Justifying Social Services: Partnership and Risk in the Alberta Funding Regime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research focuses on the funding relationships between the provincial government and the not-for-profit sector in Alberta. Since funding cuts and risk management accounting techniques were introduced in the 1990s, the funding environment has evolved in the direction of enhanced sophistication of risk management techniques. The current environment is a remnant of the changes in values that took place during this period. Current trends indicate a continuation of these values, repackaged under the guise of community and individual empowerment. Recent policy and legislation such as the Results Based Budgeting Act and the Social Policy Framework are reminiscent of past initiatives designed to enhance fiscal accountability, create efficiencies and generate expectations for the not-for-profit sector to deliver consistent services with fewer resources. Drawing on interview and observational data, this project examines the implications of key neoliberal assumptions and practices as they pertain to the not-for-profit sector in Alberta. In particular, I am interested in the devolution of what were previous state activities onto the not-for-profit sector alongside the notion of equitable partnerships, control at a distance through financial accounting measures, the role of evidence-based ideology and the embrace of risk management techniques. I argue that the actual implementation of these key neoliberal ideas often have detrimental consequences for not-for-profit agencies in terms of their ability to deliver focused programming and their need to dedicate a disproportionate amount of funds to accountability requirements and sustaining programs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".