How malleable are political-economic institutions? The case of labour-market decision-making in British Columbia

This article reviews two efforts to reform labour-market decision-making in British Columbia during the 1990s that were designed to increase the private sector's role in developing and administering education and training programs. The first effort was the British Columbia Labour Force Development Board, created in 1994 and closed in 1996; the second was the Industry Training and Apprenticeship Commission, launched in 1997 and still in operation at the time of writing. Each reform sought to foster cooperation among public- and private-sector actors in the labour-market field in "associational" arrangements. In so doing, the reforms ran counter to institutionally entrenched patterns of behaviour in B.C.'s political economy, which favour conflict between business and labour and limited involvement of private-sector actors in public-sector labour-market institutions. This article assesses the extent to which these institutional constraints precluded the success of these reforms. The evidence suggests that they did, and that political-economic institutions are therefore a powerful and relatively rigid constraint on innovations of the associational type. Nevertheless, the article concludes that such reforms are more likely to succeed at the sectoral or local level, where these constraints are less compelling and where the forces that encourage associational reforms are particulary strong.