Environment, Resources and Sustainability

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability.

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Browsing Environment, Resources and Sustainability by Author "Clarke, Amelia Caroline"

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    Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships for Community Sustainability Plan Implementation: Understanding Structures and Outcomes at the Partner and Partnership Levels
    (University of Waterloo, 2016-04-07) MacDonald , Adriane; Clarke, Amelia Caroline
    Worldwide, the prevalence and complexity of sustainable development challenges require coordinated action from actors in the private, public, and civil society sectors. Partnerships that embody inclusivity and heterogeneity are emerging as a way forward. Such partnerships build capacity by developing and leveraging the diverse perspectives and resources of the multiple stakeholders that represent all three sectors. Multi-stakeholder partnerships are designed to address and prioritize social problems and due to the number of partners, do not have the resources to negotiate the strategic interests of individual partners. Thus, it can be problematic to define the value proposition for partners involved in multi-stakeholder partnerships. Moreover, multi-stakeholder partnerships address social problems by building and leveraging the collective capacity of the partnering stakeholders; however, there are significant issues related to accessing the necessary resources at the partnership level. This dissertation uses resource-oriented theories to examine how resources are gained at both the partner and partnership levels of analysis. At the partner level, resource-based view theory is used to, i) identify which partnership resources are valuable, rare, and costly for competitors to imitate, and ii) identify how partners can organize to capture value by creating internal implementation structures. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between individual implementation structure and four types of partner capital: physical/financial, human, organizational, and shared. At the partnership level, relational view theory is used to understand how the processes of knowledge-sharing and collaborative decision making work together as subcomponents of structures to develop partnership capital. Two separate surveys were used to collect data for this dissertation: the partner survey and the partnership survey. The partner survey collected data about partner-level implementation and outcomes. It surveyed 42 partners involved in multi-stakeholder partnerships implementing community sustainability plans across Canada. Findings from the partner survey indicate that partners prefer outcomes related to building relationships and gaining knowledge. The survey also found that partners who implement by creating internal structures for implementation, such as creating new sustainability-related positions or teams, experienced more learning and gained further knowledge, better relationships, and more cost savings than partners who did not implement in this way. The partnership survey collected data about partnership-level implementation and outcomes. It surveyed 94 local authorities leading the implementation of community sustainability plans through partnerships from around the world. Findings from the partnership survey indicate that collaborative decision making has a positive effect on communication and renewal systems, which has a positive influence on a partnership’s capacity in the areas of knowledge and learning, relationships, and adaptability. The findings in this dissertation contribute to the social partnership literature by indicating that plan implementation can occur concurrently at two levels: the partner and the partnership level. Moreover, it finds that based on partner perceptions different approaches to implementation at each level may result in varying outcomes for partners and the partnership. The overarching implication of this research is that while multi-stakeholder partnerships and local sustainable development challenges are embedded in complex social, ecological and economic systems, and are themselves complex, there may be aspects within the control of the partners that can contribute to realizing desirable outcomes.
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    Planning for Social Change Towards Sustainability? Investigating Local Government Strategic Sustainability Planning in Canada
    (University of Waterloo, 2015-04-08) Markvart, Tanya I.; Filion, Pierre, 1952-; Gibson, Robert B., 1950-; Clarke, Amelia Caroline
    This dissertation investigated the condition of local government strategic sustainability planning (SSP) in Canada as well as the contextual underpinnings of prevailing practices. It asked big questions about where we are going, how we are getting there, and what planning for social change towards sustainability should mean and entail. But one body of scholarship, alone, does not address these queries and scholars have tended to use meagre evaluative frameworks to analyse municipal government SSP initiatives. In response to these research gaps, this study developed an analytical framework that integrates ideas from five pertinent fields of study: sustainability assessment, social-ecological resilience theory, collaborative planning, the New Institutionalism, and lessons learned from experience in municipal SSP. When combined, concepts from these areas of inquiry illuminate the core concerns of SSP in any context. Notions from institutional theory help to explain why practice is the way it is. From this theoretical standpoint the research examined the community-scoping frameworks that practitioners have applied in the plan formulation phase of municipal SSP. Community scoping is a type of participatory analysis that aims to better understand baseline local conditions and provide the foundation for sustainability goals. Because community scoping requires practitioners to make choices with respect to contents and processes, it provides an