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The development and implementation of extended producer responsibility (EPR) policies to manage e‐waste provide multilevel governance frameworks for achieving greater material circularity. However, the roles and responsibilities that are allocated to various stakeholders under these policies, which are crucial for program effectiveness, often vary across jurisdictions, and consensus is lacking about the best types of relationships and collaboration that should govern municipalities' contributions to EPR programs. Against this backdrop, and since this issue is poorly researched, we conducted an empirical investigation to identify the main drivers and barriers influencing municipalities' collaboration with an e‐waste EPR program in a Canadian province where municipalities are free to decide whether or not to engage with the program. Based on our study, we explore policy implications for similar programs in other jurisdictions, and propose questions for further research. Our findings identify key motivations for collaboration, including perceived program legitimacy, program funding, and logistical efficiencies. Conversely, a lack of program transparency, failure to support local employment, a focus on recycling instead of reuse, and limited program scope are identified as disincentives to program participation. Policymaking for e‐waste management and circularity need to consider municipalities' interests and contributions to ensure successful implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the digitisation of the ocean reconfigure capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations? What analytic tools allow us to trace their intersecting dynamics? These are the central questions that we take up through an examination of smart oceans governance along the west coast of Canada, where the state is developing new institutional partnerships to manage the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure across unceded Indigenous lands and waters. In this context, laden with environmental risks and resurgent anti‐colonial politics, state actors are implicating smart oceans governance in efforts to harmonise capitalist growth with sustainability mandates and the 'recognition' of Indigenous self‐determination. Our analysis draws on environmental state theory, critical indigenous studies, and human geographies of the ocean, to analyse interviews, Access to Information requests, scientific studies, and policy reports. Our findings suggest that smart oceans governance poses novel risks to Indigenous peoples and their distinctive 'seascape epistemologies'. At the same time, we observe in this medium new limits to the state's ability to consolidate settler colonial authority and extend possessive colonial entitlements to Indigenous lands and waters. First Nations are also engaging with smart oceans governance in ways that assert 'Indigenous data sovereignty', help chart their own political and territorial ambitions, and carve out meaningful spaces of Indigenous marine stewardship. A comprehensive overview of the politics of smart oceans ‐ that is, ensembles of data intensive sensing tools and associated marine governance practices. The paper draws examples from the west coast of Canada where it finds new risks to First Nations governance but also moments where smart oceans governance is being leveraged by communities to support their political goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing trends in environmental governance over recent decades have brought more civil society involvement into decision-making processes. The participation of faith communities in these processes is under-researched and poorly understood. This paper applies a governance lens to features of faith organizations to explore their roles, strengths, and shortcomings in contributing to environmental governance. Data were collected through literature review, interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. The data reveal that governance strengths of faith organizations coalesce around providing space for dialogue, helping shape the values and direction of governance, and the existence of strong organizational infrastructure and networks to implement action. Capacity challenges are posed by declining membership in some communities and a large proportion of new immigrants in others. Our research findings also provide a foundation for future studies (as some of the first studies of this kind in Canada) by offering preliminary conclusions and questions for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As humans exceed global ecological limits nation state-based environmental governance attracts persistent criticism. Historically, the focus of regulatory design for environmental law has been to provide access to natural resources or the environment but without ecosystem-based standards at any scale or cumulative effects assessment by which state governments evaluate whether they are achieving ecosystem health. Illuminated within these nation state regimes are two examples where legal pluralism has or is mandating environmental regulatory design that more explicitly elevates ecological function as a key outcome. Bhutan's relatively recent state environmental laws are part of its broader development approach of Gross National Happiness (GNH), an expression of state, Buddhist, and other customary laws. This 'internal legal pluralism' in state policy is expressed through multiple layers of plans and project review by administrative agencies and a GNH screening tool. By contrast, Canada is reforming its environmental laws to account for cumulative impacts and Indigenous rights. In particular, state governments have committed to aligning their laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and plural legal agreements establish unique collaborative governance bodies. The purpose of this