Burch - climate action - BC - three municipalities

Global Environmental Change 20 (2010) 287–297

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Transforming barriers into enablers of action on climate change: Insights from three municipal case studies in British Columbia, Canada Sarah Burch * Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, 428-2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 19 May 2009 Received in revised form 25 November 2009 Accepted 30 November 2009

Despite a wealth of financial, technical, and human capacity in Canadian cities, it remains a challenging task to transform this capacity into effective climate change adaptation and mitigation. Indeed, mitigative and adaptive capacities only represent the potential to achieve the ultimate goals of greenhouse gas and vulnerability reduction. This paper builds on previous explorations of barriers to identify powerful levers by which action can be triggered and sustained at the local level through the study of three municipalities in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada. The necessity of an explicitly articulated high-level directive, leadership that stimulates an organizational culture of innovation and collaboration, and the ‘institutionalization’ of climate change response measures within standard operating procedures emerged as crucial enablers of action. Addressing a lack of technical, financial, or human resources is less a matter of creating more capacity than of facilitating the effective use of existing resources. This facilitation depends most fundamentally on re-working the path dependent institutional structures, organizational culture and policy-making procedures that have characterized the unsuccessful patterns of climate change policy development in the past. The ultimate goal is to contribute to the ongoing efforts to adapt institutions to the complex and uncertain futures associated with a changing climate, while simultaneously embedding broader sustainability goals in long-range strategic planning. ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Climate change Barriers Sustainability Communities Governance Capacity

1. Introduction The story of climate change mitigation and adaptation in Canada is one of innumerable false starts, often piecemeal policies, and great potential. At the national level, the Canadian government is carefully choosing its steps through the ‘post-Kyoto’ implementation period, while attempting to predict the implications of the Obama administration’s climate change policy for Canadian policy.

Increasingly, the attention of policymakers and scholars is being focused on delivering measurable results, thereby revealing the need to explore the challenges inherent in implementing effective climate change response measures. This carries with it a shift in focus to the local level: the scale at which responses will be put into action (cf. Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005; Burstrom and Korhonen, 2001). The ingredients of, and barriers to, action on climate change at the local level, however, are poorly understood phenomena that deeply influence the likelihood of successful mitigation and adaptation strategies.

* Tel.: +1 778 288 4564; fax: +1 604 822 9250.

E-mail address: Sburch02@gmail.com.

0959-3780/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.11.009

One critical set of ingredients to climate change action that has garnered significant attention in recent years is that of capacity. In particular, adaptive and mitigative capacities have been argued to consist of resources such as the technological options available, financial resources, human capital, and the structure of critical institutions (for instance) (cf. Klein et al., 2007; Adger et al., 2004; Yohe, 2001). Mitigative and adaptive capacities, however, still represent only the potential to achieve the ultimate goals of greenhouse gas and vulnerability reduction. In many highly developed cities, climate change responses are nascent, and it remains a challenging task to transform capacity into policies that will yield the desired results. The current definition of mitigative and adaptive capacity1 in the climate change literature, it would

1 Adaptive capacity is commonly defined as the potential or capability of a system to adapt to climatic stimuli and their impacts (Smit et al., 2001). Mitigative capacity is defined as the ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or enhance sinks (Winkler et al., 2007, based on: Yohe, 2001). These capacities are said to be determined by: the range of technological options available, the structure of critical institutions, the stocks of human and social capital, the system’s access to riskspreading procedures, the ability of decision-makers to manage information and their credibility, and the public’s perception of the causes of the change and its likely impacts (Yohe and Tol, 2002).

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seem, does not provide a clear picture of the reality of climate change policy development and implementation in cities, and it has been argued that the presence of capacity is a necessary but not sufficient determinant of action. Missing from these common definitions are, for instance, discussions of the effects of leadership, organizational cultures, the need for locally specific and relevant information, and the inter-jurisdictional context that may fundamentally affect the success with which capacity is utilized.

Also missing is the recognition that adaptation and mitigation grow from similar institutional and developmental roots (Burch and Robinson, 2007; Burch, 2009), and thus may more fruitfully be examined in tandem. The ultimate goal, however, is to identify ways in which these barriers may be overcome, or even transformed into enablers of action.

It has been suggested that the conventional approach to identifying and overcoming barriers is weak because it does not consider whether or not barriers are inter-related or rooted in the social organization of society (Markandya and Halsnaes, 2002).

This points to the recent assertion made by sustainability scholars, who have argued that the underlying development path may matter more to the successful realization of climate change goals than was previously thought (cf. Robinson et al., 2006; Cohen et al., 1998). In particular, ‘‘transforming systems of production and consumption poses challenges: innovation studies identify mutually reinforcing processes that tend to channel development along trajectories’’ (Seyfang and Smith, 2007, referring to: Russell and Williams, 2002; Dosi, 1982; Nelson and Winter, 1982). These trajectories are deeply imbued with inertia, and have clearly yielded unsustainable patterns of development (cf. United Nations, 2008; IPCC, 2007).

Municipalities in Canada have the potential to create sustainable communities through the critical functions of land use planning, utility provision, transportation infrastructure development, and waste management, but are fundamentally characterized by the path dependency alluded to above. The current municipal structure and function has embedded in it a host of barriers to action that have influenced the successful pursuit of climate change action. Structural, operational, cultural, and contextual factors (for instance) can serve to enable or inhibit the translation of capacity into action. Many of these factors are not independent phenomena, but rather are the interwoven products of the underlying development path. Transforming barriers into enablers requires us to: (1) identify locally specific sources of path dependency (whereby alternatives become increasingly less likely as learning accumulates and irreversible choices are made); (2) strategically challenge aspects of the city’s development path; and (3) institutionalize sustainable patterns of action.

For the purposes of this paper, climate change mitigation is defined as actions that either reduce the emission of greenhouse gas emissions or enhance carbon sinks. Adaptation, in contrast, refers to efforts to reduce the severity of climate change impacts: addressing the effects of climate change rather than the causes.

Finally, sustainability refers to the intersection of ecological, economic, and social imperatives, and represents a mode of development that does not favour current priorities over the wellbeing of future generations. A sustainable development path is taken to be one that is both low-carbon and resilient. Synergies and trade-offs occur between adaptation and mitigation (Burch and Robinson, 2007; Dang et al., 2003; Beg et al., 2002), thereby revealing the need for an integrated approach to climate change responses (such as the one taken here).

