50 Shades of Green: An Examination of Sustainability Policy on Canadian Campuses

Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, asserts that education is one of the most effective instruments that society can employ in the effort to adopt sustainable development. This paper is a first effort to explore the degree to which Canadian institutions of higher education, including colleges and universities, have embraced this assertion. It includes the first census of the existing environment/sustainability policies and/or plans of Canadian postsecondary institutions (n = 220), and an examination of the relationships between the existence of an environment/sustainability policy/plan and the presence of other sustainability initiatives on campus. The focus on policies and plans is timely because in public institutions like colleges and universities, actions and practices are determined by policy. The results reveal a number of patterns and insights, including, for example, the influence of provincial legislation on the uptake of policies.  Koichiro Matsuura, directeur général de l’UNESCO, affirme que l’éducation est l’un des instruments les plus puissants que la société puisse utiliser dans un effort de développement durable. Ce document constitue un premier effort pour explorer à quel point les institutions canadiennes d’enseignement supérieur ont mis cette affirmation en pratique. Cet effort comprend le premier recensement des politiques actuelles sur l’environnement et le développement durable, et des plans des établissements canadiens d’enseignement postsecondaire (n = 220), ainsi qu’un examen des relations entre l’existence d’un plan/d’une politique sur l’environnement/de développement durable et la présence d’autres initiatives de développement durable sur le campus. L’accent sur les politiques et les plans se fait à point nommé parce que dans les établissements publics, tels que les collèges et les universités, les actions et les pratiques sont déterminées par la politique. Les résultats révèlent un certain nombre de motifs et de découvertes incluant, par exemple, l’influence des lois provinciales sur l’adoption des politiques

Canadian cities: climate change action and plans

The individual and collective decarbonization pathways of 26 Canadian cities are assessed by evaluating data gathered from the implementation of a unique energy model, CityinSight. Although many cities in Canada have declared a climate emergency and plans are at various stages of implementation, development path change is mostly incremental. They are at the very beginning of transforming development paths that necessitate climate action planning which embraces a systems perspective and whole-city planning. The present data reveal that there are very different starting points for Canadian cities, and considerable asymmetries between municipalities, as well as the collective impact of their plans on national targets. The latency of municipalities for on-the-ground implementation of their plans means that ongoing assessments will be required to determine the impact of efforts by cities to achieve their targets. 'Policy relevance' Cities are on the front line of implementing climate change adaptation and mitigation. Many climate researchers and practitioners have called for fundamental change and new governance arrangements to achieve even a 2°C limit to rising global temperatures. At the same time, researchers argue that Canadian cities do not have the ability to raise revenue other than through continuous development: an incentive therefore exists to keep ‘growing’ regardless of other sustainable imperatives. Transformational change is required through policy instruments and more appropriate incentives harmonized across macro-, meso-, and microlevels to create carbon-neutral development paths in the next decade. Policy harmonization, coherence, and alignment are necessary and sufficient conditions for meeting the international commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This also requires action at multiple scales with multilevel partnerships and unprecedented degrees of government collaboration and leadership

Trans-disciplinary Research: An Academic-Practitioner Partnership Effort on Investigating the Relationship between the Cooperative Model and Sustainability

This article details novel research methodology developed through a researcher-practitioner partnership and employed in a three-phase research effort that explored relationships between the co-operative model and sustainable development. Firstly, a basic understanding of the characteristics of the co-operative model was established using the co-operative principles as a framework, and their complementarity to sustainable development was examined by comparing them with sustainability theory, principles and best practices (defined through seminal journal articles on the topic). Secondly, relationships between sustainability theory and the ideas and operations of currently functioning co-operatives were investigated, namely, whether co-operatives had integrated sustainability into their organizations. Thirdly, an integrated analysis that examined the relationship between co-operatives, the co-operative principles and sustainability concepts was conducted, and output from this work was used to build a visualization (referred to as the ‘Co-operative Star’), specifically designed to communicate a synthesis of research findings to diverse audiences. This study specifically focused on co-operatives and sustainability; however, the analytical techniques developed and employed have applications for other research involving comparisons between concepts and large bodies of literature, and it is particularly useful for comparing theoretical works (such as academic literature) with texts that discuss operations and practices (such as website and reports)

Trans-disciplinary Research: An Academic-Practitioner Partnership Effort on Investigating the Relationship between the Cooperative Model and Sustainability

This article details novel research methodology developed through a researcher-practitioner partnership and employed in a three-phase research effort that explored relationships between the co-operative model and sustainable development. Firstly, a basic understanding of the characteristics of the co-operative model was established using the co-operative principles as a framework, and their complementarity to sustainable development was examined by comparing them with sustainability theory, principles and best practices (defined through seminal journal articles on the topic). Secondly, relationships between sustainability theory and the ideas and operations of currently functioning co-operatives were investigated, namely, whether co-operatives had integrated sustainability into their organizations.  Thirdly, an integrated analysis that examined the relationship between co-operatives, the co-operative principles and sustainability concepts was conducted, and output from this work was used to build a visualization (referred to as the ‘Co-operative Star’), specifically designed to communicate a synthesis of research findings to diverse audiences.  This study specifically focused on co-operatives and sustainability; however, the analytical techniques developed and employed have applications for other research involving comparisons between concepts and large bodies of literature, and it is particularly useful for comparing theoretical works (such as academic literature) with texts that discuss operations and practices (such as website and reports)