Conflits liés à la fracturation hydraulique et promotion d’innovations : étude de cas sur la gouvernance de l’eau dans le nord-est de la C.-B.

Le bassin de la rivière Horn recouvre en partie le territoire traditionnel de la Première Nation de Fort Nelson (Fort Nelson First Nation, ou FNFN) et est un site actif de fracturation hydraulique industrielle. Cette dernière a accru la demande en eau dans le bassin. Alors qu’il est généralement admis qu’une gouvernance de l’eau efficace exige la collaboration d’un vaste éventail d’acteurs, les barrières à l’inclusion des nations autochtones dans la gouvernance de l’eau existent encore en tant que legs de l’histoire coloniale du Canada. L’approche de la province relativement à la participation des nations autochtones à la gouvernance de l’eau s’est limitée, en grande partie, à des consultations, à des accommodements et à de lentes négociations de gouvernement à gouvernement. Cette approche n'a pas encore débouché sur une collaboration significative. Le partenaire de recherche, le Fort Nelson First Nation Lands Department, est impliqué de manière officielle et officieuse dans des négociations de longue date avec le gouvernement et avec l’industrie concernant divers enjeux liés à la fracturation hydraulique et à l’utilisation d’eau afférente dans le bassin versant de la rivière Horn. La résolution de cette impasse exigeait de l’innovation en matière de gouvernance, et il était évident qu’un processus d'apprentissage social serait nécessaire à l’établissement, par l’industrie, le gouvernement et la FNFN, d’une vision commune concernant les mécanismes futurs de gouvernance de l’eau

From Fracking Conflicts to Innovation Generation: a Case Study of Water Governance in Northeastern B.C.

The Horn River Basin overlaps with the Fort Nelson First Nation (FNFN) traditional territory, and has been an active site of hydraulic fracturing development. This has increased the demand for water in the Basin. While it is well established that effective water governance requires collaboration from a wide array of actors, barriers to including Indigenous Nations in water governance remain as a legacy of Canada’s colonial history. The Province’s approach to involving Indigenous Nations in water governance has largely been limited to consultation and accommodation and slow government-to-government negotiations. This approach has yet to yield significant collaboration. Research partner, the Fort Nelson First Nations (FNFN) Lands Department, has been both formally and informally engaged in ongoing negotiations with government, and with industry on various issues related to the hydraulic fracturing and water use for hydraulic fracturing in the Horn River watershed. Governance innovation was needed to break the deadlock, and it was clear that a social learning process would be necessary if industry, government, and FNFN were going to establish a shared vision for future water governance arrangements. As part of their efforts, the FNFN Lands Department began a community consultation process to develop their own FNFN water management strategy, and sought research to better understand the range of possible organizational structures that would support a more acceptable governance arrangement. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the existing conditions for social learning in the Horn River Basin, support the FNFN approach to developing a water management strategy through research on social learning and community-based planning processes, and to examine possible alternative governance models

ReFRESH: Canada-US Transboundary Water Governance and the Columbia River Treaty Renegotiations

The Columbia Basin is at a crossroads due to the potential termination of the 1964 Canada-US Columbia River Treaty. Once widely recognized as a world-leading, innovative approach to transboundary water governance, concerns are mounting about whether the renegotiation process can address the numerous issues that have emerged since 1964 and regain the Columbia River’s status as a recognized global leader in transboundary governance. In preparation for this milestone, Canadian and US agencies have begun to address what Kenney (2009) calls the “omissions of the past”: ecosystem integrity, cultural flows, indigenous values, and climate change (see Province of BC, 2013; U.S. Entity, 2013). The small body of scholarship that has characterized Canada-US transboundary water governance has primarily highlighted challenges, such as the limited power of local actors (Norman and Bakker, 2009) and the lack of resilience planning (Cosens and Williams, 2012). Questions remain about how to apply the emerging research on innovative governance approaches and water security, in light of these challenges. That is, how can governance innovation be supported in Canada’s transboundary basins, specifically in the Columbia given the critical juncture poised by the Treaty renegotiation process

Challenges for environmental governance: policy issue interdependencies might not lead to collaboration

Policy actors address complex environmental problems by engaging in multiple and often interdependent policy issues. Policy issue interdependencies imply that efforts by actors to address separate policy issues can either reinforce (‘win–win’) or counteract (‘trade-off’) each other. Thus, if interdependent issues are managed in isolation instead of being coordinated, the most effective and well-balanced solution to the underlying problem might never be realised. This study asks if reinforcing and counteracting interdependencies have different impacts on perception and collaboration. Our empirical study of collaborative water governance in the Norrström basin, Sweden, shows that policy actors often avoid collaborating when the policy issues exhibit reinforcing interdependencies. Our evidence indicates a perceived infeasibility of acting on reinforcing interdependencies. We also find that actors do not consider counteracting interdependencies (‘trade-offs’) at all when they engage in collaboration. Further, even though actors were aware of counteracting and reinforcing interdependencies, our analyses suggest they might be less aware of the former. These findings illustrate that actors either avoid each other due to policy issue interdependencies or, at best, ignore existing interdependencies when engaging in collaboration. Our study highlights the importance of problem perception in accomplishing integrated solutions to complex environmental problems, and of how understandings of different types of interdependencies shape collaboration in environmental governance

