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Since Confederation in 1867, official Canadian settler government policy on the environment has sought to simultaneously preserve “wilderness” and exploit natural resources for market gain. In the 1960s, the nascent North American modern environmental movement pushed for stronger regulation on pollution and toxics - and a more institutionalised state-led response to environmental problems emerged. Throughout the last five decades, three principal “eras” of federal government reaction have emerged in response to mounting scientific evidence and public pressure to act on environmental issues. The first, from the late-1960s to mid-1980s, saw the development and implementation of early environmental policy and programmes. The second era, from the mid-1980s to mid-2000s co-occurred alongside the rise of the sustainable development paradigm, and is marked by the Canadian government’s attempt at leadership on the global stage. The third era, from the mid-2000s to 2015, demonstrates a shift from environmental regime-building and multilateral collaboration toward rollbacks and obstructionism. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the government of Canada reversed decades of progress and cooperation on the environment and sustainable development through its muzzling of government scientists, superficial co-optation of climate policy, rollbacks of environmental legislation and disparagement of environmental activists. In total, by shifting the federal government from a position of ineffective benevolence on environmental issues to one of contention and antagonism, the Harper government’s approach represents a departure from Canadian environmental governance norms and sought to remake the identity of Canada as an energy superpower inextricably tied to its oil and gas industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the rescaling of environmental governance, and with the social construction of environmental and governance scales in particular. With the aid of case-study data from Canada, it is argued that watersheds, as particular forms of rescaled environmental governance, have increased in popularity because of their status as boundary objects: that is, a common concept interpreted differently by different groups. The paper shows how particular features of the watershed approach-namely, their physical size and the shared discursive framings they employ ('stakeholder' and 'integration')- make the watershed concept both cohesive enough to travel among different epistemic communities, and plastic enough to be interpreted and used differently within them. As such, it is suggested that the trend of the uptake of the so-called 'watershed approach' reflects and is shaped by ideologies underpinned by three different, and occasionally competing, epistemic communities: the scientific, neoliberal, and grassroots communities. These arguments corroborate constructivist accounts of the political nature of boundary drawing, bring science into discussion on the relationship between neoliberalism and public participation, and contribute to environmental governance literatures by providing an alternative explanation for the uptake of watersheds in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental governance research has paid insufficient attention to scholarship on values even though environmental values is a well-studied field. This paper begins to unpack the relationship between values and governance with a particular focus on protected areas governance and in light of ideas such as the distinction between held values and assigned values. We report on research from four case studies in Canada, Ghana and Tanzania, each of which investigated the values, interests and objectives of people in a rural community and ways in which these are reflected, or not, in governance arrangements for an adjacent protected area. Despite very diverse contexts, two held values that were encountered in each of the four case studies could be described as responsibility toward future generations and respect for and appreciation of nature. The existence of what may be universal values does not negate the importance of culture and place: similar held values are translated, through the particular circumstances of different individuals, communities and cultures, into a diversity of assigned values, interests and positions. The attention that governance processes have given to local people's fundamental held values in three of the cases, and the ignoring of such values in the fourth, have had important implications for the relationship between community members and the adjacent protected area. We argue that systems for governance would do well to explicitly engage with values by supporting local articulation of values and by facilitating dialogue and deliberation amongst diverse stakeholders around their values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]