Home / Governance / The Sustainability Project / Progress Through Process: Achieving Sustainable Development Together / Progress through Process – Section 1

Progress through Process – Section 1

Achieving Sustainable Development Together

-Next Sustainable development means that economic, social and environmental goals can be—must be—pursued in tandem. It is not simply a question of “balancing” environment and economy as competing interests. Rather, sustainable development means finding ways in which they can be integrated so that our prosperity and a healthy environment go together. This is an optimistic vision, and achieving that vision requires not just different policies but also different policy processes. We—the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) and the Public Policy Forum (PPF)—began this project because we believe that achieving sustainable development requires a governance agenda that is more collaborative, engages governments, stakeholders, and citizens at the same table; and helps government solve problems jointly. Governments in Canada often struggle with sustainable development issues. They are uniquely complex: they straddle departments, involve long time frames, and comprise many urgent interconnected issues. On many fronts — climate change, energy, land-use, water, urban development, and others — progress gets bogged down by entrenched interests and adversarial posturing. Governments, which need to take decisions, must navigate between competing claims and deliver on their electoral commitments while upholding the public interest. Yet we also see instances where stakeholders have overcome their differences to collaborate with government and each other on solutions. These positive examples helped inspire this joint PPF-NRTEE project. Driven by a desire to step back from the day-to-day tangle of disagreement and debate on sustainability issues in Canada, we sought to consider how we might forge a more effective path forward for sustainable development through collaborative governance and engagement. We put forward the view that sustainability requires specially crafted governance mechanisms to navigate through difficult issues and to create a more integrated perspective within our governments and society on how to achieve sustainability. Our discussions began with the premise that different views must be brought together and integrated within a process if we are to make progress on sustainable development. In doing so, we recognize that calls for greater openness, collaboration, and engagement in government are not new. As long ago as 1993, the NRTEE recognized that “Conventional decision making mechanisms tend to exclude rather than include diverse interests and do not cope well with the complexity of issues that sustainability presents.” Indeed, the insight that sustainable development requires differing interests be brought together was the principle on which the NRTEE was founded. Since its establishment 22 years ago, the NRTEE has successfully developed a policy advice model in which consensus reports provide a rational, reasoned consideration of sustainable development issues that represent a broad range of views. The Public Policy Forum has a similar story to tell. Since 1987, it has provided a “safe space” for government officials and stakeholders to meet and discuss issues and options that might be too sensitive to discuss in traditional government forums. More recently, PPF has been working with governments to develop models for more collaborative decision-making processes. This joint NRTEE-PPF collaborative process brought together 20 leading Canadian experts and practitioners in sustainability and public policy to consider how more collaborative governance and broader engagement processes might lead to effective progress on sustainable development. Our goals were twofold:

• Understand the potential for effective engagement mechanisms and processes to improve the governance of sustainable development in Canada.
• Develop ideas, recommendations, and strategies for improved engagement practices of the NRTEE and similar organizations.

Through two roundtable discussions and a series of one-on-one interviews, we asked these experts for their views on whether our diagnosis is right: Is there a governance problem for sustainable development in Canada? How can collaboration and engagement improve public policy for sustainable development? This report sets out what we learned from the discussion, and highlights quotes from the dialogue throughout. More specifically, it sets out our thoughts on why collaboration matters and how successful collaborative processes work. It draws two main conclusions from our discussions. First, participants agreed that public policy on sustainable development in Canada is suffering because traditional governance approaches are no longer sufficient for today’s complex world and pluralistic society. They agreed that there is room for progress, and that collaborative governance approaches offer a promising way forward on sustainable development in Canada. Second, participants offered the view that those concerned with public policy on sustainable development shouldn’t always wait for government to lead. On some issues, positions have become so polarized and entrenched that governments are not always best placed to break the logjam. We heard that in such cases policy or advisory organizations like PPF and NRTEE can play a critical role as neutral conveners and facilitators of a dialogue that tries to reframe key issues and move stakeholders away from entrenched positions. In this way, a more open public policy space can be created to facilitate progress.