Environment, Resources and Sustainability

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

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Bridging Theories, Concepts, Organisations, and Collective Knowledge for Health and Sustainability Integration
(University of Waterloo, 2014-11-28) Abernethy, Paivi; Gibson, Robert B., 1950-
Complex environmental health issues are examples of ‘wicked problems’ that require cross-sectoral collaboration of the public, private, not-for-profit, and academic sectors together with the communities in which they function. Although the linkages between health and sustainability have been widely acknowledged in theory, stakeholders engaged in sustainable development and health seldom collaborate in practice. Promoting environmental health has remained strongly in the domain of the health sector, despite the ambitious rhetoric of international agreements. This dissertation focuses on cross-sectoral integration of health and sustainable development practices by exploring the bridging of ‘siloed’ knowledge. The emphasis is on collective knowledge and the three characteristics of cross-sectoral partnerships that have been identified as valuable for improving decision-making processes: bridging key discourses, bringing together key groups, and generating new knowledge. Aristotle’s three intellectual virtues, epistemé, techné and phronesis, were modified to help describe these aspects of collective intelligence that could enhance the integration of approaches to health and sustainability. The theoretical foundation for this transdisciplinary research was built primarily on health promotion and sustainability governance literatures, which were examined for their overlapping and complementary aspects. Children’s environmental health was studied as a useful bridging concept and UNESCO-mandated biosphere reserves as bridging organisations for integrating health and sustainability. Activities in all Canadian and British biosphere reserves were assessed for the extent of their focus on health. In addition, by investigating four biosphere reserves as case studies, this research identified barriers to and drivers for integrating health goals into biosphere reserve activities. At the same time, the organisational understanding of matters relevant to children’s environmental health was studied to assess the potential of biosphere reserves as bridging organisations for gathering and mobilising local knowledge on these issues. The findings centre on three new perspectives for mobilising knowledge as it relates to the cross-sectoral integration of health and sustainability: (1) the bridging of health promotion and sustainability governance theories, using children’s environmental health as a bridging concept and area of application, which brings together the key discourses in a transdisciplinary manner (epistemé); (2) the value of bridging organisations offering their skills and functional platforms as mechanisms to facilitate bridging of health and sustainability in practice, by bringing together main stakeholders (techné); and (3) the importance of bridging collective knowledge and combining the theoretical, practical, and ethical aspects of the integration process, to increase the level of understanding of specific problems, in this case children’s environmental health (phronesis). Other contributions offered by this research include the discovery of similarities in health promotion and sustainability governance theories; development of a transdisciplinary ecohealth framework; recognition of biosphere reserves as bridging organisations that function as innovative community-based forums for the integration of sustainable development and public health; and findings that reveal an insufficiency of local data collection on children’s environmental health threats. All in all, the findings in this research offer a conceptual and practical frame for integrating health and sustainability by facilitating cross-sectoral collaboration.
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.
Understanding Institutional Change and Resistance to Change Towards Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Theoretical Framework and Illustrative Application to Provincial-Municipal Aggregates Policy
(University of Waterloo, 2009-08-31T17:54:49Z) Markvart, Tanya I.; Gibson, Robert B., 1950-
This study develops an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for understanding institutional change and resistance to change towards sustainability. The research rests on two leading theories of change within the social and ecological sciences: the New Institutionalism and Panarchy theory. A theoretical framework integrating insights from the two theories is applied in an analysis of the development of the Town of Caledon’s mineral resources policies. The research suggests that institutional change and inertia are interconnected and interdependent and, depending on the case and context, they may interact with each other across spatial and temporal scales. There may be overlap in the emergence of pressures for institutional inertia and change across temporal and spatial scales, and both institutional change and inertia may be present when opportunities arise for renegotiation of the “rules of the game”. Results show that the two theories share many concepts (e.g., thresholds or tipping points, fast and slow moving variables, etc.) to aid in understanding the dynamics of institutional and ecological realms. Moreover, the integrated theoretical framework can help to explain the dynamics of institutional systems in a way that overcomes the limitations in Panarchy and the New Institutionalism theories by themselves. Key concepts within Panarchy theory (e.g., regime shifts, etc.) complement the New Institutionalism’s ability to capture important contextual factors influencing institutional change and inertia, and help to overcome the current limitation in its capacity to explain the nonlinear, multi-scalar dynamics of institutional systems. In turn, key concepts within the New Institutionalism (e.g., uncertainty, etc.) complement and enrich Panarchy theory’s capacity to illustrate the social and economic dimensions of institutional dynamics. Results of the case analysis demonstrate that a range of overlapping, historic and immediate, local-to-provincial factors (e.g., socioeconomic costs, uncertainty, path dependent effects, etc.) and institutional elements (e.g., interests and values, power and resources, issues of fit, etc.) drove institutional change and inertia in the development of Caledon’s mineral resources policies. The slow moving institutional variables in Caledon’s case (core Town, industry and provincial government values and interests) were perhaps the greatest determinants of institutional change and resistance to change towards sustainability. The story of the development of Caledon’s mineral resources policies, then, is about the resilience and resistance efforts of a small Town committed to maintaining core community values under the constraints of a resilient and resistant, ecologically destructive and inequitable institutional system.

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Browsing Environment, Resources and Sustainability by Author "Gibson, Robert B., 1950-"