Decision Making

I am back on my beloved campus at Royal Roads, it really is such a beautiful place here. Place matters very much to me, as I believe it matters to most people, and the diversity of scholarship here makes for some wonderful conversations. In our Live Chat last week on the climate adaptation and mitigation project, we talked about the importance of language, rather than 'carbon neutral' which could be perceived as not moving forward, 'climate positive' policies may be seen as more action oriented.

August 29^th, 2012

The line graph in the figure below shows that Canadians’ personal expenditure on pharmaceuticals, hospital fees, and health services has almost doubled in the last two decades. However, as can be seen with the area graphs, the percentages of Canadians that considered themselves healthy have remain unchanged. We must then ask, what drives this increase in spending? What have we been paying for?

A series of nine planetary boundaries have been identified by Rockstrom et al. 2009. It is becoming increasingly clear that development pathways must reconnect with the biosphere’s capacity to sustain them  (Folke et al. 2011).

July 26^th, 2012

What does inequality do to a community? Ironically, there is no relationship whatsoever between key social indicators and gross national product (GNP). Bigger income gaps lead to deteriorations in health (drug abuse, infant mortality, life expectancy, mental illness, obesity), human capital (child well-being, high school drop outs, math and literacy scores, social mobility, teenage births, and social relations (child conflict, homicide, imprisonment, social capital, trust).

Governance in the good society is grounded in integrated and evidence-based decision-making based on the science and research circulating widely in society. This carbon map is an example of such evidence, as over 95% of the world's scientists now concur that we are indeed changing the climate as a result of human impacts. We need to think carefully about our own perceptions of what our governments say they are doing on our behalf and what decisions are actually being made. Governments are only as accountable as we make them.

We have just published A Policy Agenda for Canadian Muncipalities. This is agenda is the result of a series of e-Dialogues held with 19 sustainability planners from across the country, who then identified 6 international case studies that were leaders in implementing sustainable development. We then came together again to discuss the lessons to be learned from these six leaders and their application to the Canadian context.

You may be interested in an upcoming e-Dialogue this coming Thursday, October 27th, on What is the Meaning of Progress and Growth in the 21th century? This is a critical question that all communities are facing in conversations around the meaning of the good society. This real time on-line dialogue is the first in the series of Robert Bateman Conversations, a forum for provocative dialogue and idea sharing around critical questions of the day.