September 12, 2024

Alasdair Roberts’s new book The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century was released earlier this September by McGill-Queen’s University Press. This is Roberts’ tenth book and follows his 2023 release Superstates: Empires of the 21st Century from Polity Books.

Roberts, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote the book while serving as the Bourgon Visiting Scholar at the Canada School for Public Service in Ottawa in 2022-2023.

The book looks at how Canada is losing ground in its capacity to anticipate and manage the shifting terrain of geopolitics, demographics, climate change, and technology. The publisher says The Adaptable Country “outlines practical reforms to improve adaptability, reminding us of the bigger picture: in a turbulent world, authoritarian rule is a tempting path to security. Canada’s challenge is to show how political systems built to respect diversity can also respond deftly to existential threats.”

The Adaptable Country has already received positive reviews for its insight into Canadian institutions. Anne McClellan, former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, said “In a world of disruptive, interconnected crises, Roberts provides us with a warning: Canada is on the edge of an adaptability trap. Our institutions, and the people who work in them, must have the nimbleness and flexibility to sustain our democracy in the treacherous years ahead.”

Roberts says that there is a common theme in several of his recent books.  “Public policy programs have tended to ignore big-picture questions about the health and performance of the political system,” Roberts says.  “In these times especially, that’s a dangerous gap in our research and practice.”