opening for scholars to investigate the range of sustainability (including resilience), social change and effective practice concerns that community-scoping frameworks have tended to cover. Because community scoping requires public participation, it offers an opportunity for scholars to scrutinize the processes that have been used. Finally, because the community-scoping step must unfold within the context of a particular place, it presents a window for scholars to explore the institutional, built and ecological factors that have influenced practice. This study involved two key stages. The first stage included a Canada-wide search for local government SSP undertakings, the selection of sixty-five municipal SSP initiatives, basic qualitative data collection, and an in-depth analysis of applied community-scoping frameworks. The in-depth examination concentrated on the content and process components of the frameworks as well as the community-specific concerns that were elicited from the public. During this stage, the initially generic and integrated evaluative framework was specified for the local government context and teased apart in order to examine the content and process elements of community scoping separately. Building on the findings of this research, the second, case study stage employed concepts from institutional theory to explain the contextual underpinnings of practice. Three cases were selected, the City of Prince George SSP undertaking in British Columbia, the Town of Cochrane SSP initiative in Alberta, and the Town of Huntsville SSP effort in Ontario. Key informant interviews probed into why certain choices were made in the design of the community-scoping step. The findings of the first research stage showed that communities have committed to the concept of sustainability as an overarching idea. The predominant interpretation of the notion, however, conformed to the prevailing capitalist model of economic growth and development. None of the initiatives used sustainability criteria to structure the community-scoping step. Rather, practitioners preferred to use open-ended questions and sustainability pillars or urban planning categories. The findings revealed that open-ended questions were more effective with respect to covering a diverse range of community-specific matters; however, they tended to miss important sustainability (including resilience), social change and practical enactment concerns. The overall lack of attention that was given to place-specific inter- and intragenerational equity issues, among others, evidenced the limitations of the open-ended, pillared approach. Indeed, the findings exposed a general uncertainty with respect to how to do integrative planning. Additionally, the community-scoping frameworks were generally not clearly underpinned by an intention to shift community systems towards sustainability, and strong collaborative processes undergirded by an intention to facilitate learning and paradigm change were not the norm. The major strength of the interdisciplinary evaluative framework was that it was able to expose prevalent and atypical approaches to thinking and practice with respect to the different components of community scoping. For example, the analysis of community-specific concerns that were elicited from the public revealed a dominant vision and a minority vision for community development. The former projected a business-as-usual community development trajectory, supported by an efficiency-based model of resource maintenance and a mitigative approach to the social-ecological impacts of development. It almost completely ignored the distributive dimensions of socioeconomic systems. In contrast, the minority vision expressed a concern for the distributive dimension of socioeconomic systems; it questioned the power of corporations and our dependence on global markets and fossil fuels; it acknowledged critical thresholds and alternative states of equilibrium; and it emphasized the notions of living locally, zero waste, slowing the pace of growth, and limiting growth. On the whole, the findings of the first research stage depicted a mechanistic approach to public sector SSP. The case studies, interviews and concepts from the New Institutionalism suggested that prevailing practices may be underpinned by an actor’s sense of what is right and good for the local context as well as his or her socioeconomic interests in adhering to some well-established norms in local government SSP. Uncertainty, collective understandings, legislative frameworks, relationships of power, and taken-for-granted interpretations of the roles that municipal governments, citizens, and practitioners should play in SSP may also underpin predominant approaches. While these institutional factors contributed to the durability of prevalent practices, the Town of Huntsville case demonstrated how practitioners could acknowledge the need for change, raise the bar on practice, and introduce new planning norms. The research enriches our understanding of the conceptual basis for theory building about planning for social change towards sustainability. It also contributes to each body of research that comprised the evaluative framework. With respect to practical contributions, this study begins to portray the condition of municipal SSP in Canada relative to a representative set of generic and local-government specific SSP considerations. Opportunities for improvement were underscored, especially with respect to how and when social change and practical implementation concerns should be addressed. This study clearly evidenced the need for planning and community-scoping frameworks that cut to the heart of the institutional underpinnings of prevailing (insufficient) approaches to practice. These contributions raise further questions about how the interdisciplinary analytical framework should be applied in other SSP contexts; the planning realities that might discourage and/or encourage the approach to community scoping that I proposed in this thesis; and whether this approach would lead to greater progress towards sustainability over the long term.