article is to examine how legal pluralism is influencing the evolution of regulatory design for environmental governance in Bhutan and Canada. While the plural legal aspects of their regimes have resulted in the prioritization of ecological health, that focus in both regimes is vulnerable without further regulatory scaffolding to establish ecological limits that engage with multiple legal orders at various temporal and spatial scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In evaluating effectiveness for collaborative environmental governance arrangements, a key concern is describing not just the processes and actors that are a part of these systems, but also the impacts that these processes have on ecological and social conditions. Existing research delineates an emphasis on process variables over outcome variables, as well as the difficulties of demonstrating causal relationships between collaborative governance processes and ecological outcomes. In this paper, we examined how process and outcome criteria are used by sponsors, industry practitioners, and participants of collaborative environmental governance (CEG) arrangements in Canada's forest sector to ascertain effectiveness. We explicitly sought evidence from sponsors and industry practitioners of self-described effective forest advisory committees, anticipating that sponsors or practitioners might place greater emphasis than participants on outcome criteria over process criteria. We analyzed data from a nation-wide survey of forest advisory committee participants, conducted interviews with sponsoring agencies, and completed two in-depth case studies. We found that sponsors and industry practitioners, like participants, perceived a strong relationship between process and effectiveness. The perspectives of all participants helped us articulate ten key process criteria that they determined as essential for CEG. By including the insights of sponsoring agencies, our study provides both on-the-ground and management interpretations of process and outcomes as well as a nuanced approach to understanding the relationship between the two. However, we conclude that systematic evaluation approaches involving outcome-based criteria are still necessary and would provide a clear step towards encouraging accountability in CEG decision-making, both for sponsors and members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Political Science Review is the property of Canadian Political Science Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Portland Metropolitan region, a single economic and ecological region with a bifurcated state and local governance structure, provides an opportunity to compare governance models and state policy environments in a single region. Using stakeholder interviews and secondary sources, we examine the role of state government policy in shaping and supporting different regimes. We find that Portland exhibits a stable, “smart-growth” regime that we characterized as a metropolitan eco-regime whereas Vancouver is in a period of fragmentation without a stable metropolitan regime. This is best explained by the differing state-level regulatory contexts and the different forms of polycentricity influenced by state action. Differences in regime and governance structure result in differently drawn and expanded urban growth boundaries with subsequent differences in land-use outcomes. We conclude with observations about state-level action and subsequent forms of polycentricity to support metropolitan eco-regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Confederation in 1867, official Canadian settler government policy on the environment has sought to simultaneously preserve “wilderness” and exploit natural resources for market gain. In the 1960s, the nascent North American modern environmental movement pushed for stronger regulation on pollution and toxics - and a more institutionalised state-led response to environmental problems emerged. Throughout the last five decades, three principal “eras” of federal government reaction have emerged in response to mounting scientific evidence and public pressure to act on environmental issues. The first, from the late-1960s to mid-1980s, saw the development and implementation of early environmental policy and programmes. The second era, from the mid-1980s to mid-2000s co-occurred alongside the rise of the sustainable development paradigm, and is marked by the Canadian government’s attempt at leadership on the global stage. The third era, from the mid-2000s to 2015, demonstrates a shift from environmental regime-building and multilateral collaboration toward rollbacks and obstructionism. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the government of Canada reversed decades of progress and cooperation on the environment and sustainable development through its muzzling of government scientists, superficial co-optation of climate policy, rollbacks of environmental legislation and disparagement of environmental activists. In total, by shifting the federal government from a position of ineffective benevolence on environmental issues to one of contention and antagonism, the Harper government’s approach represents a departure from Canadian environmental governance norms and sought to remake the identity of Canada as an energy superpower inextricably tied to its oil and gas industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case studies of the Canada Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) highlighted factors influencing scientific communication that are contingent on the characteristics of the many dynamic and iterative science-policy interfaces among decision-makers, scientists, and other stakeholders. Direct observations of 15 scientific and management meetings coupled with interviews with 78 scientists and managers revealed aspects of the information pathways, i.e., production, communication, and use of