Environment, Resources and Sustainability

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Assessing Legitimacy Within Collaborative Water Governance: How, When, and by Whom?
(University of Waterloo, 2017-10-24) Melnychuk, Natalya; De Loë, Robert
Collaborative water governance (CWG) is a form of decision-making for water that involves multiple actors with diverse interests working together to solve common problems (e.g., pollution, scarcity, flooding). CWG has emerged as an increasingly popular model of governance in Western countries and is promoted as a way to enhance the resilience and effectiveness of decisions and actions for water resources. Vital to CWG is the governance attribute legitimacy, which helps collaborations function and produce results effectively. Legitimacy is about the justifiability or acceptance of governance systems, organizations, decisions, and mechanisms. Traditionally, in the context of governance, the state’s legitimacy, which is largely a product of democratic values, has been the primary focus of legitimacy studies. However, the increased use of collaborative governance that involves non-state actors from various societal sectors (e.g., Indigenous peoples, civil society, industry, agriculture) in decision-making has brought to light questions about the nature of legitimacy within CWG. In particular, there are outstanding questions about what types of legitimacy matter for CWG, how legitimacy evolves as a collaboration develops, and how legitimacy perceptions differ by societal sector. The purpose of this research is to provide conceptual clarity about the multi-faceted and dynamic nature of CWG legitimacy. This was done through a multi-case study approach analyzing five watershed-based collaborative governance initiatives in British Columbia, Canada. These cases include the Cowichan Watershed Board (CWB), the Lake Windermere Ambassadors (LWA), the Nechako Watershed Council (NWC), the Okanagan Basin Water Board (OBWB), and the Shuswap Lake Integrated Planning Process (SLIPP)/Shuswap Watershed Council (SWC). The objectives of this research include the following: (1) to synthesise existing legitimacy typologies and build a robust conceptual framework of legitimacy types that can be used for the integrated assessment of legitimacy within CWG; (2) to examine how legitimacy evolves as a collaborative body develops; (3) to determine variations in the composition of legitimacy judgements by societal sector (e.g., government, agriculture, industry, environment) towards CWG bodies; and (4) to provide insight into ways collaborative practitioners can influence legitimacy to enhance the effectiveness and stability of CWG according to various perspectives. The key findings of this research confirm the hybrid, pluralistic, and dynamic nature of legitimacy as a governance attribute. Legitimacy within CWG is sourced from a combination of practice-, results-, institutional-, social-, and individual-based types that exist across 18 different typologies. No one legitimacy typology encapsulates all legitimacy types. Therefore, the synthesis of typologies in a comparable and mutually reinforcing manner is necessary for an accurate assessment of legitimacy. This is particularly true for multi-sector collaborative governance as findings indicate that empirically the range of actors involved in or impacted by collaborative bodies draw on multiple sources that relate to legitimacy types identified across all 18 typologies. Moreover, these legitimacy types, in different combinations, matter more or less at different stages of a CWG body’s development and within the legitimacy judgements of individuals from different societal sectors. As CWG bodies develop through stages of establishment, growth, maturity, decline and then either dissolution or renewal, legitimacy is also established, extended, maintained, defended, and either lost or re-extended. Findings of this research indicate that the sources that most directly influence these legitimacy changes vary at each development stage of a collaboration. In each of the five cases, the most dominant legitimacy sources shifted from at first being focused on a sense of need to collaborate, to process management and the production of results, to the development of a sense of permanence, and then to the defence of the relevance and usefulness of a collaboration under the guidance of a leader. In addition to identifying how legitimacy shifts as a CWG body develops organizationally, research findings also categorized what sources and types of legitimacy are more prevalent in the judgements about a collaboration by actors from different societal sectors. Legitimacy judgements of actors connected to the different cases varied according to whether they represented government, First Nations, agriculture, environmental civil society, industry, local property owner associations, or local businesses sectors. For example, government actors commonly viewed a collaboration’s legitimacy positively when other government actors either participated in or supported a collaboration. Meanwhile, agriculture representatives positively judged a CWG body when it helped address water issues that impact farmers such as the protection of water allocation licences and agriculture-environmental sustainability. From these findings, this research makes both a conceptual and practical contribution to knowledge. Conceptually, the research first builds clarity around the meaning and nature of legitimacy in CWG contexts. Conceptual frameworks concerning the relevancy of multiple legitimacy typologies, the stage-based dynamic nature of CWG legitimacy, and the composition of different legitimacy judgements by societal sector may act as assessment tools to more critically and accurately examine legitimacy. Likewise, methodologically, the research also provides insight regarding the importance of cross-disciplinarily for the study of CWG legitimacy. The multiple fields (e.g., political science, sociology, law, psychology) that all study legitimacy through different lenses provide necessary insight to comprehensively understand