When the State Borrows the Vocabulary of Collaboration to Better Recentralize

In December 2023, the Quebec National Assembly passed Bill 23. At the heart of the legislation was the creation of the Institut national d'excellence en éducation (INEE), or National Institute of Excellence in Education, presented by Minister Bernard Drainville as an independent body tasked with identifying « best practices » for the school system. Two years later, the institute's launch has been postponed to summer 2025, and the public debate has only intensified: editorials by former chairs of the Conseil supérieur de l'éducation (Higher Council of Education), a letter signed by nearly 70 university professors, repeated union protests.

Why such an outcry against a body whose stated mission, disseminating evidence-based knowledge, seems hard to dispute? The answer, I believe, reaches beyond education alone. It says something important about how the Quebec state today deploys the vocabulary of collaborative governance to serve ends that are its exact opposite.

An Institute at the Crossroads of Three Paradigms

On paper, the INEE checks every box of New Public Governance. Mapping knowledge, transferring it to practitioners, networking stakeholders: this is precisely what Stephen Osborne (2006) theorizes when he describes the shift from an input-driven to an outcomes-driven logic, in which public action mobilizes a plurality of actors around a shared issue.

The institutional architecture, however, tells a different story. The thirteen board members are appointed by the Quebec government. Research priorities are identified « in consultation with the Minister ». The CEO is chosen by the Minister, without any requirement of recognized scientific expertise. Co-decision and co-production, the central markers of the collaborative governance this institute claims to embody, are replaced by a decidedly top-down logic.

What we find here, instead, are the markers of the previous paradigm: New Public Management, as theorized notably by Charbonneau (2012). Agencification, a dashboard to measure system performance, international benchmarking, intensified accountability mechanisms. And behind that, more deeply still, the return of an authoritarian Weberian logic that Stéphane Dion (1993) already described: the Minister grants himself the power to appoint and dismiss directors general of school service centres, to impose practices, to prescribe continuing education.

Three paradigms layered into a single mechanism. The discourse borrows from the most recent; the structure belongs to the oldest.

Why This Gap Matters

The gap between rhetoric and structure is not trivial. It produces three effects that field actors are already identifying clearly.

The first is the destruction of existing social capital. The Conseil supérieur de l'éducation, established in 1964 on the recommendation of the Parent Report, had patiently accumulated, over six decades, the legitimacy of an autonomous advisory body. Its dismantling, denounced by its former chairs, illustrates what Robert Putnam (1993) called the destruction of previously constituted networks of trust. Once destroyed, such capital takes decades to rebuild.

The second effect is the deprofessionalization of teachers. By imposing « effective practices » prescribed from the top, the institute shifts toward what administrative science calls a coercive logic, as opposed to an enabling logic that would consolidate practitioners' contextual judgment. Professionals then become, in a phrase that circulates in the debate, « appliers of pedagogical recipes chosen elsewhere ».

The third and more subtle effect is what sociologist Frédéric Saussez (2023) calls « governance by numbers ». The promise of measuring network performance through a centralized dashboard imports into education a grammar borrowed from the private sector, whose limits have long been documented in public management scholarship. Yves Emery and David Giauque (2005) showed how such mechanisms, under the guise of efficiency, strip professionals of their agency and end up measuring what can be measured rather than what counts.

What the Case Reveals Beyond Education

The INEE is not an isolated case. It is a symptom.

Across several sectors, including health, environment and social services, a similar pattern has emerged in recent years: institutions presented as independent and collaborative, yet structured to concentrate decision-making power around the responsible Minister. Jacob Torfing and colleagues (2020) theorized this phenomenon, noting that New Public Governance remains, in practice, more theoretical than empirical. Its rhetorical invocation often serves to mask a process of recentralization.

Magalie Paris and Suzanne Garon (2020) confirm this in their study of municipal collaborative arrangements: without certain initial conditions, resource asymmetries overcome, a genuine culture of collaboration, shared motivation to engage, any claim to shared governance quickly weakens. Joseph Facal and Luc Bernier (2008) had already identified this risk in the Quebec context: administrative reforms that ignore political culture and existing institutional networks tend to produce the opposite of their intended effect.

The risk for public management is not only technical. It is democratic. When frontline actors, teachers, doctors, social workers, researchers, perceive a widening gap between collaborative rhetoric and top-down practice, trust erodes. And with it, the very capacity of the state to implement its policies.

A Question of Coherence

This is not a defence of the status quo. The Conseil supérieur de l'éducation could no doubt have been reformed. Disseminating scientific knowledge to practitioners is a legitimate, even important, objective. The Centre de transfert pour la réussite éducative du Québec already exists precisely for that purpose, and INESSS, its counterpart in healthcare, has shown that such a model can work.

The real question, then, is not « do we need an institute? », but « what kind of governance are we prepared to assume? ». If the goal is collaboration, its conditions must be accepted: genuine co-decision, institutional autonomy, scientific legitimacy of leadership, continuous dialogue with stakeholders. If the goal is centralized steering, it must be named and owned as such.

The problem is not the political choice itself. It is the use of one paradigm's vocabulary to push through another's structure. Over time, this dissonance costs more than the frankness it avoids.