POLIS Discussion Series on Ecological Governance

The POLIS Discussion Series is a regular event that was established in Fall 2005 with the goal of creating an ongoing space for information sharing and discussion of research and activities affiliated with POLIS to further our collective understanding of ecological governance. The primary participants are intended as affiliates of POLIS (e.g., research associates, grad students, research assistants, faculty mentors, staff, collaborators, partners, funders) but anyone interested is very welcome. The Discussion Series was established with support from the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation.

UPCOMING PRESENTATION

PAST PRESENTATIONS

Site C is a hydroelectric dam site and manmade reservoir project proposed by BC Hydro. If it is built, it will be the fourth dam on the Peace River. Including the proposed Site C project, the BC Peace River hydro projects will produce 40% of BC's electricity. Since the 1960's Site C proposals have been met head-to-head with public outcries supported by independent research and legal proceedings. This presentation will explore the complexity of this proposal, including projected environmental and socioeconomic impacts on surrounding communities.

As Chief Negotiator of the Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group, Robert Morales has an intimate and detailed knowledge of the treaty negotiation process in British Columbia.  Mr. Morales will speak on the state of the treaty process today, reflecting on recent developments and arguing for a new approach to treaty-making in British Columbia.  Mr. Morales argues that in the present process, First Nations too often are reduced to the role of 'beggars' at the negotiation table, and that this must change to reflect a recognition of the fundamental rights of Aboriginal peoples to land and self-determination.

What kind of challenge is climate change and how do we mobilize people to respond effectively to it?

Climate change is a complex challenge involving the relationships among people in society, our energy systems, and the ecosystems that sustain us. Universities are potential catalysts for local action on climate change because they have tools to address this complexity—if academics and operations are integrated into interdisciplinary strategies that support local change. What is needed are networks of people interested in taking action on climate change and able to work collaboratively, which creates interesting new challenges related to collaborative planning and network governance.

How we steward water and how we manage our watersheds
directly affects the health of people and the environment.
Yet many of us are disconnected from the complex environmental,
political, economic, and socio-cultural issues surrounding water.
Aboriginal communities in Canada are increasingly being put in a
reactive position with regard to addressing water issues and
asserting Aboriginal rights in relation to adequate drinking
water, flooding and mould in homes on-reserve, bathing and
other cultural uses, and declining fish habitat in local rivers.
The goal of this event is to explore what an ecological governance
perspective can contribute to resolving Aboriginal water issues.

The Río Bravo is a mighty 3,000 km river that sustains countless communities in both Mexico and the United States. Matamoros, in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, is the last place the river touches before it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. When the river dried up in 2000, the residents of Matamoros were left without easily-accessible water for months. In response to this crisis, the municipality went about re-educating the people of Matamoros in regards to their water usage. One innovative local initiative, the Water Detectives, has children teaching adults the importance of water conservation. Water Detectives is a short documentary featuring narration and interviews with kids who helped make a difference in their community. Today the focus may be on conserving water, but there are no limits to the sustainability issues this empowering program may inspire in these and other young agents of change worldwide.

What are the implications of land use planning process currently unfolding on Haida Gwaii for Haida people and community control of forest resources? Louise Takeda will present a conceptual and methodological framework for understanding power in this context of ecological governance. The three-layered model combines an understanding of the microanalysis of strategies and tactics with a macro analysis of institutions and structures.  The framework will be applied to the case of collaborative land use planning on Haida Gwaii to illustrate the interplay of day-to-day agency interactions on the one hand and macro-processes of change and/or stability of social and political structures on the other, with an emphasis on understanding how oppressive relations might be changed.

Innovations in biotechnology seem to present startling possibilities and equally startling risks.  To the non-specialist, biotechnology's future seems to thwart our best attempts to "get science under control."  Just how are we to think of biotechnology, and what role does law or politics have in assisting us to approach the question of biotechnology?

Experience in developing countries in Asia suggests that to improve the ability of poor communities to use common pool resources sustainability, three kinds of innovation are needed: 1) more secure access to common resources on which the poor typically depend; 2) new institutions for collective resource governance which give poor local users a greater voice; and 3) reducing degradation and increasing income through more productive techniques for resource use. These innovations are closely linked. Any one of them, on its own, will fail without the other two. The first two of these pre-requisites are issues of rights and governance, both of which are undergoing changes in BC. Using examples mainly from Asia, we will explore how participatory action research led to transformative change that had not previously been possible. Are there lessons for strategy in BC??

As a brief introduction to a free-thinking brainstorming session, Rod will provide background information and present an overarching conceptual and organisational framework for the idea of a UVic Forum on Complex Systems and Community Governance. Such a forum would support a virtual linkage of groups on campus who share interest in community-based research, complex systems and community governance (potentially including UVic's Centre for Public Sector Studies, Centre for Global Studies, Faculty of Business, POLIS Project, and others) with existing community partnerships such as the Clayoquot Alliance.

In this presentation, Andrew will reveal how modern, Western secularist law – that is, law presupposing that it has been severed from religion – is grounded, in actuality, in an unacknowledged faith that confines divinity within the material world.  Specifically, the law’s notion that all existing things can be reduced to the form of commodities property signals an implicit belief in humans’ God-like power of proprietorship and exchange over all things, a power that is continually reinforced by the presumed, inhering sacredness of the proprietary items themselves.  Andrew will emphasize how secularist law’s metaphysically all-encompassing, religious idea of commodified property is exemplified in two juridical fields of special interest to POLIS discussants: environmental law; and intellectual property law involving living organisms.

Noah Quastel views law traditionally as having worked with an interlocking system of concepts about persons (individualistic, self-interested maximizers), exchange (freedom of contract) and objects (physical objects detached from process and production methods).  He has been considering the way "process-identifying products" (such as fair trade coffee or forest stewardship council wood) suggest ways of thinking about consumer transactions and consumption that are largely absent from traditional legal thought (both theoretic and as found in actual laws). His main argument is that green consumption implicitly involves a new conception – person as relational, exchange as involving our "metabolic relations with nature" and commodities as networks of people, places and ecologies. The challenge for sustainable consumption is one of how to move towards these ideals in the face of a legal and economc system designed otherwise. In his presentation, Noah will consider different concepts of the "consumer" that underlie alternative approaches to consumption policy.

Shiri Pasternak is coordinator of the "Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain" www.forumonpublicdomain.ca. The vision of the Forum is to deepen current public discourse on privatization, often limited to single-issue complaints, as well as to explore alternative models to both nationalism and corporatism in thinking through the meaning of the "public domain" and "commons." What are some of the theoretical and practical challenges to this vision?

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