This paper contributes a new level of analysis, building earlier work (Burch, 2009), which employs data gathered in three municipalities to identify levels of capacity and critical barriers to action on climate change. Through a blend of theory and empirical data collected in three case studies, this paper seeks to

accomplish three goals that have not been addressed in previous analyses of this data. First, the story is told of the translation of capacity into action in these three cities, summarizing the key barriers to this process. Second, this paper identifies potentially powerful levers by which barriers to action may be transformed into enablers of it, thereby triggering and sustaining action at the local level. Third, a five-step generalizable process is suggested that may be used to address path dependency and shift development paths in cities, with the goal of more successfully stimulating action. This process reveals the specific actions that are necessary for producing effective local climate change responses, as we learn lessons that may be applied to cities around the world. Although the methodology that was followed during the process of interview administration and document analysis will be presented in full later in this paper, the sections that follow will summarize the story of climate change capacity and action in the communities of Delta, the District of North Vancouver, and the City of Vancouver.

2. Background: capacity and action in three cities Although this paper focuses on the challenge of overcoming barriers to action on climate change, the data collected for this study was also used to evaluate the levels of capacity in the three Canadian municipalities under study, and to identify the key barriers at play in each context (Burch, 2009). The findings of earlier work are summarized below, in order to provide the foundation upon which strategies for overcoming barriers can be explored.

Canadian cities are richly endowed with the resources required to respond effectively to climate change, especially if compared to those in developing countries, which may be burdened by public health crises, illegitimate decision-making authority, and poverty.

Even relative to many other cities in the developed world, the three cities chosen for this study (see Fig. 1) possess significant institutional, financial, and technical resources. The three cases all share similar systems of legitimate governance, strong economies, and highly educated populations—all of which are determinants of adaptive and mitigative capacities, according to the most prevalent definitions of these concepts (see above). In accordance with a re-worked definition of these terms, it can be argued that these cities possess similar stores of response capacity, or the broad, development-related resources that are required for a group to respond to any risk, including climate change (see Burch and Robinson, 2007; Burch, 2009).

These municipalities have followed very different paths with regard to climate change, leading to dramatically different levels of action on mitigation and adaptation (Burch, 2009). The sections that follow will address levels of capacity and action in Delta first, followed by the District of North Vancouver and the City of Vancouver.

Delta, a low-lying community of 99,000 people surrounded on three sides by water, is comprised of a mix of agricultural, suburban-style residential development, and industrial operations. Generally speaking, Delta has access to the same range of technical options available to other municipalities in the region, and decision-making authority is also structured similarly (based on the British Columbia Local Government Act). The only significant area of divergence, with regard to capacity, pertains to financial resources: because of very highly valued property, the City of Vancouver and the District of North Vancouver possess slightly greater financial resources per capita than Delta. As discussed in greater detail later in this paper, however, budgetary resources appear to be less important than the clear articulation of climate change as a municipal priority. In other words, the superficial rhetoric is one of the financial deficiencies, but the reality is highly contingent on priority setting and job descriptions.

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Fig. 1. Case study areas in the Metro Vancouver Region of British Columbia, Canada. Source: Metro Vancouver’s Vital Signs (2009); inset adapted from Geology.com (2007).

Despite similarities in capacity, however, climate change mitigation (and to a lesser extent, adaptation) remains relatively new additions to Delta’s policy repertoire. Matters related to the environment and sustainability were considered in Delta’s Official Community Plan and in the regional Liveable Region Strategic Plan, but no well-defined and practical climate change policies, geared towards either corporate or community emissions, had been developed until 2007, when the Corporation of Delta developed a nine-part climate change initiative geared towards their corporate operations. Management of floods, natural areas, staff training and community education were also addressed in the report, although without a high level of specificity in terms of budget and work plan.

No plans had been designed to address GHG emissions from community sources (such as residential buildings and transportation), but rather the focus had been exclusively on corporate (or municipal operations) emissions. So, although most individuals interviewed in Delta repeatedly drew attention to the policies and initiatives introduced through the climate change strategy, the general consensus appeared to be that climate change responses in Delta are still very much in the planning stages. Nevertheless, new methods of inter-departmental collaboration have been established in order to address the exceedingly complex and uncertain problems associated with GHG reduction and vulnerability to impacts.

The District of North Vancouver is home to approximately 86,000 residents, in addition to the Capilano and Seymour reservoirs, and covers a vast 160 km2 ranging from 0 to 1400 m

above sea-level (District of North Vancouver, 2008). In 2004, a short time before the beginning of this study, the District of North Vancouver City Council officially adopted the Natural Step Framework2 in order to pursue a mandate of sustainability. In the 4 years that followed, the District of North Vancouver has focused on developing a common definition of sustainability that is shared by all divisions and individuals within the municipal organization. This was paired with the pursuit of corporate sustainability strategies, with very little explicit reference to GHG reduction. Plans for the future abound, however, the municipality is intending to revise its Official Community Plan, the touchstone of its corporate policy and procedure, which was last revised in 1991 (District of North Vancouver, 1991), create a green building strategy by 2010, and develop a climate change action plan to be completed by 2009. Despite these promising steps, climate change actions have focused almost entirely on the internal activities of the municipal government, rather than on the emissions produced by the broader community.

With a population of approximately 615,000 people, the City of Vancouver is the urban core of a region whose population exceeds 2,000,000. Like Delta and the DNV, the city is surrounded by water on three sides, and is the most densely populated region in British Columbia. Municipal government in Vancouver is unusual for the 2 The framework was developed in Sweden in 1989, and claims to provide a ‘science-based definition of sustainability’ and a ‘practical strategic planning framework’ for achieving sustainability (The Natural Step, 2008).

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region, in that three parties (with no ofďŹ cial links to the party system at the provincial and federal levels) dominate municipal politics. Furthermore, the City of Vancouver is the only municipality in the region that was granted its own local government Charter by the province, and thus exercises considerably more power than Delta and the District of North Vancouver over issues such as taxation and building codes (Province of British Columbia, 2009).