The contributions of resilience to reshaping sustainable development

We review the past decade’s widespread application of resilience science in sustainable development practice and examine whether and how resilience is reshaping this practice to better engage in complex contexts. We analyse six shifts in practice: from capitals to capacities, from objects to relations, from outcomes to processes, from closed to open systems, from generic interventions to context sensitivity, and from linear to complex causality. Innovative complexity-oriented practices have emerged, but dominant applications diverge substantially from the science, including its theoretical and methodological orientations. We highlight aspects of the six shifts that are proving challenging in practice and what is required from sustainability science.Figure 1: A graphical representation of the social-ecological systems (SES) school of resilience: a complex adaptive systems based perspective on the intertwined, multilevel and dynamic SES processes, interdependencies and relationships that shape resilience (Graphic by Jive Media Africa).Figure 2: Six interconnected and intertwined shifts move sustainable development away from commonly used linear approaches towards innovative approaches able to account for complex SES dynamics. We review the contributions and constraints of SES resilience science and its use in sustainable development to make progress across these shifts. See text and Table 1 for more details on the shifts (Graphic by Jive Media Africa).The Sida-funded GRAID program at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University; Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Swedish Research Council Vetenskapsrådet; the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.https://www.nature.com/natsustainhj2023Future Afric

Resilience in a Watershed Governance Context: A Primer

Watersheds are complex systems involving social, economic, and ecological dimensions that are constantly interacting and influencing each other, and governance of these systems involve a large and diverse cast of actors that add to the complexity and difficulty in deciding what is best for the watershed and people. Resilience thinking offers a way to understand and navigate the uncertainty, dynamics and complexity of watershed governance. This primer describes key ideas associated with resilience: more inclusive participation; building a shared understanding; inclusion of ecosystem services and functions in long-term planning; strong leadership; institutional and decision making flexibility; and, a decentralized system. This primer is an initial effort to translate the scholarly understanding of these key ideas and initiate a dialogue about their application in the context of watershed governance.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Water Economicsw, Policy and Governance Network Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Gran

Studying the complexity of change: toward an analytical framework for understanding deliberate social-ecological transformations

Faced with numerous seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges, many scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding how to actively engage and transform the existing systems holding such problems in place. Although a variety of analytical models have emerged in recent years, most emphasize either the social or ecological elements of such transformations rather than their coupled nature. To address this, first we have presented a definition of the core elements of a social-ecological system (SES) that could potentially be altered in a transformation. Second, we drew on insights about transformation from three branches of literature focused on radical change, i.e., social movements, socio-technical transitions, and social innovation, and gave consideration to the similarities and differences with the current studies by resilience scholars. Drawing on these findings, we have proposed a framework that outlines the process and phases of transformative change in an SES. Future research will be able to utilize the framework as a tool for analyzing the alteration of social-ecological feedbacks, identifying critical barriers and leverage points and assessing the outcome of social-ecological transformations

Transformative spaces in the making: key lessons from nine cases in the Global South

Creating a just and sustainable planet will require not only small changes, but also systemic transformations in how humans relate to the planet and to each other, i.e., social–ecological transformations. We suggest there is a need for collaborative environments where experimentation with new configurations of social–ecological systems can occur, and we refer to these as transformative spaces. In this paper, we seek a better understanding of how to design and enable the creation of transformative spaces in a development context. We analyse nine case studies from a previous special issue on Designing Transformative Spaces that aimed to collect examples of cutting-edge action-oriented research on transformations from the Global South. The analysis showed five design phases as being essential: Problem Definition Phase; Operationalisation Phase; Tactical Phase; Outcome Phase; and Reflection Phase. From this synthesis, we distilled five key messages that should be considered when designing research, including: (a) there are ethical dilemmas associated with creating a transformative space in a system; (b) it is important to assess the readiness of the system for change before engaging in it; (c) there is a need to balance between ‘safe’ and ‘safe-enough’ spaces for transformation; (d) convening a transformative space requires an assemblage of diverse methodological frameworks and tools; and (e) transformative spaces can act as a starting point for institutionalising transformative change. Many researchers are now engaging in transdisciplinary transformations research, and are finding themselves at the knowledge–action interface contributing to transformative space-making. We hope that by analysing experiences from across different geographies we can contribute towards better understanding of how to navigate the processes needed for the urgent global transformations that are being called for to create a more equitable and sustainable planet Earth