The Statistics of Canada

Co-management institutional arrangements have an important role in creating conditions for social learning and adaptation in a rapidly changing Arctic environment, although how that works in practice has not been clearly articulated. This paper draws on three co-management cases from the Canadian Arctic to examine the role of knowledge co-production as an institutional trigger or mechanism to enable learning and adapting. Experience with knowledge co-production across the three cases is variable but outcomes illustrate how co-management actors are learning to learn through uncertainty and environmental change, or learning to be adaptive. Policy implications of this analysis are highlighted and include the importance of a long-term commitment to institution building, an enabling policy environment to sustain difficult social processes associated with knowledge co-production, and the value of diverse modes of communication, deliberation and social interaction.

Co-management and the co-production of knowledge: Learning to adapt in Canada's Arctic

Why do some community-based natural resource management strategies perform better than others? Commons theorists have approached this question by developing institutional design principles to address collective choice situations, while other analysts have critiqued the underlying assumptions of community-based resource management. However, efforts to enhance community-based natural resource management performance also require an analysis of exogenous and endogenous variables that influence how social actors not only act collectively but do so in ways that respond to changing circumstances, foster learning, and build capacity for management adaptation. Drawing on examples from northern Canada and Southeast Asia, this article examines the relationship among adaptive capacity, community-based resource management performance, and the socio-institutional determinants of collective action, such as technical, financial, and legal constraints, and complex issues of politics, scale, knowledge, community and culture. An emphasis on adaptive capacity responds to a conceptual weakness in community-based natural resource management and highlights an emerging research and policy discourse that builds upon static design principles and the contested concepts in current management practice.

Adaptive Capacity and Community-Based Natural Resource Management

The First Nations of Canada have been active over the past three decades in negotiating natural resources co-management arrangements that would give them greater involvement in decision- making processes that are closer to their values and worldviews. These values and worldviews are part of the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that First Nations possess about the land; to reach agreements to the satisfaction of First Nations, appropriate ways to involve TEK in decision-making processes must be designed. Through a review of the literature on TEK, I identified six "faces" of TEK, i.e., factual observations, management systems, past and current land uses, ethics and values, culture and identity, and cosmology, as well as the particular challenges and opportunities that each face poses to the co-management of natural resources.

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The Six Faces of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Challenges and Opportunities for Canadian Co-Management Arrangements

Over the past decade research examining the human dimensions of climatic change in the Arctic has expanded significantly and has become the dominant framework through which the relations between northern peoples and climatic change are understood by scholars, policy makers, political leaders, and the media. This paper critically examines the assumptions, exclusions, and orientations that characterize this broad literature, and suggests revising and expanding the terms upon which it is carried out. It focuses in particular on the exclusion of colonialism from the study of human vulnerability and adaptation to climatic change, the framing of Indigenous peoples and communities in terms of the local and the traditional, and the ways in which efforts to improve the lives of northern Indigenous peoples risk perpetuating colonial relations. The paper argues that these exclusions and orientations lead scholars to systematically overlook the immense importance of resource extraction and shipping as human dimensions of climatic change in the Canadian Arctic, and it examines the implications of such oversights.

Securing Indigenous politics: A critique of the vulnerability and adaptation approach to the human dimensions of climate change in the Canadian Arctic

This article examines the interplay of structure and culture in the Legislative Assembly of the newly established territory of Nunavut in Canada's eastern Arctic. This institution combines the Westminster cabinet-parliamentary system with traditional Inuit culture, many features of which are antithetical to British-style ‘responsible government’. The distinctive ‘consensus government’ system which characterises the Nunavut Legislative Assembly has important features consistent with Inuit values and approaches, for example, the absence of political parties. Based primarily on personal interviews with Members of the Assembly, the article considers whether Inuit culture has significantly recast the structures and the political imperatives inherent in the Westminster system or if the powerful values and constraints of that system have effectively overridden Inuit values. Perceptions and reflections of members serving in the First Assembly (1999–2004) suggest that while substantial adaptations to the conventio...

Traditional aboriginal values in a Westminster parliament: The legislative assembly of Nunavut

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0008423900022666

Westminster in the Arctic: The Adaptation of British Parliamentarism in the Northwest Territories

The Ontario Legislature: A Political Analysis

Characteristics of ministerial careers - the length of time cabinet ministers hold office, the number and type of portfolios they hold, ministers' pre-cabinet political experience, the circumstances of their leaving cabinet, and the like - constitute an important but understudied aspect of Canadian cabinets. This article examines career patterns among the 1,375 individuals who held ministerial office in the ten provinces between the mid-1940s and the mid-1990s. Evidence of sweeping changes in the basic contours of provincial ministerial careers since World War II is presented and analyzed. Possible implications of these changes on internal cabinet dynamics are discussed.



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Les caracteristiques des carriers ministerielles (la duree du mandat des membres du Conseil des ministers, le nombre et le type de leurs portefeuilles, leur experience politique pre-ministerielle, les circumstances dans lesquelles ils ont quitte le Conseil des ministers, et ainsi de suite) sont un element important mais peu etudie des Conseils des ministers au Canada. Cette etude examine les schemas de carriere des 1 375 personnes ayant occupe le poste de ministre dans les dix provinces entre le milieu des annees 1940 et le milieu des annees 1990. On y presente et analyse les changements profonds qu'ont subis les carrieres ministerielles provinciales depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale. On discute aussi des repercussions eventuelles de ces chanagements sur la dynamique interne du Conseil des ministres.

Shorter measures: the changing ministerial career in Canada

. The North—defined as the Canadian Arctic—ranks among the most understudied and yet the most promising fields of enquiry for Canadian political scientists. It offers a host of fascinating research topics and intellectual puzzles, many of which entail the often fraught relationship between the Canadian state and Aboriginal peoples. Important conceptual issues await academics studying northern politics and governance. As well, political scientists' work can benefit the governments and the people of the North who are grappling with difficult practical problems as they develop distinctive ways of governing themselves. Academic work on northern politics can be at once intellectually stimulating, professionally rewarding and of significant practical utility. Accordingly, more Canadian political scientists, especially young scholars, should turn their attention northwards. Resume. Le Nord, ou plus precisement l'Arctique canadien, constitue un des champs les moins explores et pourtant les plus prometteurs pour les politologues canadiens. Son etude revele une foule de sujets de recherche fascinants et d'enigmes intellectuelles, dont plusieurs se rapportent aux relations souvent tendues entre l'Etat canadien et les peuples autochtones. D'importants enjeux conceptuels se posent aux chercheurs de la politique nordique et de la gouvernance. De plus, les recherches des politologues peuvent aider les gouvernements et les habitants du Nord a resoudre des problemes concrets associes au developpement de facons distinctives de se gouverner. En somme, la recherche sur la politique nordique peut etre a la fois intellectuellement stimulante, professionnellement gratifiante et pourvu d'une grande utilite pratique. En consequence, plus de politologues canadiens, et en particulier ceux des nouvelles generations, devraient diriger leur attention vers le Nord.

Graham White

Papers

Traditional aboriginal values in a Westminster parliament: The legislative assembly of Nunavut

Westminster in the Arctic: The Adaptation of British Parliamentarism in the Northwest Territories

The Ontario Legislature: A Political Analysis

Shorter measures: the changing ministerial career in Canada

Go North, Young Scholar, Go North