In July of 2007, the City of Vancouver began to consider longrange GHG planning and the issue of carbon neutrality, and the Council adopted targets to reduce community GHG emissions by 33% below 2006 levels by 2030 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 (City of Vancouver, 2007a). In order to achieve these targets, the City of Vancouver has implemented (or is planning to implement) a range of projects that may signiďŹ cantly affect long-term emissions trajectories. These initiatives are focused on facilitating the creation of environmentally sustainable density in the city, and are accompanied by increased spending on public transit throughout the region, retroďŹ ts of existing commercial, residential, and institutional buildings for energy efďŹ ciency, and enhanced provision of biodiesel fuel blends throughout the city. Integrating climate change goals into a long-range strategic vision for sustainability is a critical next step that the City of Vancouver has yet to take.

Although cities, like ďŹ rms, experience economies of scale with regard to the provision of services and the programs implemented to deal with issues like energy use, the City of Vancouver also faces parallel challenges related to the signiďŹ cantly greater quantity of emissions that it must address, its location as a hub for commuter trafďŹ c (without reaping the beneďŹ ts of these commuters contributing property taxes to the city’s coffers), a signiďŹ cant population earning incomes far below the regional average, and the inexibility of its urban design resulting from highly valued and intensely developed urban spaces. Thus, it can be argued that while the City of Vancouver possesses greater ďŹ nancial resources in an absolute sense than the municipalities of Delta and the District of North Vancouver, it is faced with barriers to climate change action not experienced by its suburban counterparts (see Table 1).

Climate change action at higher levels of government has provided a highly inuential stimulus for municipal action on climate change in British Columbia. Although previous efforts had been made to address climate change, such as with Weather, Climate, and the Future: BC’s Plan (Province of British Columbia, 2004), these efforts were not supported by stringent, legislated, targets or strategies. The most recent energy plan, however, began to signal a substantial shift in provincial energy and climate change policy (Ministry of Energy Mines and Petroleum Resources, 2007).

Soon after the release of the Energy Plan, the Province of British Columbia enacted legally binding short- and long-term GHG reduction targets, a comprehensive revenue-neutral carbon tax, a

Table 1 General indicators of response capacity for the Corporation of Delta, the District of North Vancouver, and the City of Vancouver.

Response capacity

Annual municipal taxes per capita % of population post-secondary degree or diploma % of total population employed by municipality Median household income a b c d e

Delta

DNV

Vancouver

$823a 62%b

$769a 77%b

$986a 70%b

0.6%c

0.6%c

1.55%d

$72,594e

$77,032e

$47,299e

Source: Metro Vancouver (2008).

Source: Metro Vancouver (2009).

Source: Civicinfo BC (2009).

Source: Employment (City of Vancouver, 2009a).

Source: City of Vancouver (2007b).

cap and trade system for large emitters, vehicle emissions standards, industrial emissions standards, and a new Green Building Code (Province of British Columbia, 2007, 2008). Taken together, these initiatives, which occurred during the time of this study, represent a dramatic shift in provincial context within which BC municipalities are functioning (Dusyk et al., 2009). At the regional level, a process began in 2008 by which the regional Liveable Region Sustainability Plan is being re-written (now entitled the Regional Growth Strategy) to explicitly address, among other issues, the challenge of climate change.

This brief summary shows that these three cities, despite having relatively similar levels of the resources needed to respond to climate change, have nevertheless followed very different paths with regard to climate change action (for more detail, see Burch, 2009). The sections that follow will introduce the methods followed in this research, draw upon recent scholarly advances to explore the means by which these paths can be intentionally shifted, and barriers transformed into enablers of the translation of capacity into action, and present the empirical ďŹ ndings that resulted from testing this theory in the municipal context.

3. Methods The data gathered for this study was analyzed with multiple goals in mind. The ďŹ rst was to explore the levels of response, mitigative, and adaptive capacity in each of the three municipalities under study, as well as the level and type of action on climate change. The second was to identify the most important barriers at play in each context, which might inuence the extent to which capacity is translated in to action (Burch, 2009). The ďŹ nal goal, presented in this paper, was to reveal strategies that might facilitate the transformation of barriers into enablers of action, and to develop a practical process that municipalities can follow to ensure this transformation occurs.

Preliminary policy document analysis was carried out for each city, in order to gain a sense of the context of climate change response efforts. Meeting transcripts, council reports, internal memoranda, ofďŹ cial government documents, and media reports were gathered to supplement interview data. In all cases, documents were not retrieved for years preceding 1990, since this was found to be the approximate time during which climate change and sustainable development began to be substantially addressed in the Lower Mainland. Climate change and sustainability policy documents were analyzed with the goal of determining: the temporal scale, the spatial scale, the central adaptive or mitigative issues of interest, the responsible parties, and the level of detail or likelihood of implementation.

A series of semi-structured elite interviews3 (between 1 and 2.5 h in length) were carried out in each of the three case study areas. Participants were invited on the basis of three criteria: employment with one of the municipalities under study, involvement in the creation or implementation of climate change (or sustainability) policy in the city, and the occupation of a position in the organizational structure that pertains directly to aspects of climate change mitigation or adaptation (even if not involved directly in climate change policy development). Local incumbent politicians, heads of municipal departments (such as engineering and planning), and climate change working group team members were interviewed. Participants were contacted by email using a

3 Sample size of semi-structured interviews: in Delta (total n = 12): 3 politicians, 3 planners, 2 engineers, 4 environmental services/operations staff; in the District of North Vancouver (total n = 13): 4 politicians, 3 planners, 2 engineers, 1 administrator, 3 environmental services/operations staff; in the City of Vancouver (total n = 11): 3 politicians, 1 planner, 2 engineers, 4 Sustainability Group staff, 1 administrator, Metro Vancouver: 3 engineers, 2 planners. Total n for study = 41.

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standardized letter of invitation. They were told about the full nature of the study, the other cases involved, and why they were selected for participation. Approximately 95% of the individuals who were contacted for interviews participated in the study.

Interviewees were told that their responses would remain confidential, and their colleagues would not be aware of their participation in the study. In addition, un-structured interviews took place throughout the study period as the result of parallel research taking place in two of the three case studies (cf. Sheppard et al., 2008). The result was an extended network of planners, engineers, and politicians who were approached in order to gather together insights into the design and implementation of climate change policy in the cases under study.