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    Understanding the Strategic Engagement of Partner Organizations in Large Cross-Sector Social Partnerships Implementing Community Sustainability Plans
    (University of Waterloo, 2018-08-10) Ordonez Ponce, Eduardo; Clarke, Amelia Caroline
    Sustainability is a grand challenge that diverse communities of interest all over the world are currently focusing on at the local and global level. At the local level, thousands of cities have decided to address their sustainability goals through local cross-sector social partnerships, while at the global scale, governments of the world have agreed on the universal aim of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Cross-sector social partnerships have also been identified by researchers and policy makers as a way to address sustainability challenges, with partner organizations from across sectors playing a key role in the achievement of their sustainability goals. Organizations partnering for sustainability are the focus of this dissertation. Many researchers from diverse disciplines claim that organizations join partnerships for strategic reasons, and that sustainability is a strategic opportunity. Integrated literature on strategy, partnerships and sustainability, however, is sparse, and the strategic engagement of organizations in partnerships has been mostly assessed qualitatively. This dissertation draws on strategic management, cross-sector partnerships and sustainability literature to examine the strategic engagement of organizations partnering across sectors for community sustainability. Building on strategic management literature, this dissertation bases its research on three key variables: strategic goals represented as drivers for organizations to join sustainability partnerships, organizational structural features which reflect how organizations structure to implement the partnership’s collective sustainability strategy, and organizational outcomes as what organizations gain from partnering for sustainability. Drivers and outcomes are studied through the management perspective of resource-based view (RBV), that is complemented with a community capitals approach often used in the public policy literature, and structural features are examined through contingency theory drawing from management literature. The questions this dissertation aims to answer are focused on the strategic engagement of organizations in sustainability partnerships through the understanding of organizational structures, the value organizations assign to drivers and outcomes to assess resources through RBV, the implemented structural features to examine contingency theory, and the strategic relationships among these variables. This research collects data through a survey from 224 organizations partnering in large cross-sector partnerships. Each of these partnerships has an approximate minimum of one hundred partners implementing community sustainability plans; these are found in: Barcelona (Spain), Bristol (UK), Gwangju (South Korea), and Montreal (Canada). The survey reached a response rate of 26% allowing findings to be generalizable, showing good reliability, and with unbiased responses across organizations, partnerships, and types of organizations. Within this data set are responses from 71 businesses on their drivers to partner, structural features for partnering, and partner outcomes, which was complemented with qualitative content analyses to study the relationships between businesses partnering for local sustainability, and the SDGs as a proxy to global sustainability. Findings from this research show that organizations implement structures when partnering for sustainability. However, the findings further reveal that structures do not affect the relationships between goals and desired outcomes, and being highly structured is not imperative for achieving valuable outcomes. Results also show that society-oriented resources such as contributing positively to environmental challenges or collaborating with society are the most valuable drivers and outcomes for organizations; informal structural features are the most implemented for addressing sustainability partnerships (for example implementing plans and policies, or partnering with other organizations); and organizations achieve the goals that drive them to partner. No statistically significant relationships were found between drivers and structures, nor between structures and outcomes. Finally, research on businesses shows a positive relationship between business’ drivers and outcomes and the SDGs, representing an opportunity for businesses to achieve their goals and for business outcomes to contribute to global sustainability. Findings from this dissertation contribute to organizational strategic management, partnerships and sustainability literature by confirming quantitatively that sustainability partnerships are strategic for organizations. This dissertation also contributes to the strategy literature by highlighting the key roles of structures and context in the achievement of strategic goals, presenting a theoretical model that integrates different schools of thought. This research also contributes to the refinement of RBV by highlighting with empirical evidence how valuable societal resources are to organizations, and to contingency theory by confirming that informal structural features are how organizations address uncertain and complex environments such as sustainability. Another contribution from this research is to the partnerships literature by highlighting the power that large cross-sector partnerships have in the achievement of organizational goals. With respect to the business literature, this research also contributes to the understanding of businesses in the context of their engagement in local and global sustainability. From these specific contributions, two main conclusions and theoretical contributions arise. First is the relevance of large cross-sector sustainability partnerships, highlighting the contextual role they play, which together with organizational structures, lead organizations to achieve their strategic goals. And second is the value of societal resources, which can be considered strategic for organizations due to the importance that contributing to society has for organizations, and the way these resources are pursued through organizational engagement in cross-sector partnerships.