scientific information in these organizations. Unique features of decision-making and information use enable the production of credible, relevant, and legitimate information in each organization, including trade-offs in these attributes to support fisheries governance objectives. For instance, defined processes for producing scientific advice embedded in fisheries management authorities, such as DFO and NAFO, ensure uptake of information in decision-making. As a boundary organization, FAO bridges science and policy-making groups among its member countries. The demand for scientific advice, policy development, and trade aspects are primary drivers in the information pathways. However, organizational aspects such as dispersed units and inadequate communication persist as barriers to information flow. Across the geographic scales of the three organizations, stakeholders apart from government scientists and policy-makers, e.g., the fishing industry, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the public, are increasingly involved in the information pathways. Insights about the information pathways can equip the organizations to evaluate or modify practices to increase the uptake of information in decision-making as fisheries management issues and considerations become more complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in Impact Assessment (IA) has been an ongoing and important topic for scholars, with specific emphasis on public and, more recently, Indigenous participation. While specific barriers to Indigenous participation have been identified, little work has been done on how the different approaches to IA (neutral arbitration, multi-way exchange, and legal space) have affected how these actors interact with the process. Here, we take the case of the Yukon Territory, where IA-specific constraints identified in the literature have been at least partially addressed through land claims and legislation, such as guaranteed participation and Indigenous-specific funding. Based on 17 semi-structured interviews with IA practitioners representing First Nations Governments, we find that Indigenous peoples continue to adapt their strategies for engagement, revealing a contrast between the promise of inclusion and the reality of implementation. In moving towards inclusive processes and implementing modern land claims, the challenge for IA in northern Canada remains not 'if' but 'how.' • IA positioned as a knowledge-based activity where knowledge exchange is vital. • Indigenous peoples are often viewed as stakeholders, not rightsholders in current IA interactions. • Approaches used by current IA processes need to re-oriented towards educating IA actors prior to engagement with Indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consensus-based multi-stakeholder forms of environmental governance involving government, private and civil society actors, have become popular for advancing sustainability, but have been criticized for failing to achieve procedural justice objectives including recognition, participation and strengthening capabilities. Yet, how such models have functioned within non-governmental organizations dedicated to advancing sustainability has been underexplored. This paper assesses the procedural elements of consensus-based multi-stakeholder models used within Canadian biosphere reserves and model forests, two organizations working to address environment and sustainability issues. We draw on strategic documents and semi-structured interviews from five organizations in Canada to analyze their governance structures and processes against a framework for procedural justice. We find the organizational structure reproduces elitism and professionalism associated with stakeholder models more generally and reproduces challenges associated with recognition, participation and building capabilities found in other stakeholder approaches. Meeting broader sustainability challenges requires organizations to address procedural justice issues in addition to their traditional environmental concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time of Indigenous “inclusion” into state-led marine policy making is ending. Indigenous peoples are increasingly asserting their rights to primary roles in policy- and decision-making that affect their traditional homelands, freshwater bodies and oceans. Pacific herring governance is an important illustration of how coastal Indigenous nations, are reasserting legal and inherent rights to fisheries governance. Based in the empirical setting of British Columbia, Canada, this research examines (1) pressures for change to federal herring policy in the context of Indigenous rights and self-determination, and (2) the compatibility of Canadian federal marine policies with Indigenous herring governance. Findings suggest that Canada has an opportunity to implement new and strategic policy alternatives on herring that: better reflect emergent legal precedents; accommodates gains in Indigenous influence over decision-making; and supports the self-determination goals of coastal Indigenous nations. Given the context of fisheries uncertainty and a clear need to address Indigenous legal and inherent rights, Canada has an opportunity to position itself as a global leader in marine policy to reflect Indigenous inherent and legal rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the often chaotic and confounding implications of neoliberalism as it applies to environmental governance in the Canadian forest sector. On one hand, neoliberal governance strategies are said to enhance collaborative and partnership approaches to forest management that empower local stakeholders and communities. On the other hand, these same strategies can entrench market discipline and optimize mechanisms for economic development at the expense of broader public interests. We explore these contrasting perspectives through a comparative case