One of the primary challenges to sustainable development throughout the world involves effectively resolving conflicts among competing stakeholders over the use of scarce resources. One of Canada’s principal contributions to this global challenge has been the development of innovative approaches to land use planning based on the concept of “shared decision-making”. This approach has attempted to resolve major resource conflicts by engaging stakeholders in consensus-based planning to seek solutions that balance competing interests. This experience in British Columbia is now gaining worldwide attention as an effective and innovative approach to planning and conflict resolution.
This innovative approach to planning has evolved in British Columbia over the last decade in response to intense conflicts over the use of natural resources in a number of regional watersheds such as Clayoquot Sound, Carmanah Valley, and the Stein Watershed. To manage these disputes, the provincial government created a new planning process under the auspices of the Commission on Resources and Environment (CORE) in 1992. Concurrent and subsequent to the CORE process was an accompanying land use planning process called the Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP) based on the same approach as the CORE process but managed by government ministries rather than by an independent agency like CORE. The key concept underlying both approaches revolved around “shared decision-making” that engaged all stakeholders during plan development to ensure that competing interests and objectives were balanced.
The alternative dispute resolution experience in British Columbia provides an excellent opportunity to test the efficacy of these new approaches because it is one of the few jurisdictions where these approaches have been implemented in a systematic way through the activities of CORE and the LRMP process. Therefore, the findings will contribute to the international body of knowledge on planning and dispute resolution and be relevant to helping resolve resource conflicts throughout North America and the world by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of shared decision-making and identifying the keys to successful conflict resolution. The findings will help advance the theory on shared decision-making in environmental planning and the theory on plan implementation.
This proposed research builds on a successful research program conducted in the School of Resource and Environmental Management (REM) at Simon Fraser University over the last number of years. The proposed research program builds on these previous successful programs in two ways. First, the previous program completed only two case studies of CORE planning processes. The proposed program continues this successful case study approach by (i) increasing the overall case study database and (ii) examining two more recent LRMP processes, to test whether recent improvements and changes intended to mitigate some of the deficiencies in the previous CORE processes have been successful. The analysis of these new post-CORE approaches is an essential step in advancing understanding of and in building the theoretical foundations of the emerging field of shared decision-making and dispute resolution.
Second, the previous case study research examined only the process of preparing plans, not the process of plan implementation. The key to success of any planning process is successful implementation. Given that one of the principal alleged benefits of shared decision-making is that it results in more effective implementation, the evaluation of shared decision-making in British Columbia will not be complete until the implementation process is assessed. Now that sufficient time has passed since the adoption of the CORE plans in 1995, it is possible to complete this key step in the research program of evaluating the implementation process in two CORE plans. This understanding of plan implementation will have relevance to the practice of shared decision-making in all fields and jurisdictions by testing one of the key hypotheses of the shared-decision-making approach: that it will lead to easier plan implementation. The research will also advance the general understanding of the theory of plan implementation and identify ways for improving the implementation process.
REM is one of Canada’s first interdisciplinary programs focusing on resource and environmental management. Since its beginning in 1979, REM has grown into a large integrated research and teaching school offering PhD, masters, and undergraduate courses. REM has gained an international reputation for research and teaching in a number of areas including resource planning, dispute resolution, fisheries, forest ecology, energy, environmental impact assessment, recreation and environmental toxicology. More information on REM can be obtained at www.rem.sfu.ca.
