Providing Science Advice: An Ethnography of the Council of Canadian Academies’ Boundary Work of Recontextualizing Expert-Produced Scientific Knowledge for Canadian Government Policy-Makers

My study is an ethnographic account of the collaborative discursive activity of the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), a non-profit advisory organization that contracts with government clients to perform "boundary work" which includes taking expert-produced scientific knowledge and transforming and re-purposing this knowledge into a science-based discourse that is accessible and useful for government policy-makers.The CCA works at armslength from its government clients in producing science-related information for policy-makers, an activity that draws on the expertise of a multi-disciplinary panel of invited outside experts and the CCA staff.Using data collected at the CCA between 2013 and 2018, I explore the organization's culture, with a focus on its cultural constructs and tools.More specifically, its representations of key entities such as "science", "evidence", and "expertise".Concentrating my analysis on a 2017 CCA report produced for Transport Canada titled Older Canadians on the Move, I unpack the discursive "black box" of what is referred to in the CCA as the "Council Assessment Lifecycle Methodology" (CALM), a cultural tool used by a CCA "staff assessment team" in "recontextualizing" expert-produced science for use by policy-makers.In describing this collaborative activity, I show how aspects of the culture shape the boundary work performed by the panel and the staff team.Additionally, I use the method of "textography" to identify the types and rhetorical purposes of a series of "intermediary texts" used in producing the report, Older Canadians on the Move.I found that the staff team employed multiple iterations of intermediary texts to move the McKelvey, 2018; Hutchings & Stenseth, 2016; OECD, 2015).One approach used in providing science-informed advice to governments is through an advisory body closely connected with a national academy of science.Such an advisory body functions as an intermediary, nongovernment organization (NGO) mandated to interpret expert-produced scientific knowledge and communicate the relevant meaning of this expert-produced knowledge for use by government policy-makers in a form that is accessible and useful to them (Gluckman, 2014).Two well-known examples of such organizations are the National Academies of Science in the United States' National Research Council and the Royal Society in England's Science Policy Expert Advisory Committee.In Canada, the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA)performs this role by providing science-based advice to Canadian government policy-makers in the form of advisory reports, a kind of "boundary object" (Star & Gruesemer, 1989) -that is, an artefact, such as a report, that crosses the boundary of science or policy and is useable in either domain without becoming something entirely new.Government policy-making is a multi-faceted, solutions-oriented practice in which policy-makers attempt to resolve societal issues (Cairney, 2016;Tehara, 2010;Theodoulou, 2013).In Canada, as elsewhere, policy-making is a political process involving elected and unelected officials in national, provincial, and municipal institutions.At the federal level, Canadian policy is enacted through an Act of Parliament, which involves a process of deliberation among elected Members of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons and unelected Senators in the House of the Senate (Bejermi, 2010).Policy-making is an activity in which policy-makers use this knowledge to identify and choose between alternative ends and means while weighing competing factors such as public values, cost, efficiency, security, and liberty (Douglas, 2009;Dunn, 2013).For example, articles cited were from the following types of academic disciplines:  The health-sciences and medicine (Maturitas,

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