study of two Canadian Model Forest initiatives: Resources North and the Manitoba Model Forest. Results from interviews and document analysis reveal that local capacity development for collaborative management at the regional scale was limited and unevenly sustained. We identify intentions within the Model Forest program that migrated from wide-ranging public concerns toward more narrowly defined private-sector interests, such as forest certification. These outcomes resulted from strong federally mandated “action at a distance.” Results also reveal that while some initiatives provided for local empowerment at the beginning of the Model Forest program, over time, these initiatives became more prescriptive. Hence, there remained ongoing limitations of neoliberal governance in fostering capacity development for environmental governance at local scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative forest governance arrangements have been viewed as promising for sustainable forestry because they allow local communities to participate directly in management and benefit from resource use or protection. Such arrangements are strengthened through social learning during management activities that can enhance capacity to solve complex problems. Despite significant research on social learning in collaborative environmental governance, it is not clear how social learning evolves over time, who influences social learning, and whether learning influences management effectiveness. This study investigates how social learning outcomes change over time, using an in-depth study of a community forest in Canada. Personal interviews, focus group meetings, and participant observation revealed that most participants started engaging in community forestry with limited knowledge and learned as they participated in management activities. However, as the community forest organization became effective at complying with forestry legislation, learning opportunities and outcomes became more restricted. Our results run contrary to the prevalent view that opportunities for and outcomes of social learning become enlarged over time. In our case, learning how to meet governmental requirements increased professionalism and reduced opportunities for involvement and learning to a smaller group. Our findings suggest the need to further test propositions about social learning and collaborative governance, particularly to determine how relationships evolve over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural climate solutions adopted by agricultural producers, such as cover crops, avoided grassland conversion, and improved nutrient management, can contribute to climate change mitigation while producing social and environmental co-benefits. Scaling natural climate solutions in agriculture is increasingly being explored as a critical component for achieving net-zero targets. There is growing recognition, however, that the hoped-for benefits of natural climate solutions will not be realized without a governance ecosystem that enables adoption. While many governance mechanisms have emerged to promote natural climate solutions in agriculture such as ecosystem service markets, climate innovation and clean tech funds, and producer education and outreach programs, little attention has been paid to how these governance mechanisms effectively contribute to an enabling governance ecosystem and where they fit within. In response, this paper compiles and synthesizes recommendations from relevant research fields including natural climate solutions, agri-environmental stewardship, and environmental governance to formulate a framework for natural climate solutions in agriculture. The framework manifests as a list of ten normative criteria organized by macro, sector, and geographical scales, which, if realized, can be expected to scale natural climate solutions adoption in agriculture. To demonstrate the utility of the framework, it is used to evaluate efforts to promote natural climate solutions in Canada's agriculture sector. This evaluation reveals an approach that is progressing towards meeting the criteria of the framework. However, in its current state, the governance ecosystem that influences natural climate solutions adoption in Canada's agriculture sector is project specific, with a patchwork of governance mechanisms largely operating parallel to one another, such that only some regional successes are possible. The framework is a starting point for identifying what might define an enabling governance ecosystem for natural climate solutions adoption in agriculture based on literature, highlighting the opportunity for future empirical research to build upon this framework towards a more complete view. • An enabling governance system should be developed to scale NCS adoption in agriculture. • A framework to evaluate and organize governance systems that influence NCS in agriculture is presented. • The application of the framework to Canada reveals an approach that is progressing towards meeting the criteria. • The current governance system in Canada reflects a patchwork of project specific mechanisms. • Further research is needed on the governance of NCS in agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada's adoption of international climate commitments, national emissions standards, and incentive programs drove expansion of biofuel production using available first-generation technologies in feedstock-rich regions. Market saturation and the emergence of second-generation technologies shifted government support away from first-generation technologies, placing pressure on regional production clusters. This article analyzes how Canadian biofuel firms restructured their value-chain activities in response to those technological and policy changes. The ability to access technologies and navigate multiscalar policy contexts shapes restructuring. Geographic patterns of cellulosic