The interviews followed a basic script, which contained questions pertaining to capacity, past or planned climate change action, the success/failure of these actions, organizational culture, structure, and the broader inter-jurisdictional context (including both explicit and implicit questions that addressed strategies for overcoming barriers). Notes were taken during and following each interview, and interviews were recorded with the permission of the participant. Interviews were coded and analyzed (using the qualitative analysis software ATLAS TI) according to a scheme which identified points made about capacity (including financial, human, and technical capacity), the internal function of civic government (such as organizational structure and organizational culture), extra-institutional matters (such as jurisdictional issues, legislation and regulation, and external policy context), leadership (both political and technical), and the values, attitudes, and knowledge of each city’s public. The literature explored below helped to frame the questions that were asked of interviewees, and informed the coding structure that was later used to analyze the responses. Nevertheless, this coding structure evolved as analysis progressed, in order to reflect the new information provided by participants. As such, a typology of barriers, and the specific strategies for overcoming these barriers (discussed below), were created through a blend of inductive and deductive methods. This ensured that the interviews were guided by the state of the art in the literature, while accounting for novel insights and contextual idiosyncrasies that emerged as data was gathered and processed.

4. Theories exploring the stimulation of local climate change action and development path transformations Effective and efficient action in response to climate change at the local level has faced many obstacles in Canada, despite increasing levels of awareness of the causes and potential impacts of this complex and uncertain phenomenon (Sheppard et al., 2008).

Many of these obstacles are institutional in origin, and include regulatory, structural, behavioural, cultural, and contextual factors (Burch, 2009). The section that follows will introduce the central factors that may inhibit action, and build on this to draw together the literatures that illuminate strategies that can be used to overcome these barriers and stimulate action.

Regulatory barriers include the policy tools that the municipality has at its disposal (such as its Official Community Plan and system of bylaws) as well as interactions between multiple levels of government (Burch, 2009). Schipper and Pelling (2006) suggest that a supportive institutional and policy environment at the state and international level can enable local adaptation. This may be even more the case with mitigation, where, in Canada, vehicle efficiency standards and building codes are determined at the provincial and federal levels. As a result, municipalities are often not empowered to implement critical climate change mitigation strategies, and must instead wait for key pieces of legislation to pass at higher levels of government. Regulatory programs should employ cost effective tools, foster creativity in achieving solutions,

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match the scale of the ecosystem and spillover effects they are meant to govern, and must have comprehensive, adaptive, and incentive-based regulatory design (Schneider et al., 2000).

Structural or operational barriers, on the other hand, arise from, for instance, the location of climate change and/or sustainability in the organizational hierarchy, the job descriptions that set priorities and performance criteria for individuals, and the organizational mechanisms for facilitating inter-departmental collaboration (Burch, 2009). Climate change policy scholars have argued that adaptation is likely to be implemented only if it is consistent with programs designed to cope with non-climatic stresses (Yohe, 2001) and this claim has been echoed on the mitigation side (O’Riordan et al., 1998). Behavioural barriers are especially critical to local action; they generally incorporate both the personalities and leadership capabilities of individuals in critical positions within the municipality, and the institutional cultures of various groups within the institution and municipal departments (Burch, 2009). Contemporary changes in policy and behaviour of societal sectors are often induced by coercion, voluntary agreements, societal pressure, financial stimuli, and market stimuli (Kok et al., 2000) but although these forces have been found to stimulate changes, it is not clear that, without facilitation, the altered behaviour will be sustained or become the dominant mode of action. The remaining category of barriers to local action includes the context within which the municipality is functioning (such as the values and priorities of the public, the strength and resiliency of the economic system, national and global security, and even the frequency and severity of climatic events), and the capacity that the community possesses to respond to climate change impacts and causes (including human, financial, and technical capital) (Burch, 2009).

Some in the climate change field have begun to suggest that best way to deal with the complex problem of climate change is to explore links between it and other issues, helping to reveal cobenefits and no-regrets options (Van Asselt et al., 2005). This indicates the need for a shift in thinking that considers the system (or development path) as a whole, and the complexities and uncertainties therein. This mode of thinking is what lies behind the development of socio-technical system theory.

Growing out of the study of technological innovation and diffusion, socio-technical system theory seeks to place technologies within the universe of rules and forces that influence both their use and evolution (see for example: Geels and Schot, 2007; Smith et al., 2005; Berkhout, 2002). This ‘universe’ is a system that (as we shall see) may be deeply resistant to change, and yet fundamentally shapes the emissions trajectories that drive climate change.

The ‘deep structure’ of socio-technical systems is provided by socio-technical regimes: semi-coherent sets of rules or a linked patchwork of other rule regimes (such as the purely technical rule regime, the user and market regime, and the policy regime), whose rules are aligned in some way with each other (Geels, 2004; Berkhout, 2002; Rip and Kemp, 1998). Systems of regimes are slow to change and must evolve in an incremental and cumulative fashion, or through a gradual and smooth re-orientation of the system (Berkhout, 2002). That ‘slowness to change’ includes the fact that it is often very unlikely that a socio-technical regime will suffer a shock so great that the entire system is re-oriented towards an entirely different path of institution/actor/technology relations.

The source of change in these systems is often instead induced through policy instruments or changes in cost distributions (Grubb et al., 2002; Grubler, 2000), and is more likely to occur at the ‘niche’ level (Seyfang and Smith, 2007). Niches are protected spaces in which a radical novelty can develop, unhindered by the market forces and socio-cultural rules that typically provide relative stability in the broader socio-technical system (Geels, 2004). Rules in these niches are less certain, providing an opportunity for

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intentional deviation from the underlying path (Garud and Karnøe, 2003). Finally, regimes exist within the broader context of sociotechnical landscapes, and consist of macro economic, political, and cultural trajectories (Geels and Schot, 2007). Landscapes are the exogenous context of socio-technical regimes, and are beyond the direct control of actors (Geels, 2004). This ‘multi-level perspective’ suggests that socio-technical development path transitions occur as the result of alignments between changes in each of these three levels (niches, regime, and landscapes), shifting pressures on the regimes, and adaptation to these pressures (Geels and Schot, 2007; Smith et al., 2005).

It is important to note that strong shocks to the system do provide critical opportunities for path re-orientation and fundamental institutional change; in other words, institutional change follows a pattern of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (Krasner, 1989; Collier and Collier, 1991). Nevertheless, the seeds for a particular (i.e. sustainable, or climate change resilient) path must be planted prior to the shock in order for that path to emerge during the readjustment period that follows the shock (Pierson, 2004). For this reason, incremental change and institutionalization of climate change policy responses in the three municipalities under study may play a critical role if they are to devise, for instance, more economically and environmentally resilient patterns of behaviour following the economic crisis which began in 2008.

