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About the PRI

Providing Insight on Emerging Issues

Who we are

The federal government requires a strong knowledge base and policy capacity to meet the increasingly complex challenges facing Canada. The Policy Research Initiative (PRI) is a policy research organization for the whole of the federal government specialized in early stage work on issues involving several federal departments. The PRI bridges the span between the policy research community inside and outside of government and the policy development community within government on issues likely to arise as policy priorities for the federal government over the coming three to five years. Its core mandate is to advance research on emerging issues, and to ensure both effective communication to researchers of the policy research priorities of policy-makers and effective use of research findings in the development of policies.

Our Vision

Our vision is to promote excellence in government policy research and the use of evidence in every stage of the policy cycle. We accomplish this by:

• Creating and promoting collaborations, including technology enabled communities;
• Identifying emerging trends and policy issues;
• Acquiring and generating relevant research from a wide variety of research sources to support early-stage policy work; and
• Developing tools that help in framing, managing and measuring of federal policy priorities.

Our Changing Role

The federal policy research landscape is changing. Sources of policy research are diversifying and technology is having a great impact on how research is undertaken and how information is exchanged among researchers and policy-makers. The PRI will continue to play a significant role in connecting research efforts across departments by catalyzing and convening knowledge and by creating capacity both to communicate policy-makers' needs to researchers and to enable policy-makers to apply resulting research to policy development. The PRI must also be at the forefront in the use of technology to create communities of researchers and pioneer the use of new research techniques as a way of enhancing policy research capacity within the federal family.

Our Challenge

Over the planning cycle, the PRI will organize its efforts along four broad themes:

• Supporting the federal government's medium-term planning;
• Producing focused horizontal research products in support of policy committee workplans;
• Creating an appetite within the policy community for evidence produced by researchers and a capacity to assimilate that evidence; and
• Building capacity in the federal research community to support the policy process.

The PRI Knowledge Cycle

The knowledge cycle depicts the PRI modus operandi, forms the basis for PRI principal business lines and identifies the broad steps from issue identification to project completion involved in policy research.