innovation are identified, and the role of firms and policy in regional industrial reorganization is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing array of actors engaged in the field of traditional knowledge (TK). The result is a broad, messy, and contested body of literature. To navigate this conceptual space, this paper provides signposts in the form of a typology. It classifies TK scholarship into four orientations: ecological, critical, relational, and collaborative. Categories are not fixed, mutually exclusive positions, but operate under differing sets of assumptions and towards particular ends. They perform particular work, with important discursive and material implications. This underscores the need to situate one's approach to TK, which this typology seeks to facilitate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Canadian Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While the number of non-regulatory environmental governance arrangements overseeing mining has been growing in Canada, there remains limited research critically examining Aboriginal peoples' experiences in these emerging institutions. This is especially notable with respect to the sharing of techno-scientific information, often used as a means of enabling Aboriginal peoples' participation and engendering their trust. A qualitative case study of the Northern Saskatchewan Environmental Quality Committee oversight of uranium mining, this research explores how techno-scientific information in the form of risk assessments was socially constructed and discursively employed by government and industry, and how Aboriginal participants responded. Findings illustrate that risk assessments were presented in ways that rendered development as controllable and inevitable, which facilitated dominant political economic agendas and capitalist practices. Aboriginal participants, however, introduced alternative interpretations of risk and sought to claim spaces within this governance institution through underscoring absent uncertainties, and asserting knowledges of global technological failures and local conditions that contradicted scientific reassurances. Aboriginal participants also highlighted the social injustices of development processes in Saskatchewan's north, which shaped their interpretations of risk, raising important questions about the value of these alternative governance institutions for Aboriginal peoples and their environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We examine the perspective on Indigenous peoples in collaborative approaches to environmental problems. [•] We contrast these with Indigenous governance concepts and Indigenous perspectives. [•] We identify a gap in collaborative scholarship pertaining to environmental problems. [•] Empirical findings support this gap regarding assumptions pertaining to Indigenous peoples. [•] We suggest a different approach for incorporating Indigenous perspectives into theory and practice. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the past two decades, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have targeted international customers of Canadian staples, intent on cajoling and coercing them to favour exporting firms certified as practising responsible fisheries and forestry management. The link between these campaigns and the adoption of these non-state market driven (NSMD) mechanisms is, however, more complex than often portrayed. There is an uneasy tension between demands favouring NSMD as a new form of private governance that will vary its own stewardship standards according to scientific information, multi-stakeholder deliberations, and price signals; and traditional demands that focus on a specific behaviour of a specific firm over a specific, albeit narrow, environmental problem. Indecision on the part of NGOs about the approach to take creates mixed signals, affecting firm decisions (purchasers and producers) in ways that can reduce the institutionalization of private authority. We examine these dynamics by unpacking the campaigns and their implications for the potential and consequences of NSMD governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of local field offices of Parks Canada in shaping collaborative management of human–wildlife interactions in two national parks. Previous studies suggest that understanding collaborative management involves attention to local context. By reviewing the approaches to collaboration adopted by the field offices of Grasslands National Park and Riding Mountain National Park, we draw attention to how national policies and decision-making approaches adaptedwithinthe field offices affected environmental and social outcomes. Both cases were deemed successful in achieving positive environmental outcomes. However, Grasslands National Park was more successful in achieving positive social outcomes. This success was due, in large part, to the ways in which local field personnel at Grasslands ensured local people were informed, included, and engaged in the conservation initiative. Our findings suggest local particularities in how broad-based governing agencies interpret and execute their mandates are important elements of “local context.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Natural resource management (NRM) analyses often avoid a position on environmental governance as arising from and shaped by social practices and power relations in resource conflicts, contested property rights, and political-economic strategies. I examine a northern Canadian Aboriginal community's experience of a structured yet dynamic sociocultural response to a period of social and political change. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's conception of social practice I suggest that a diffuse, or less determinist, theory of practice may help explain how power relations are interwoven throughout yet applied differentially in NRM governance. Drawing on ethnographic research on watershed management and protection of Aboriginal cultural landscapes in the Northwest Territories, I refine the notion of practical understanding to explain the ways government resource managers and community leaders challenge and negotiate one another's conceptions of environmental governance in a dual process of cooperation-conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the creation of conservation areas has been a significant and contested trend in resource peripheries around the globe, embracing the “remapping” of resource extents, tenures, and values and thereby land use patterns and regional development trajectories. Environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have emerged as key actors in the conflicts underlying this remapping, as advocates of environmental values and opponents of vested economic and political interests engaged in large-scale resource commodification. Remapping is contentious because it is inescapably normative, rendering moral judgments and alterations of property rights and the meaning of sustainable development. The outcomes of remapping are highly contingent, driven by environmental bargaining processes that describe the formal and informal interactions among ENGOs, industrial interests, different levels of government, and other actors with conflicting interests, strategies, and alliances. This article explores how conflicts were resolved in the creation of the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia's central coast. Conceptually, the stakeholder model approach to resource conflict is elaborated by emphasizing the roles of ENGOs as advocates and representatives of environmental values within scientific boundary organizations created specifically to be key facilitators in the bargaining process. The study draws on forest policy documents, records of negotiation, surveys of the region's ecological and socioeconomic structures, and field visits. The analysis reveals the Coast Information Team as the multirepresentative scientific boundary organization that developed a shared, accepted multilayered geographic information system of the region. This map provided a “shared currency” and the basis for agreement regarding (1) land use zoning at multiple scales, (2) ecosystem-based management, and (3) conservation mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is concerned with the rescaling of environmental governance, and with the social construction of environmental and governance scales in particular. With the aid of case-study data from Canada, it is argued that watersheds, as particular forms of rescaled environmental governance, have increased in popularity because of their status as boundary objects: that is, a common concept interpreted differently by different groups. The paper shows how particular features of the watershed approach-namely, their physical size and the shared discursive framings they employ ('stakeholder' and 'integration')- make the watershed concept both cohesive enough to travel among different epistemic communities, and plastic enough to be interpreted and used differently within them. As such, it is suggested that the trend of the uptake of the so-called 'watershed approach' reflects and is shaped by ideologies underpinned by three different, and occasionally competing, epistemic communities: the scientific, neoliberal, and grassroots communities. These arguments corroborate constructivist accounts of the political nature of boundary drawing, bring science into discussion on the relationship between neoliberalism and public participation, and contribute to environmental governance literatures by providing an alternative explanation for the uptake of watersheds in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental governance research has paid insufficient attention to scholarship on values even though environmental values is a well-studied field. This paper begins to unpack the relationship between values and governance with a particular focus on protected areas governance and in light of ideas such as the distinction between held values and assigned values. We report on research from four case studies in Canada, Ghana and Tanzania, each of which investigated the values, interests and objectives of people in a rural community and ways in which these are reflected, or not, in governance arrangements for an adjacent protected area. Despite very diverse contexts, two held values that were encountered in each of the four case studies could be described as responsibility toward future generations and respect for and appreciation of nature. The existence of what may be universal values does not negate the importance of culture and place: similar held values are translated, through the particular circumstances of different individuals, communities and cultures, into a diversity of assigned values, interests and positions. The attention that governance processes have given to local people's fundamental held values in three of the cases, and the ignoring of such values in the fourth, have had important implications for the relationship between community members and the adjacent protected area. We argue that systems for governance would do well to explicitly engage with values by supporting local articulation of values and by facilitating dialogue and deliberation amongst diverse stakeholders around their values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the emergence of a de-centered and privatized mode of governance in the Canadian forest sector. Using deliberative democratic theory as a descriptive foundation, it explores two key social facts that are arguably central to any historical analysis of this trend. First, increasing cultural pluralism challenges contemporary society to create new institutional arrangements that can incorporate a much larger, and often contested, array of public values into decision-making