The ‘techno-economic’ paradigm described above forges links between theories of technological evolution and theories of path dependency and structural and institutional change (Andersen, 1998). This, more hybrid, theory acknowledges the fact that interwoven systems of rules surround clusters of technologies that are themselves deeply embedded in institutional cultures, so the history of that embedding culture becomes extremely important (Arthur, 1989). In other words, the institutional and cultural contexts within which innovation occurs are of equal importance to the technologies themselves and represent path dependent trajectories which are not easily re-oriented. Challenges to reorientation may be due to inter-relatedness (such as individual technologies that depend on the existence of a host of other technologies to function effectively), as well as learning effects and economies of scale (Berkhout, 2002).

The causes of path dependency, and thus the ability to overcome the challenges of inertia, reveal the importance of providing opportunities for iterative, collaborative partnerships

between municipal practitioners and climate change response experts. For change to occur that addresses a highly complex and pervasive issue like climate change, it ‘‘must be recognized as necessary, feasible, and advantageous to a broader range of actors and institutions’’ than are involved in traditional decision-making (Berkhout, 2002). Participatory processes are an important means by which these claims of feasibility and advantageousness may be established, with the goal of overcoming or adapting to path dependent social and institutional processes.

This discussion of barriers, the strategies that can be employed to overcome them, and the power of path dependency, sets the stage for the case studies that follow. With these interdisciplinary insights in mind, I will present the empirical ďŹ ndings, pertaining speciďŹ cally to overcoming barriers to action, gathered from the study of climate change action in three British Columbia cities.

Semi-structured interviews in the three case study communities revealed a wide variety of strategies that may stimulate action in response to climate change. The sections that follow will discuss those strategies that interviewees indicated were the most important, or the most frequently mentioned in each city.

Following this is an exploration of the ways that these ďŹ ndings can be utilized to formulate integrated, long-term strategies that may serve to fundamentally shift unsustainable development paths in these, and other, communities.

5. Testing theory in the municipal context: strategies for overcoming barriers to action 5.1. Organizational culture and effective leadership Table 2 introduces the breadth of strategies that interviewees suggested could help to overcome cultural/behavioural barriers.

Following this table is a discussion of the most critical strategies in this regard, as indicated by municipal staff and politicians.

Two of the most frequently mentioned barriers to climate change action included conicting cultures between the ‘operations’ (or outside workers—such as those municipal employees who are responsible for maintenance of streets, waste removal, and water distribution) staff and those who are housed at the City Hall (including planners, engineers, and human resources and ďŹ nance staff, for instance), and the absence of strong leadership, both technical and political. Conversely, in cases where action was

Table 2 Strategies for overcoming cultural/behavioural barriers raised by interviewees in the City of Vancouver, the Corporation of Delta, and the District of North Vancouver.

Cultural/behavioural DeďŹ nition: the relationships between individuals in various critical positions within the municipality, their personalities, and the collective ethos and customs at play within the organization Enthusiasm for climate change action at the provincial level pushes, rather than constrains, climate change action at the local level and thus is a critical ingredient of local climate change action Competition between municipalities can stimulate action, and should be harnessed Municipalities should build buy-in by employing a careful incremental approach to teaching a new way of doing things A very casual workshop approach to new climate change policy would help to minimize the educational/cultural differences between operations and planning/Hall staff Municipalities must exploit the opportunity for change as the current demographic shift continues The skills and personality of a climate change policy champion matter more than the location of climate change/sustainability in the organizational hierarchy Local leadership is especially important because of the direct link between local politicians and preferences/daily lives of constituents Municipalities should drive a shift in attitudes from focus on short-term beneďŹ ts and costs to a longer-term perspective Strong leadership from the Chief Administrative OfďŹ cer (or equivalent) is critical because of the direct link to the staff, must be willing to address inefďŹ ciencies and redundancies within the organization A strong mayor, who is willing to overcome special interests, is essential to effective climate change policy implementation Political leaders must be willing to weigh the educated voice differently from the uneducated voice in public debate over issues Spirit of collaboration among departments and individuals must be produced through intentional hiring practices New hires are not yet ‘institutionalized’ and so may be more innovative; this innovation should be intentionally harnessed The Chief Administrative OfďŹ cer (or equivalent) can institute collaboration among departments, which eventually becomes habit Formalized systems of decision-making are not nearly as important as individuals, their personalities, and the timing of new measures/initiatives Must hire, stimulate, and support champion personalities Respect for the skills and contributions of other departments/individuals fosters collaboration

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successful (such with certain programs in the City of Vancouver), a culture of collaboration and mutual respect, as well as strong and informed leadership were cited as two of the most critical facilitating factors. Organizational culture and leadership are thus elements of the behavioural ethos of municipal institutions that may act as either barriers or enablers of action, and are deeply intertwined. Some have argued, for instance, that the relationship between leadership and culture is as follows: a leader must impose their own values and assumptions upon the organization, leading to a culture (if successful) that deďŹ nes for future generations both the types of leadership and core values that are deemed acceptable (Schein, 2004). In other words, leadership can stimulate a path shift, but the emerging dominant form of organizational culture will remain dominant until it becomes ill-adapted to changing external conditions. New realities with regard to resource scarcity, climate change, and the fragile global economy are just a few of the external conditions that have rendered the previous models of municipal leadership and organizational culture incongruous with the scale of change required to follow a sustainable development path.

This relationship between leadership and culture is demonstrated in the case of the City of Vancouver, in which a culture of innovation and collaboration has been intentionally nurtured within the planning department. According to the values of a persuasive leader within the planning department, new staff were hired who felt similarly about the importance of inter-departmental collaboration (such as between planners and engineers) and modern planning principles (including a ‘city-building’ approach rather than neighbourhood focus, and the desirability of environmentally sustainable density). Interviewees indicated that these newly hired planners represented a sea-change in the culture of the planning department, and led directly to initiatives geared towards emissions reduction, resiliency, and energy efďŹ ciency.