the topic. Finally, the research also contributes conceptual knowledge about the considerations necessary to influence or strategically manage legitimacy. Practically, the research also makes a contribution by highlighting ways those engaged in CWG can influence or manage legitimacy. These recommendations include the following: (1) clarify how legitimacy is locally interpreted, (2) strategically assess legitimacy as a collective within a collaborative body, (3) be aware of different discourses and assertions surrounding a CWG body at different times and contexts, (4) pay cautious attention to areas of illegitimacy, (5) patiently deal with challenges of collaboration, and (6) accept that collaborative governance may not be able to establish and maintain legitimacy in all contexts. These recommendations may help build understanding about how to influence legitimacy so that decisions about whether or not and when collaboration should, should not, or should no longer be used, are contextually appropriate. Legitimacy is needed to ensure multi-sector collaborative governance bodies can effectively address water issues. If collaborative bodies are found to be illegitimate or are continuously being delegitimized then not only may resources be wasted as collaborative processes risk inefficiency or dissolution, but also water resource sustainability may be hindered. Conceptual understanding of the applicable theories, perspectives and the dynamics of legitimacy for collaborative governance can help determine whether or not specific collaborative water governance bodies can foster and maintain the popular support needed for their existence. Although findings specifically address CWG in British Columbia, they are also relevant in other contexts of collaborative governance for water and for the collaborative governance of other environmental resources.
Assessing the Role of Discourse in Influencing Water Quality Policy in Lake Erie Basin
(University of Waterloo, 2020-01-27) Isaac, Bereket Negasi; De Loë, Robert
This research examines the usefulness of a discourse approach to better understand freshwater policy and governance, with a specific focus on the involvement of non-state actors in the policy making process. Previous research has shown that these actors greatly differ in their capacities to influence policy. One capacity that has not been the subject of much research in the context of freshwater policy is the discursive capacity of actors. Discourse – the various ways people make sense of their environments and ascribe meaning to social and physical phenomena – has been shown to be an important element in the environmental policy process. However, its exact role and its relationship with actors and the institutional contexts have not been well understood. This thesis contributes to a better understanding of discourse in freshwater policy process and its relationship to the institutional context of resource governance. By adopting an interpretivist approach, I apply a ‘discourse institutional’ perspective to better understand policy process in addressing eutrophication problems in Lake Erie basin. I developed a conceptual framework to guide this research focused on the development of Domestic Action Plans (DAP) in both Ontario and Ohio with the aim of reducing phosphorus runoff to Lake Erie by 40% by 2025 from 2008 levels. I collected and analyzed data gathered through document reviews, news media reports, interviews, and participant observation as well as other relevant sources. The main findings in this study can be seen in three aspects of the role of discourse in the policy process. The first aspect is seen in how groups of actors are brought together in ‘discourse coalitions’, and how they promote specific narratives or storylines so as to construct a broad issue into a policy ‘problem’ with an identifiable cause-effect relationship. I identified two storylines in each region that provide specific conceptualizations of the eutrophication problem in Lake Erie, promote certain responses as the most appropriate, and assign responsibilities to actors. Other storylines deflect the focus away from any single actor as the main source of the problem and put the blame on a web of complex relationships among biophysical and climatic factors that act externally to the governance system. These storylines offer different accounts of the extent and level of urgency with which policy actors may need to respond to the eutrophication issue. This has been reflected in how they shaped the substantive content of the DAPs in both regions. The second aspect of discourse examined in this study relates to the specific practices that a single major policy actor engages in while influencing policy discursively. I find that the material, organizational and discursive capacities of some actors complement and support each other in helping them engage in continuous and persistent information exchange activities with key policy actors before and during the policy process. I show this with the case of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and the Ohio Farm Bureau, two major actors in the eutrophication related policy process. I observe that their multi-faceted efforts have been instrumental in helping these actors maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the public as well as to keep a ‘social license’ to operate. I find that both agricultural organizations made persistent attempts to frame the nutrient reduction policy by attaching it to broadly held ideas, such as the need for continuous and viable food production, and feeding an ever-growing global population. Such framing practices are often complemented with careful management of public images to provide an appearance of environmental stewardship, as well as by efforts to define the concept of sustainability in a way that presumes the harmonious coexistence of food production and environmental protection. This finding directly relates to the level of effectiveness of environmental sustainability policy efforts. The last aspect of the influence of discourse on policy is seen in how broader