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Complexity and sustainable development in the circumpolar north : positioning Canada in the Arctic Council

University of British Columbia

In 1996, Canada assumed the initial two-year rotating chair of the Arctic Council; an unusual international regime of all eight Arctic states and three aboriginal organizations established to promote a broad cross-functional mandate of environmental protection and sustainable development. Coincidentally, 1995 amendments to Canada's Auditor Generals Act had required all major federal departments to prepare detailed sustainable development strategies. The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development had sponsored interdepartmental coordination in the development of a domestic Arctic strategy. Simultaneously, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade had directed attention to a northern foreign policy. Canada was wellpositioned, then, to bring leadership to the Arctic Council promoting international cooperation that was consistent with Canadian aspirations. The first biennial Ministerial meeting held in Iqaluit, however, fell short of expectations. No sustainable development program framework was considered and only a few joint projects were conditionally adopted. Reasons for Canada's failure to facilitate more substantial progress included a lack of consistency and conceptual coherence in Canada's domestic and foreign policies, and a lack of political diplomacy and leadership in leveraging membership support for progress. An analysis of Canada's policy highlights conflicts between neoclassical and ecological economic biases within key federal departments. More importantly, an analysis based on far from-equilibrium complex systems reveals that Canada had made no effort to understand the systemic relationships between environmental, ecological, and social dimensions of sustainable development upon which to plan robust and resilient solutions. Finally, Canada had not analyzed its position in the global economic system or questioned the sustainability of this context. The thesis suggests that systemic transformation is inevitable and recommends that evolution of the global system requires internalization of dominant systemic relationships and the integration of the functionalist production of social meaning at regional scales. The circumpolar Arctic, given its key role in the regulation of biophysical planetary systems and its relatively untapped fuel and non-fuel resource reserves for economic expansion, has the potential to provide leadership in demonstrating revolutionary approaches to sustainable development and a regulatory function in the transition to global sustainability.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-07-03

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/10028

Planning

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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