This effectively caused development proposals to be viewed through a sustainability ‘lens’ while, simultaneously, new policies are created and vetted by utilizing the expertise of an interdisciplinary team of municipal staff. In the long run, strong leadership (on the part of a senior planner, in this case) may have contributed to a new ‘path’ in the City of Vancouver: one that is

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highly responsive to the challenges of a changing climate. In the District of Vancouver, in contrast, the Natural Step Framework represents an important opportunity to embed climate change concerns within a sustainability-oriented transformation of the municipality but is unlikely to yield such results without strong leadership and speciďŹ c action plans.

A further role that leadership plays in determining the success of climate change responses is through the power of explicit policy directives that articulate climate change mitigation and adaptation as a municipal priority. Interviewees in all three municipalities raised this as an integral component of their perceived ‘permission’ to be innovative with regard to climate change. In both Delta and the District of North Vancouver, interviewees expressed fear that the current enthusiastic rhetoric of the politicians for climate change action was simply a politically savvy response to the public mood, and thus subject to a sudden shift in that mood. Furthermore, as mentioned previously, some staff were not convinced that political statements in support of climate change action were backed by the willingness to make the difďŹ cult decisions that are required to make real progress towards climate change goals. This created hesitancy and scepticism within the municipalities, which may have hindered the development and implementation of climate change response plans.

5.2. Inter-jurisdictional context Table 3 presents the breadth of strategies for overcoming regulatory/legislative barriers that were proposed by interviewees.

The most frequently mentioned strategies, or those that were considered to be the most critical, are discussed below.

A common refrain during the interviews in all three cities was that of frustration with the inconsistencies between municipal, regional, provincial, and federal approaches (or lack thereof) to climate change. For instance, in Delta, a climate change mitigation plan was developed in 2007 to tackle the relatively insigniďŹ cant corporate emissions, while the province of British Columbia was simultaneously proposing a major infrastructure plan that would very likely cause transportation-related emissions to increase dramatically. Interviewees communicated a strong sense of

Table 3 Strategies for overcoming regulatory/legislative barriers, as proposed by interviewees in the three case study municipalities.

Regulatory/legislative DeďŹ nition: the nature of the policy tools that the municipality has at its disposal and the interactions between multiple levels of government Province can impose higher standards for building bylaws, which municipalities must match Province must abide by the Regional Growth Strategy in order to support effective regional planning The Union of British Columbia Municipalities can pass a resolution allowing additional in camera meetings so that councillors may learn about a new issue in a non-threatening environment Greenhouse gas reduction targets are both symbolically and pragmatically important tools for municipalities, and thus must be set in order to stimulate coherent and ambitious climate change action Regional planning should match density with transportation needs, rather than piecemeal local planning Municipalities should utilize existing tools in the provincial Community Charter and the Local Government Act (such as development permit areas and development cost charges) to force an increase in green building Province can give a substantial port of the provincial Carbon Tax to municipalities to support local action Provincial and Federal government must set standards for industrial emissions so that these are harmonized for the region Higher levels of government should take on the expensive role of commissioning new research The federal government has, and should play, a strong role in removing market barriers to green technologies A long-range strategic plan for sustainability may help to ensure that goals between planners and engineers are consistent The OfďŹ cial Community Plan is the single most important expression of the community, so this must be changed if evolution is to occur Municipalities must design and implement mix of mandatory and voluntary climate change response measures Municipalities should create a policy basis upon which to force developers to comply with green standards Bringing the operations staff at the ground-level of a policy innovation is not enough—they must be supported by clear instructions and sufďŹ cient budget The single most powerful regulatory instrument at any level of government, with regard to climate change, is land use zoning; the potential of this as an integral element of successful climate change policy should be explored Inventory of climate change/sustainability actions helps to identify which groups are succeeding, which are not, and what is the best strategy for moving forward New policies must follow a phased approach during which, in the early phases, there are ‘easy wins’ that buoy conďŹ dence and enthusiasm A comprehensive sustainability framework is an intentional attempt to overcome the silos between operations and the City Hall/planning department in order to have everyone understanding sustainability similarly and working towards the same goals

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disillusionment with regard to this inconsistency, since it was the leadership of the province that had driven many municipalities to commit to carbon neutrality (in their own operations) and the creation of climate change action plans. Some interviewees go so far as to suggest that facilitating improved collaboration between municipalities and the province in the future would require binding agreements that require the province to avoid the implementation of policies that directly contradict previously stated climate change goals. Although initiatives such as the revenue-neutral carbon tax, implemented in 2008, are steps towards ensuring that the province is providing ďŹ rm leadership that stimulates responses in British Columbian municipalities, many more must be taken before emissions are successfully brought under control.

Planning for climate change at the regional level is one way in which many of the barriers related to inter-jurisdictional context may be transformed into enablers of action. After all, the Metro Vancouver region is a highly interconnected web of urban cores and suburban peripheries, linked with industrial and agricultural land. Although, in the words of one senior administrator in the City of Vancouver ‘‘the single most powerful regulatory instrument at any level of government is land use zoning,’’ the effectiveness of this tool is severely hampered by a lack of coordination among the interdependent municipalities of the Metro Vancouver region. The region, originally formed to ensure the adequate provision of utilities and services, is not imbued with any formal powers akin to a municipality (such as taxation), but the emissions trajectories of the Metro Vancouver municipalities are nevertheless more likely to be fundamentally shifted if the region is following a cohesive climate change plan. Metro Vancouver has recently developed an Air Quality Management Plan (Metro Vancouver, 2005) that begins to address these concerns, and is currently undertaking a revision of the Liveable Region Strategic Plan. It remains to be seen, however, whether or not these plans will succeed in addressing climate change more holistically—by addressing vulnerabilities to impacts as well as the development paths that have given rise to current emissions levels.

5.3. Institutionalization of long-term action Table 4 summarizes the strategies for overcoming structural/ operational barriers (according to the typology introduced above) that were raised by interviewees in the three case study municipalities.

