Local Water Diversely Known: Walkerton Ontario, 2000 and After

In this narrative of the water contamination in Walkerton, Ontario, in 2000 - 02 I consider the local priorities defining good water. These vernacular understandings emphasised taste, softness, and thrift in municipal water, and they highly valued local sovereignty in matters of water quality, and solidarity as a quality of local citizenship. By using contemporaneous evidence from media reports and the judicial enquiry into the incident, I trace how the qualities of good water were redefined, and with them community standards of safety, expertise, and risk. The emphasis on community consent to vernacular water monitoring practices and the implications of this shared responsibility differ from the journalistic and judicial accounts which emphasise individual culpability

An empirical examination of the role of environmental accounting information in environmental investment decision-making

An experiment is used to investigate two important factors associated with environmental investment decision-making by managers: the regulatory regime in which the firm operates and the nature of environmental information used as a decision aid. Two regulatory regimes are examined, a command and control regulatory regime and a voluntary self-regulatory regime. Two accounting systems are contrasted, environmental management accounting and conventional management accounting, thereby providing a 2 × 2 experimental design for the empirical study. The paper considers environmental investment decision-making by different types of managers working in the Australian offshore petroleum industry. These empirical results indicate that environmental accounting information has a more significant influence on the willingness of managers to incorporate environmental considerations into investment decisions and to avoid future environmental risks, than does the type of regulatory regime