and more enduring constitutional and other formal institutional structures in Canada and the United States may have affected the nature of nutrient runoff related discourse in Ontario and Ohio. I provide insights into how discourse coalitions and other major policy actors engaged in discursive practices are either enabled or constrained by the broad institutional contexts within which they act. I find that in Ontario important formal institutional structures that bring together relevant actors at the provincial and federal levels seem to have provided a conducive environment for a more collaborative policymaking style as compared to that of Ohio. This research makes several significant and original contributions to the academic literature. The first theoretical contribution relates to the conceptual elaboration of storylines and the exercise of discursive influence by actors in the context of policy development for water quality at a basin and regional levels. This study provides key insights into the importance of the process of defining broad issues into specific problems and how this may affect the kind of solutions that are deemed appropriate in light of those definitions. It also highlights how the nature of the problems that modern societies are facing in this age are becoming difficult to define with many ‘environmental’ issues also having social, political and economic dimensions. The study underscores that the struggle over whose problem definition eventually prevails directly impacts the allocation of responsibilities and resources in addressing those issues. The second conceptual contribution relates to broadening the scope of institutional approaches, especially the Institutional Analysis and Development framework based approaches, by incorporating the important role of discourse. In particular, this study has illuminated the interactions between actors and their discourses, and the institutional frameworks that act as the context for the policy process. It provides supporting evidence to the argument that discourses and institutions operate in a spiraling, dialectical fashion. Thus, discourses may give rise to new institutional structures that, in turn, may shape the nature of discourse along a temporal scale. This research also points out that in addition to material resources, actors also employ linguistic and other discursive resources that the new institutionalism literature has generally disregarded. Thirdly, this research provides methodological insights on the use of critical discourse analysis and framing theory to study discourse and its power effects. By combining both approaches, the researcher is able to make explicit links between individual words and phrases in texts of policy documents with their significance in the broader network of social relations. This enables well-rounded analyses and understanding of variety of influences by actors on policy. Finally, this research provides a new empirical social scientific account of the interaction between discourse and institutions in the case of eutrophication issues in Lake Erie basin, thus providing important insights into similar problems in other parts of the world. This is especially the case with environmental issues where the policy emphasis might have been on further enhancing the scientific basis for decision making at the expense of a thorough appreciation of the highly contentious and value-laden nature of both the issue and any potential solutions.
Exploring factors that constrain and enable sustainable transboundary water governance in the Mackenzie River Basin
(University of Waterloo, 2016-10-19) Morris, Michelle; De Loë, Robert
Governance of transboundary water systems is complicated by factors such as institutional fragmentation, social and environmental change, competing values for and uses of water and power dynamics. These challenges exist in both international and federal transboundary contexts, although much of the scholarly attention has been on international transboundary watersheds. Sustainable transboundary water governance is an important goal given the fact that freshwater ecosystems are among the most rapidly degrading in the world. Governance, the ways in which decisions are made and implemented, can have a critical role to enable sustainability in transboundary watersheds. Many analyses of transboundary water systems provide only partial accounts of transboundary water governance because they focus primarily on the roles of governments and interjurisdictional institutions. Furthermore, analyses of federal transboundary water systems have not satisfactorily considered the role of power dynamics as possible constraints on transboundary water governance. Appreciation of the full complexity of transboundary water governance, and factors that constrain and enable sustainable transboundary water governance, requires considering governance processes at multiple levels and the variety of actors that may be involved therein. A power-analysis can facilitate consideration of which interests are advantaged in various governance processes that have implications for sustainable transboundary water governance. The purpose of this study is to explore factors that constrain and enable sustainable transboundary water governance in a federal transboundary water system. Explicitly assessing multi-level governance processes, and the ways in which power dynamics impact them, facilitates a consideration of their roles and contribution to transboundary water governance. This study’s purpose is achieved via the following objectives: 1) identify the jurisdictional levels at which federal transboundary water governance takes place in the Mackenzie River Basin, (MRB), Canada; 2) consider the design and performance of an interjurisdictional river basin organization (RBO) in the MRB; 3) determine the ways in which power dynamics impact a) collaboration and b) water use decisions within jurisdictions in the MRB; and 4) assess the role and contribution of a) an RBO, b) collaboration and c) water use decisions within jurisdictions to transboundary water governance