Evidence from the literature suggests that adaptation is likely to be implemented only if it is consistent with programs designed to cope with non-climatic stresses (Yohe, 2001) and that effective mitigation actions are very likely to be those that are most fully integrated into more general policy strategies (O’Riordan et al.,

1998). In other words, isolating climate change responses in an organizational or policy sense (for instance, by leaving the entirety of climate action to a small group of specialists without the buy-in throughout the range of municipal departments) is unlikely to yield the depth or scale of transformation required to produce truly resilient, carbon neutral communities. This integration, however, is not just a matter of encouraging the emergence of champions throughout the organization (which is necessary during the initial stages of local climate change action). Instead, climate change action must eventually become more independent of the vagaries of personality and political will that may render it fragile in the long run. The interviewee responses summarized above indicate that few municipal employees have the time or inclination to add additional complex tasks to already over-burdened staff, making ingenuity and innovation rare (but invaluable) exceptions to the daily reality of administering cities. Climate change mitigation and adaptation must thus become part of the job descriptions and standard operating procedures of municipal employees, rather than ‘extras’ that are pursued if time and budget allow. In the event of a system-wide shock, such as that experienced during the ďŹ nancial crisis of 2008–2009, this institutionalization of climate change action becomes especially critical. Without prior experience in addressing greenhouse gas reductions and adaptation, municipalities will be less likely to have the tools to produce a more sustainable development path following a major step-change or system readjustment.

The District of North Vancouver has taken the ďŹ rst steps towards institutionalizing climate change action in daily procedures, through the creation of a ‘sustainability ďŹ lter.’ This ďŹ lter is intended to subject new capital expenditure proposals to an additional set of criteria related to environmental sustainability.

The use of this tool has yet to be incorporated throughout the District’s operations, however, and remains in the early stages of implementation. In Vancouver, the ‘ecodensity’ program was developed to stimulate environmentally sustainable density in various locations throughout the city. The ďŹ rst two actions related to this program that were implemented by the City of Vancouver were: to require that applications for re-zoning include plans for buildings that meet a minimum LEEDTM Silver standard of green building (which includes standards for energy performance, water efďŹ ciency, and storm water use); to require re-zonings on sites larger than two acres to meet an additional set of sustainability measures (City of Vancouver, 2009b). These actions clearly target routines surrounding the approval of development plans in a way that institutionalizes sustainability and gears the city towards a development pathway that consumes and wastes less energy.

Delta’s approach to climate change remains targeted at speciďŹ c initiatives (such as ‘greening’ the eet) rather than transforming operations towards a fundamentally lower emissions pathway.

Table 4 Strategies for overcoming structural/operational barriers, proposed by interviewees in the City of Vancouver, the Corporation of Delta, and the District of North Vancouver.

Structural/operational DeďŹ nition: features of the organization’s structures and procedures that inuence day-to-day activities and long-term policy direction

Locating climate change in the Mayor’s ofďŹ ce (rather than a less powerful branch of the organizational hierarchy) lends the issue legitimacy and gravitas Party system can stimulate healthy competition and innovation among politicians In some cases, absence of political parties may allow for fruitful non-partisan decision-making Staff may do work ‘under the radar’ so as to continue it over the long term and not be susceptible to politics and public perceptions Municipal politicians have a closer link to technical staff (when compared to provincial politicians), who know the community intimately, and thus can provide stronger advice Hierarchical system results in a council have strong inuence on action; this should be harnessed to stimulate action Integrating climate change throughout the organizational hierarchy generates buy-in and facilitates the creation of more effective climate change policy A devoted liaison in operations should work directly with the City Hall/planning department to enhance communication and strengthen the resulting policy choices Mapping out all individuals’ roles may help to address redundancies and create synergies Spirit of collaboration among departments and individuals must be reinforced through the organizational structure

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6. Transforming development paths to produce a robust program of local climate change action As revealed above and discussed elsewhere, neither the most critical barriers, nor the frequently cited strategies for overcoming them, are related to a dearth of capacity (in the traditional sense, of resources required to respond to a risk) (Burch, 2009).

Instead, the core issue appears to be facilitating the translation of existing capacity into action. The data presented here paired with the literatures focused on institutional and socio-technical path dependency suggests that this facilitation depends most fundamentally on re-working the path dependent institutional structures, organizational culture and policy-making procedures that have characterized the unsuccessful patterns (or absence) of climate change policy development in the past. Harnessing the insights gathered from theories of path dependency, institutional theory, and socio-technical change, the ultimate task is to expose the roots of the most significant barriers to effective action, shift the underlying development path, and formulate a coherent program for local climate change responses. This contributes to a new layer to our understanding of the relationship between capacity and action in the local context, focusing on the practical challenge of designing and implementing effective climate change response strategies. The data gathered by this research, combined with recent advances in thinking about policy design and climate change, allows us to speculate about steps that could be followed in order to accomplish these tasks.

6.1. Step 1: evaluate the system The cases presented here show that financial capital and human resources are of far less significance to action on climate change than the path dependent institutional practices and complex cultures that characterize municipal governments.

Thus, the first step towards challenging an unsustainable development path is to identify critical sources of path dependency that create barriers to action. Particularly important places to look include organizational structure (i.e. absence or presence of formal structures that encourage the cooperation of multiple departments to develop and vet climate change response policies), culture (such as combativeness between the City Hall and operations), and leadership (weak efforts to choose long-term goals over special interests and to stimulate a culture of innovation and collaboration among municipal staff).

In essence this is a process of developing a baseline against which future progress can be measured—an integral component of which is also assessing the sources and quantities of greenhouse gas emissions as well as current vulnerabilities to impacts.

6.2. Step 2: identify goals Without clearly articulated priorities and an encompassing vision, the municipal staff function without the permission (and inspiration) to act effectively on climate change. These goals should be derived by exploring a vision of the future that shares the values and desires of political leadership, technical staff, and (ideally) the municipality’s public. Innovative methods (such as backcasting or visioning; see for example: Sheppard, 2005; Robinson, 2003) can be used to determine what the desired endpoint is and participatory and deliberative methods should be employed to develop buy-in and to enhance quality of product.

This is a critical phase for political leadership, during which new priorities may be raised for debate and (as described above) future generations of leadership may be defined.

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6.3. Step 3: strategically tackle sources of path dependency Organizational cultures, and the individuals within them, tend to rebel against the imposition of sweeping changes to the routines and practices that have become entrenched behavioural pathways.4 As such, small but strategically important steps towards addressing climate change goals must be embedded in policymaking procedures and job descriptions throughout the organization. Experimental procedures and practices (such as the ‘sustainability filter’ created in the District of North Vancouver, which applies sustainability criteria to all new decisions and expenditures) may need to be nurtured in protected spaces so that innovation can flourish. Key individuals within the organization (such as the Chief Administrative Officer, providing high-level technical leadership, and trusted champions within each department) must be enlisted to institutionalize/implement collaboration and knit together potentially combative groups to build policies that are anchored in the municipality’s organization reality.

