Robert B. Gibson

Governance for sustainable development: moving from theory to practice

In this paper we examine and elaborate on the central elements of sustainable development and governance, considering their interrelations as they have emerged from the core themes in sustainable development discourses over the past decade and a half. We argue that sustainability is best viewed as a socially instituted process of adaptive change in which innovation is a necessary element. We discuss four key elements of governance for sustainability, which are integrated into the concept of transition management. The result is a conceptual framework for policy-making and action-taking aimed at progress towards sustainability.

Sustainability assessment: basic components of a practical approach

The last few years have brought many experiments with forms of sustainability assessment, applied at the strategic and project levels by governments, private-sector firms, civil society organizations and various combinations. The attractiveness of the work so far suggests that it is now time to prepare for comprehensive adoption and more consistent application of the requirements and processes. The key first steps in sustainability assessment regime design are addressed in this paper. They centre on the basic sustainability requirements that should inform a transition to sustainability assessment; the main implications of these requirements for sustain-ability assessment decision criteria and trade-off rules; how to incorporate proper attention to the specific circumstances of applications into particular cases and contexts; and, more generally, how to design practical sustainability assessment regimes.

BEYOND THE PILLARS: SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT AS A FRAMEWORK FOR EFFECTIVE INTEGRATION OF SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN SIGNIFICANT DECISION-MAKING

Sustainability is an essentially integrative concept. It seems reasonable, then, to design sustainability assessment as an essentially integrative process and framework for decision-making on undertakings that may have lasting effects.The realm of sustainability has often been depicted as the intersection of social, economic and ecological interests and initiatives. Accordingly, many approaches to sustainability oriented assessments — at the project as well as strategic level — have begun by addressing the social, economic and ecological considerations separately and have then struggled with how to integrate the separate findings. The problem is exacerbated by the generally separate training of experts in the three fields, the habitual collection of data separately under the three categories and the common division of government mandates into separate social, economic and ecological bodies. The combined effect is not merely an absence of integrative expertise, data and authority but an entrenched tendency to neglect the interdependence of these factors. The three pillars or triple bottom line approach also appears to encourage an emphasis on balancing and making trade-offs, which may often be necessary but which should always be the last resort, not the assumed task, in sustainability assessment.There are, however, important concerns underlying advocacy and application of some three pillar, limited integration approaches. Most significant are well-grounded fears that integrated, sustainability-based assessments may facilitate continued or even renewed neglect of traditionally under valued considerations, especially the protection of ecological systems and functions. This problem needs to be addressed thoughtfully in judgements about how integration is to be done.One possible solution is to take sustainability as an essentially integrative concept and to design sustainability assessment more aggressively as an integrative process. This would entail a package of regime and process design features, centred on ones that.• build sustainability assessment into a larger overall governance regime that is designed to respect interconnections among issues, objectives, actions and effects, though the full interrelated set of activities from broad agenda setting to results monitoring and response;.• design assessment processes with an iterative conception-to-resurrection agenda, aiming to maximise multiple, reinforcing net benefits through selection, design and adaptive implementation of the most desirable option for every significant strategic or project level undertaking;.• redefine the driving objectives and consequent evaluation and decision criteria to avoid the three conventional categories, to ensure attention to usually neglected sustainability requirements and to focus attention on the achievement of multiple, mutually reinforcing gains;.• establish explicit basic rules that discourage trade-offs to the extent possible while guiding the decision-making on those that are unavoidable;.• provide means of combining, specifying and complementing these generic criteria and trade-off rules with attention to case- and context-specific concerns, objectives, priorities and possibilities;.• provide integrative, sustainability-centred guidance, methods and tools to help meet the key practical demands of assessment work, including identifying key cross-cutting issues and linkages among factors, judging the significance of predicted effects, and weighing overall options and implications; and.• ensure that the decision-making process facilitates public scrutiny and encourages effective public participation.

In full retreat: the Canadian government's new environmental assessment law undoes decades of progress

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act 2012, which came into force on 6 July 2012, virtually eliminates the core of federal-level environmental assessment in Canada. Under the new law, federal environmental assessments will be few, fragmentary, inconsistent and late. Key decision-making will be discretionary and consequently unpredictable. Much of it will be cloaked in secrecy. The residual potential for effective, efficient and fair assessments will depend heavily on requirements under other federal legislation and on the uneven diversity of provincial, territorial and Aboriginal assessment processes. This paper reviews the key characteristics of the new law in light of 10 basic design principles for environmental assessment processes, and considers the broader international implications of the Canadian retreat from application of these principles.

STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT AS A MEANS OF PURSUING SUSTAINABILITY: TEN ADVANTAGES AND TEN CHALLENGES

While strategic environmental assessment can be a powerful tool for fostering progress towards sustainability, effective implementation involves confronting a set of substantial challenges. This paper, based on Canadian and international literature and experience, outlines the ten most compelling advantages of strategic environmental assessment for sustainability and the ten main challenges faced in implementation. The ten advantages of the strategic environmental assessment for sustainability are that it • provides a process for integrated pursuit of sustainability objectives in policy making and planning; • operationalises sustainability principles; • improves the information base for policy making, planning and programme development; • is proactive and broad in ways that strengthen consideration of fundamental issues; • improves analysis of broad public purposes and alternatives; • facilitates proper attention to cumulative effects; • facilitates greater transparency and more effective public participation at the strategic level; • provides a framework for more effective and efficient project-level assessments; • provides a base for design and implementation of better projects where project-level assessment is not required; and • facilitates establishment of a more comprehensive overall system of sustainability application at all levels from the setting of decision objectives to the monitoring of implementations effects. The ten main challenges for effective implementation are • limited information and unavoidable uncertainties; • boundary-setting complexities; • primitive methodologies; • difficulties in defining the proper role of public participants and ensuring effective involvement; • co-ordination and integration of strategic assessment with assessment processes at other levels; • institutional resistance; • conflict between integrated assessment and bureaucratic fragmentation; • jurisdictional overlap; • limitations of the standard rational planning and policy making model; and • resistance to integration of strategic assessment in core decision making. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major implications.

From Wreck Cove to Voisey's Bay: the evolution of federal environmental assessment in Canada

Canadian environmental assessment has evolved significantly from the embarrassing Wreck Cove hydroelectric project experience in the mid-1970s to the more exemplary case of the Voiseys Bay Mine and Mill project, approved in 2002. Over this period, policy and law reforms have slowly made federal assessment requirements more demanding, open and mandatory. Viewed from a sustainability perspective, this evolution has been generally positive, but insufficient. While further improvements are possible and desirable, the experience of process reform in Canada so far suggests that they will be resisted and gradual.

Roles of environmental movement organisations in land-use planning: case studies of the Niagara Escarpment and Oak Ridges Moraine, Ontario, Canada

The paper explores the roles of environmental movement organisations (EMOs) in land-use planning, including domain creation (establishment of new or modified landscape planning boundaries) and regime change (adoption of new or modified legal and planning rules). The research involved two case studies of land-use planning processes: the Niagara Escarpment and Oak Ridges Moraine, Ontario, Canada. The two cases together reveal an evolution of land-use planning towards collaborative processes on mainly private lands in Southern Ontario during the period from 1960 to 2002. The results suggest that EMOs can create new planning domains through agenda setting activities, build landscape value and vision, educate governments and the public, and work to maintain and alter regimes. Collaborative planning has emerged as an important process in which some EMOs are now participating.

Illustrating integrated sustainability and resilience based assessments: a small-scale biodiesel project in Barbados.

Assessments today need to help reverse trends towards deeper unsustainability and address the unavoidable interconnections, feedbacks and uncertainties that typify complex socio-ecological systems at all scales. To illustrate one promising approach, this paper describes a modest effort to integrate understandings from Gibson et als approach to sustainability assessment with the Resilience Alliances applications of complex systems thinking into a suite of systems and sustainability based criteria. The integrated sustainability-resilience criteria were used to assess an existing small-scale biodiesel operation on Barbados that involves waste management, public health, transportation, energy security and community involvement considerations. The assessment revealed that the main benefit of this biodiesel project is in social learning rather than enhancing energy security and waste management, and the best ways of enhancing the project lie in larger scale policy initiatives. The findings suggest that the use of a sustainability-resilience approach can contribute insights unlikely to emerge from more narrowly focused assessments.

A DECISION-MAKER'S TOOL FOR SUSTAINABILITY-CENTRED STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT

This paper outlines a Decision-Makers Tool (DM Tool), designed to guide practitioners and their inter-disciplinary teams through a typical strategic environmental assessment (SEA) process. While SEA properly includes post-decision follow-up, the DM Tool covers the SEA process up to the creation of a Briefing Note for the decision maker. Together, use of the DM Tool and the Briefing Note should facilitate positive contributions to sustainability through well considered and aligned policies, plans and programmes (PPPs), by enhancing the comprehensiveness, consistency, clarity, accessibility and credibility of decision making information.The discussion presumes that the SEA is central to the PPP development process, rather than being a separate exercise. The DM Tool and Briefing Note are designed to recommend PPP action based on clearly stated needs and purposes, addressing the key issues, and application of explicit sustainability criteria in the comparative evaluation of feasible alternatives. Particular attention is paid to recognising trade-offs and residual risks, and presenting all this information concisely for the decision maker.

Application of a contribution to sustainability test by the Joint Review Panel for the Canadian Mackenzie Gas Project

Ultimately, the enhancement we need to deliver through environmental assessment is confidence that every approved undertaking will move us positively towards a desirable and durable future. In Canada, the most promising steps in this direction have been in several major project assessment reviews with public hearings and independent panels that applied a contribution to sustainability test. The most recent and advanced case is the review of a proposed C