil servants. As a result, civil servants use their discretionary power to make decisions that will likely have important consequences for society. This is the case with immigration. Partially based on interviews conducted with Canadian and Quebecois immigration agents, the authors note that the use of the judgement of civil servants is an important factor in the selection process of newcomers. The authors recognize also that discretion can take different forms: procedural discretion, selection grid discretion, and final decision discretion. This case study enables a better understanding of both the use of judgement in the decision-making process and the role of street-level civil servants in the policy implementation process. 
 
 
 
Sommaire: Les decisions se rapportant a des domaines de politiques complexes et pretant a controverse sont souvent laissees aux mains des fondionnaires. Ainsi, les fonctionnaires usent de leur pouvoir discretiormaire pour prendre des decisions qui auront vraisemblablement des consequences importantes pour la societe. C'est precisement le cas de l'immigration. Se fondant partiellement sur des entrevues effectuees par des agents d'immigration canadiens et quebecois, les auteurs remarquent que dans le processus de selection des nouveaux arrivants, le jugement de ces agents est un facteur important. Les auteurs reconnaissent egalement que la discretion peut prendre differentes formes: la discretion procedurale, la discretion relative a la grille de selection et la discretion en matiere de decision definitive. La presente etude de cas permet de mieux comprendre a la fois le recours au jugement dans le processus decisionnel et le role des fonctionnaires de la base dans le processus de mise en aeeuvre des politiques.
To Devolve or Not To Devolve? Welfare Reform in the States
This article analyzes variation in the degree to which states have responded to the devolution of welfare at the federal level by devolving authority over welfare policy to local government. I find that to the extent that states have devolved authority to lower levels of government, they tend to be states that already had a high degree of involvement of local government in welfare provision. In states without this record of local government involvement, the devolution that has occurred has not generated greater involvement of local government, but rather responsibility has been devolved to regional entities with ties to workforce development and with a substantial degree of business involvement. As states gain increasing authority over a redistributive policy, they may begin to treat it as a subset of a larger developmental policy—workforce development.