The wrong machine

Conservation groups alienated by provincial stakeholder consultation process
Originally published in FFWD February 28, 2008 by Drew Anderson in News


Public and stakeholder consultation in the province is largely failing to live up to the public interest, according to some stakeholders involved in environmental protection. This contention has recently been highlighted by the use of advisory councils in the provincial Water for Life strategy and the process that led to the creation of Alberta’s new Land-use Framework.

Many environmental groups chose not to participate in the discussions on the Land-use Framework, citing concerns with the ongoing consultation process; while those involved in the Water for Life strategy are concerned about the lack of authority for water councils.

“The most recent stakeholder process has been the Land-use Framework, which they’ve [the government] been working on drafting for roughly a couple of years now,” says Diane Pachal, Alberta wilderness director for the Sierra Club of Canada Prairie Chapter. “Prior to that, landholder groups and conservation groups and environmental groups all met and looked at the proposed process. Those of us with experience in previous processes said ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work.’”

The framework is intended to be a government policy that lays the foundation for managing natural resources in the province, on both public and private lands. The environmental groups drafted a set of suggestions for the government about how to make the process function in a way that could bring them on board, but the government largely ignored these suggestions. “If a process isn’t designed to work, what’s the point of putting your time into it? You can always do other things with that time,” says Pachal.

Essentially the groups were concerned about what they perceived as the process’s lack of accountability and murky goals.

Major concerns with the discussions raised by the discouraged environmental groups centreed on the design of the consultation process and the commitment of the government to support the framework and to be held accountable. They wanted clearer goals and direction from the government before proceeding. According to David Kahane, a professor at the Univesity of Alberta who specializes in participatory democratic theory and practice, the design of the process is the most important factor in determining whether a collaborative process will work, particularly in terms of who gets to participate. “For me, the big variable in making these democratically legitimate or illegitimate is how carefully you think about the principles that are governing who you bring in and how transparent you are about that,” says Kahane.

According to Deleen Schoff, a spokesperson for Sustainable Resource Development — the government ministry in charge of the land-use discussions — despite environmental group concerns, there was significant participation in the process. “Over 3,000 Albertans did complete the workbooks, 110 stakeholders chose to have a voice in the process and served on the working groups, and we’re thankful that that has happened,” she says.

However, the fact that many participate in a process does not ensure a balanced outcome, according to Pachal, something she says she has seen from the provincial government in the realm of habitat protection for threatened species. “Say 80 per cent of the public wants to see caribou habitat protected and caribou recover,” she explains, “but that’s not necessarily represented at the table because you’ve got all the industry sectors… and if the selection of the stakeholders isn’t careful, you’ll wind up with the balance at the table being organizations for which wildlife habitat or conservation is not the priority of their organization,” she says.

Another priority that is constantly raised these days is the issue of water use in the province. The Conservatives moved on this front and established the Water for Life strategy that includes the creation of advisory water councils consisting of concerned stakeholders. While the move towards a collaborative approach to finding solutions can be viewed as a positive step towards greater democratic participations, some see fatal flaws in the organization.

“We’ve been involved in this pretty intimately for a couple of years now, and our unfolding view is that we’ve got to get back to basics with respect to governance. At the end of the day, the ultimate responsibility for protecting our watersheds should lie with government. Particularly the provincial government,” says Danielle Droitsch, director of Bow Riverkeeper and a participant on the Bow River Basin Council.

While she supports the concept of Watershed Planning and Advisory Councils (WPACS) like the Bow Basin Council, which look into issues for specific watersheds, she thinks that it can act as a distraction and a means to stall effective change, rather than a powerful policy tool.

“So for example, WPACS don’t have any authority, they have no legal authority whatsoever to actually change what happens on the landscape. Their only power — and even that power hasn’t been defined anywhere near clearly enough — is an advisory capacity,” she says. “There’s absolutely nothing written down that says the government must listen to the WPACs.”

Kahane holds out a great deal of hope for the future of democracy and puts most of that hope in collaborative methods that engage citizens in the decision-making process, but he doesn’t think that Alberta is there yet. In the case of exercises for which there is no legitimate authority, like advisory bodies without teeth, he is cautious.

“It’s not clear what the democratic usefulness of those sorts of exercises are, because it’s at least always vulnerable to the suspicion that this is just window dressing. That you bring people together, they say lots of different things and then the government goes, ‘Oh, what we discovered was they love our policy,’” he says.

He is quick to point out, however, that when discussing new forms of democracy, it is always important to contrast with the system that is already in place, rather than aiming for an ideal right away. “You want to assess the democratic effect of these sorts of stakeholder processes compared to the kind of democracy we already have. I don’t think we have some glowing model of representative democracy in Alberta,” he says.

There is also the concern of compromise in any process that involves divergent interests coming together at the same table, something particularly worrisome for environmental groups. “When you get a whole bunch of people in a room, I see people compromising away what they feel is their bottom line simply to get the acceptance of an industry player at the table who has no real reason for making commitments that will cost them money,” says Droitsch, reiterating that it should be up to the government to institute solid bottom lines to ensure appropriate conservation of our waterways.

For Pachal, it all comes down to how you grind it all out. “They make the analogy to sausages; if you don’t have a good sausage machine, and you’re not putting good things into it, you get crappy sausages at the other end, and that’s what’s happening,” she says. “We’ve been getting crappy sausages — crappy policies and programs — the machine’s the wrong machine, and the wrong things are going into it.”