processes. Second, as management systems become more complex and science-driven, decision makers are finding it increasingly difficult to resolve issues of uncertainty and conflicting scientific evidence. De-centered forms of public participation provide important opportunities for government and industry to overcome these contemporary challenges, but certain side effects are also apparent. From the steering tactics of sponsoring agencies and corporations to the “ghettoizing” of environmental discourses, several implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the postcolonial context of Australia there has been a belated legal recognition of sui generis Indigenous rights and interests over much of the continent. However, the pervasive environmental discourse guiding resource management practices remains firmly based on ‘commonsense’ settler understandings of ‘nature’ as an external domain to be managed and/or preserved. In order to understand how this could be otherwise, this paper examines ideas about political landscape formation and the implications of the changing role of the nation-state and civil society in relation to the recognition of Indigenous political subjectivities. Taking the situation faced by Indigenous peoples in two settler societies as our vantage point, I argue here that we need to move away from assimilative environmental governance arrangements and politicise the concept of ‘nature’. This will open up spaces for the recognition and active participation of Indigenous polities in the realm of natural resource management. The paper concludes by contrasting the situation faced by Indigenous landowners in Australia's Kakadu National Park with the overtly political negotiations occurring in two northern regions of Canada. In the latter, in a process similar to what Tully calls ‘daily subconstitutional politics’, it is through the recognition of Indigenous polities in environmental governance issues that Indigenous peoples are starting to refashion their stake in the governing ideas and institutions of the broader regional, provincial and national polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May of 2000, thousands of residents of the town of Walkerton, Ontario became ill from drinking municipal water contaminated by Escherichia coli and Campylobacter jejuni bacteria. Seven people died, while many suffered debilitating injuries. A highly unusual and risk prone local hydrological regime, coupled with manure spreading on farms near municipal wells, and lax oversight by municipal water utility officials, were quickly blamed by Ontario government figures, including then premier Mike Harris. However, the scandal surrounding Walkerton''s tragedy and a subsequent public inquiry into the incident also implicated neoliberal reforms of environmental governance introduced by Harris''s government subsequent to its election in 1995. This paper examines the Walkerton incident as an important example of a “normal accident” of neoliberalism, one that can be expected from neoliberal environmental regulatory reforms arising from systematic irresponsibility in environmental governance. This irresponsibility is promulgated by an overarching hostility to any regulatory interference with free markets, as well as specific regulatory gaps that produce environmental risks. The paper also serves as a case study of the extent to which neoliberalism is constituted by environmental governance reform, and conversely, how environmental governance reform is reconfigured as part of the emergent neoliberal mode of social regulation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

What are the features of a good regulatory review process? In this paper we identify criteria for 'good process' drawn from a combined reading of the environmental justice and process literature. We then apply these criteria to a case study, assessing four versions of Canadian regulatory review: CEAA 1992, CEAA 2012, the 2017 Expert Panel report, and IAA 2019. We aim to make two contributions. First, we propose a set of 'good process' criteria that we hope can be widely applied, reflecting on complementarities and tensions that arise from combining two bodies of scholarship. Second, we identify areas where Canadian review processes have improved over time and those where significant work remains to be done. This work seeks to make a constructive intervention at a time when energy and industrial projects around the world face strong challenges in the legal, political and public domains. • 'Good process' criteria are drawn from process and environmental justice literature. • Four versions of Canadian impact assessment are assessed against the criteria. • Canada's 2019 Impact Assessment Act improves on CEAA 1992 and 2012. • Deliberation was an area of weakness across all four versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration is a proposed strategy to address super wicked environmental problems, such as climate change. Yet, understanding how it works for climate change adaptation is nascent. This research aims to advance the understanding of this by a cross-case analysis of three cases in New Brunswick, Canada. We sought to illuminate the inner workings of multiparty collaboration in the context of community climate change adaptation; identify important qualities of the process and outcomes from it, and probe their relationships; and, explore how they come about in practice. A questionnaire was sent to individuals involved in cases and key informant interviews were conducted. Results reveal case-specific variations, but more importantly, common qualities and outcomes across the cases. They offer key insight into elements which may be important in collaborative settings. These are informative for influencing the uptake of collaborative strategies in climate change adaptation and offer the opportunity to better understand their functional effectiveness.