Indigenous Policy Research in Canada: Trends in Canadian Public Administration, 1958-2024

Abstract

Since the 1970s, public administration scholars have increasingly turned to meta-analysis aimed at systematically analyzing the published output of public administration scholarship to understand scope, nature and disciplinary status. Although these reviews have made significant strides towards understanding the study’s interdisciplinarity and heterodoxy, existing research has rarely examined Indigenous policy scholarship, and this research has tended to ask questions investigating what knowledge is produced, which limits attention to questions of how. Against this backdrop, the present study applies a summative analysis approach to Indigenous policy scholarship, and a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse to the case of self-determination. The present study asks two critically interrelated research questions: (1) How does Canadian public administration scholarship engage with the study of Indigenous policy in terms of topic and knowledge utilization? and (2) How is the self-determination discourse constructed within the studies over time? To answer these research questions, the study used qualitative content analysis to analyze, through ATLAS.ti, 47 texts accessed through the Canadian Public Administration issue archive via Wiley Online Library published between 1982 and 2024. Drawing from the 47 texts, the study examines how the Indigenous policy scholarship increasingly engaged with distinct topics and Indigenous-focused literature over time, while published output remained uneven and concentrated. Drawing from the case of self-determination, the study examines how different schemata in scholarly discourse relate to the social construction of knowledge using interpretive scheme analysis to explore meaning structures that organize the discourses of self-determination.