Restructuring development expertise and labour in the CIDA-DFAIT merger

Abstract

In 2013, the government of Canada amalgamated the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) to form the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development (DFATD), now Global Affairs Canada (GAC). Though officially amalgamation aims to ensure policy coherence and effectiveness, it also brings CIDA, which had been a relatively independent agency with considerable policy powers, directly into the foreign affairs and international trade apparatus. Recent critical scholarship demonstrates the importance of more closely examining the day-to-day labour and strategic agency of professional experts in bureaucratic settings for assessing how policy is made, and for rethinking the geographies of bureaucracy, expertise, and the capitalist state more generally. The new department's structure and operation, and how it executes its political and strategic mandates, are dependent on the reorganization of expert labour within the department, especially the integration of development experts moving from CIDA. Building from interviews and government and public sector union surveys, this paper examines amalgamation with a focus on the construction of a new “institutional culture” in DFATD/GAC and how the department reorganizes and incorporates CIDA's development expertise and experts.