6.4. Step 4: evaluate progress Initial problem definition and priority setting phases must not be permitted to continue indefinitely (although—as discussed below—opportunities must be created to revise priorities based on new information). Progress in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reductions, resiliency improvements, and sustainability goals must be fed back into the organization (at both the political and technical/staff levels) in order to stimulate further action and realistically assess progress. The tools that are needed in order to complete this step, however, are still in their infancy, and may require considerable refinement as their application becomes more widespread.

6.5. Step 5: adaptively manage Finally, frequent opportunities for institutional learning must be created in order to build upon past experiences and most efficiently achieve results. The implementation of organizational mechanisms for adaptive management (such as multi-departmental steering committees that share emerging issues and plan future initiatives) helps to institutionalize a process of adaptive management that is integral to absorbing the ever-evolving landscape of climate change data and response options.

This five-step process is not radically different from the common methods of policy development and organizational change in municipalities, but it brings to light three critical issues that pertain specifically to the challenges inherent in addressing climate change and sustainability. First, if the goal of cities is to, over the long run, shift the development path that has given rise to climate change, both the priorities that they set and the way in which they evaluate challenges to those priorities are very different than if they assume that one-off initiatives, unencumbered by path dependency, will be sufficient. Considering the underlying development path reveals the importance of exploiting ‘niche’ opportunities to shift the organizational culture and embed (rather than isolate) sustainability throughout the policy-making process. Second, digging deeper than emissions to the underlying patterns of development that give rise to climate change (and other

4 An analogy to this is provided by socio-technical theory, in which it is argued that change most often occurs at the niche level, in protected spaces where innovation is encouraged (Geels, 2004). The larger system, which consists of interwoven sets of rules, technologies, and practices, is more amenable to gradual (and often unintentional) readjustment (Geels and Schot, 2007; Seyfang and Smith, 2007).

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sustainability problems) highlights the wisdom of integrating adaptation and mitigation in planning. After all, truly sustainable systems are both fundamentally low emissions as well as resilient to a changing climate. Adaptation strategies may imply trade-offs for mitigation, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions may (if planned poorly) lead to enhanced vulnerability (Klein et al., 2007; Wilbanks et al., 2007). Alternatively, despite differences,5 adaptation and mitigation can synergistically combine to produce mutually beneficial outcomes, which may only be realized if intentionally sought. Finally, the barriers and opportunities presented by path dependency focus our attention on the critical importance of institutional learning. Since momentum clearly builds behind both sustainable and unsustainable patterns of development, and our understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change is continually evolving, we must find opportunities to actively feed new information into policy-making processes.

7. Conclusions and future directions The three municipalities examined in this study offer insights into the potential for overcoming barriers to the translation of capacity into action by addressing the myriad sources of path dependency in municipal governance. Interviews and document analysis in these cities suggests that neither the most critical barriers, nor the frequently cited strategies for overcoming them, are related to a dearth of capacity (with the possible exception of locally specific climate change impacts data) (Burch, 2009). Indeed, even addressing a lack of technical, financial, or human resources is less a matter of creating more capacity (such as municipalities requiring additional funding from the provincial government— although this would certainly be welcomed) than facilitating the effective use of existing resources. This facilitation depends most fundamentally on re-working the path dependent institutional structures, organizational culture and policy-making procedures that have characterized the unsuccessful patterns of climate change policy development in the past. This paper delved deeper into the question of the relationship between capacity and action (see Burch and Robinson, 2007; Burch, 2009) to reveal practical strategies that can be used to facilitate climate change action and to further explore the fallacy of explanations of inaction that focus on technical or financial insufficiency.

Most critical to progress towards achieving climate change goals in Delta is a more ambitious, integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation plan that addresses both corporate and community emissions. This must be supported by institutionalized processes, eventually becoming routine, which nurture interdepartmental collaboration and innovation. In the District of North Vancouver, interviewees suggested that leadership (especially at the political level) was the most significant missing ingredient. In the past, special interests have often been catered to in the interests of consensus-building, but this has often led to suboptimal sustainability and climate change outcomes. Stronger leadership may both drive innovation and assure technical staff that climate change priorities will not suddenly evaporate in the face of other pressing concerns. This leadership should not preclude meaningful public participation, but should serve to push the municipality in a policy direction that benefits the 5 Adaptation is generally considered to be a private or club good (Dang et al., 2003), the effects of which are likely to be realized by the groups undertaking the activity. As such, successfully adaptation depends in part on local financial, technical and human resources (Ruth, 2005). Mitigation, in contrast, is a global public good, often subject to excessive free riding (Dang et al., 2003; Kane and Shogren, 2000). The benefits of mitigation are most likely to be realized rather far in the future (Nicholls and Lowe, 2004), and so, some scholars argue, successful mitigation depends more on international cooperation (Ruth, 2005).

greatest proportion of individuals, but within and outside of this community. The City of Vancouver has made substantial progress towards its climate change goals, but continues to function without a cohesive long-range sustainability plan. Such a plan might help to strategically unite the activities of all departments under a banner of sustainability and embed common goals in the day-to-day activities of municipal staff.

Although the specific strategies used to tackle path dependency in any municipality will be driven by the local sustainability priorities and climate change goals, a process by which barriers to action are identified, sources of path dependency are targeted, and learning occurs, may be useful to all. Additional work must be done to explore the extent to which the findings presented here are unique to the three cities under study (or even wealthy industrialized Western cities), and to put a finer point on the policy tools and other actions that may drive a shift in development paths. A related study could apply to the principles presented here to explore the barriers faced by non-institutional actors. Furthermore, it must be recognized that a true shift in the underlying development path may only be evident in hindsight, as further progress down the same path may appear to be fundamental change at the time it occurs, but may not lead to the desired outcome. As such, the relative success or failure of these municipalities to respond meaningfully to climate change must be evaluated periodically into the future, revealing opportunities for more effective action and course readjustment. This work will undoubtedly bring to the fore a continuous stream of unanswered questions as Canada navigates the uncertain path towards its climate change goals.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. John Robinson for his intellectual guidance and mentorship, as well as Dr. Stephen Sheppard, Dr. James Tansey, and Dr. Terre Satterfield for their insightful comments. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the University of British Columbia.

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