within the MRB. Single and multiple case studies and qualitative data collection and analysis methods were used to achieve these objectives. Two hundred and ninety-six documents, 30 interviews and personal observations were collected and analyzed to achieve the study objectives. The MRB, a jurisdictionally and ecologically complex federal transboundary system in which three provinces, three territories, a federal government and Indigenous governments have responsibilities for water, provided an excellent empirical context in which to explore these issues. Upstream hydroelectric developments and oil sands mining have emerged as key transboundary concerns in this basin. The multiple perspectives, values, interests and power dynamics among key actors in the basin challenge governance that contributes to sustainability. Furthermore, as a basin that at 1.8 million km2 that drains approximately 20% of Canada’s land mass, a multi-level governance design is essential to achieving coordination and inclusion required to enable sustainable transboundary water governance. In fact, a number of multi-level governance initiatives, including an interjurisdictional water management institution, collaborations at various levels and major water use decisions, exist within and among jurisdictions in the basin. They are included as case studies in this dissertation. By considering multi-level governance processes and the ways in which power dynamics impact federal transboundary water systems, this study makes two major contributions to the transboundary water governance literature. First, it demonstrates the need to consider large transboundary water systems as systems of multi-level governance. Considering the ways in which governance processes at multiple levels interact may be key to identifying factors that constrain and enable sustainable transboundary water governance. Second, by undertaking a power analysis of a federal transboundary water context this study directly challenges assumptions in the literature that the presence of a central government or well-developed regulations within federal jurisdictions can temper federal water conflicts. This study’s assessment of the design and performance of an interjurisdictional institution, the ways in which power dynamics impact collaboration and water use decisions and consideration of the roles and contributions of multi-level governance processes in a federal transboundary water governance context provide empirical contributions to the transboundary water governance literature. The assessment of how power impacts collaboration in transboundary contexts adds a theoretical and empirical contribution to the collaborative governance literature.
Thinking outside the 'water box' in the Detroit River Area of Concern
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-30) Turner, Allison; De Loë, Robert
Despite sustained attention to water issues around the world—including attention to shortcomings in water governance—many long-standing water problems persist around the world. This may be because some of the sources or causes of water problems are external to the water sector. Water governance often is based on water-centric problem framings that do not take sufficient account of the role of external actors, institutions, and drivers. Recognition of this problem is growing, but identifying external connections and then addressing the critical ones is challenging for water managers. This thesis tests a flexible diagnostic process that can be used by researchers and practitioners to identify external connections and evaluate their importance in specific water governance settings. The case study for this research is the Detroit River Area of Concern (AOC), located in both the United States and Canada. The river is important and used extensively by both humans and wildlife; as a result of the human uses, the Detroit River was listed as an Area of Concern. The objectives of this research include (1) applying a diagnostic approach to the Detroit River AOC to determine whether or not external connections are affecting progress on the Detroit River Area of Concern, and if so, what external connections are most relevant and important to address; and (2) proposing response strategies and actions for improving governance in the Detroit River Area of Concern and beyond. This research uses a “two-case” multiple case study research design, triangulating data gathered from 28 key informant interviews, review of 58 documents, and personal observations. The findings of this study reveal that the Detroit River AOC was carefully and purposefully designed in a water-centric manner, in order to more easily manage the complexity of cleaning legacy pollution. As a result of this water-centric framing, people working on the Detroit River AOC have completed numerous high-profile projects on the river, and the river should qualify for delisting as an Area of Concern without having to address external connections. That being said, a water-centric perspective has caused challenges in the AOC, and these challenges illustrate that efforts should be made to engage external drivers, institutions, and actors in parallel to or after AOC delisting. Key external connections include global environmental changes such as climate change and the introduction of invasive species, the health of adjacent waterways, population and land use change, and changing incentives in the form of funding, regulations, and public perception. Practitioners have several options for addressing external connections both during and after delisting; these include thinking more proactively about “life after delisting” through a comprehensive visioning exercise, connecting with existing initiatives and networks in the area with the help of “boundary spanners,” strengthening binational ties, and clarifying the role of an Area of Concern. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to furthering our understanding of external connections in water governance, with special focus on the Great Lakes Area of Concern program.

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