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Local sustainability programmes incomparative perspective: Canada andthe USAErnest J. Yanarella aa Department of Political Science , University of Kentucky ,Patterson Office Tower, # 1615, 40506, USA Fax: E-mail:Published online: 02 May 2007.

To cite this article: Ernest J. Yanarella (1999) Local sustainability programmes in comparativeperspective: Canada and the USA, Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice andSustainability, 4:2, 209-223, DOI: 10.1080/13549839908725594

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Local Environment, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1999

ARTICLE

Local Sustainability Programmes inComparative Perspective: Canada andthe USAERNEST J. YANARELLA

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to explore Canada's response to the globaldialogue over sustainable development on two dimensions: policy articulation atthe federal and provincial levels and policy implementation at the municipallevel. In order to accomplish these goals, this analysis begins by outlining acritical framework for understanding and assessing local sustainable develop-ment. Next, it examines the evolution of Canadian federal and provincial policiessupportive of sustainable development, including the role played by non-govern-mental organisations (NGOs) in enhancing this process. It then contrasts theCanadian promise and experience with that of the USA. In analysing localresponses to the call for sustainable communities, it offers a case study of theHamilton-Wentworth Vision 2020 sustainable community programme--a NorthAmerican showcase of sustainable community initiatives.

Introduction

As a result of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development(UNCED) in 1992, various nations are pursuing the spirit of Local Agenda 21by designing and implementing local sustainable development programmes.Canada has been among those nations taking the lead in seeking ways to achievea sustainable balance between economic development and ecological sensibility.Despite efforts to translate global designs and programme imperatives intonational policies, economic realities relating to its often dependent statusvis-a-vis the USA and the necessities of engaging in a vigorous export policyin the global economy have meant that Canada's goal of sustainable develop-ment has had to negotiate the Scylla of eco-technocratic management and theCharybdis of aggressive economic growth policies.

Sustainability as an 'Essentially Contested Concept'

Although 'sustainable development' and its more generic term 'sustainability'have become watchwords at global conferences and rallying cries for social

Ernest J. Yanarella, Department of Political Science, Patterson Office Tower # 1615, University ofKentucky 40506, USA. Fax: 606 257 7034. Email: ejyana@pop.uky.edu

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movements and NGOs, their meanings and implications have remained 'essen-tially contested concepts', concealing as much as they reveal. The most populardefinition of the former is offered in the Brundtland Commission report—namely, development that "meets the needs of the present without compromisingthe ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (World Commissionon Environment and Development, 1987). This rendering says little about thecharacter of those needs of the present or the future or the constituencies whomay have to bear the costs of preserving those potentialities for meeting futureneeds or possibly the technical or other means for alleviating those costs andsacrifices. Instead, it has largely served as a minimalist definition around whichsocial consensus might coalesce to initiate such broadly based and looselyorganised programmes.

This definition has also contributed to blurring of the difference betweengrowth and development. While some advocates of sustainability programmesuse the terms interchangeably, Daly & Cobb (1989, p.71) have clarified thedistinction by defining 'growth' as "quantitative expansion in the scale of thephysical dimensions of the economic system," while defining 'development' as"qualitative change of a physically nongrowing economic system in dynamicequilibrium with the environment". Placing the economic system within a moreencompassing ecological system, they argue that:

...by definition, the earth is not growing but developing. Any systemof a finite and nongrowing earth must itself also eventually becomenongrowing. Therefore, growth will become unsustainable eventuallyand the term 'economic growth' would then be self-contradictory. Butsustainable development does not become self-contradictory, (pp. 7 1 -72)

This argument against sustainable growth (whether interpreted as economicgrowth sustained indefinitely into the future or as economic growth counterbal-anced by environmental protection or repair) is grounded in Daly & Cobb'sembrace of the 'reduced consumption' approach over the 'substitutability'approach to sustainable development (Colgan, 1997) and their defence of 'strongsustainability' over 'weak sustainability' as the linchpin of sustainable develop-ment. As against the assumption of the 'human exceptionalist' school (e.g.Simon, 1981) that postulates the infinite replaceability of finite natural resourcesby humanly created substitutes, Daly & Cobb press their defence of strongsustainability by arguing that the latter requires "maintaining both humanlycreated and natural capital intact separately, on the assumption that they arecomplements rather than substitutes in most production functions" (p. 72).

Working from the idea that social sustainability can be discerned in part byunderstanding sustainable processes in natural settings, Redclift shows howcomplex ecosystems, like tropical rainforests, achieve homeostatic balance, orwhat natural ecologists call 'climax systems' of high diversity, large biomass,and high stability through protection from rapid change and 'through shifts ofenergy flows away from production and towards the maintenance of the systemitself (1987, p. 18). By contrast, he notes, humans typically seek to stall suchecosystems in early stages of ecological succession, where the yield of products

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is high, but where the stabilising elements of organic matter and biomass fail toaccumulate. High production within these ecosystems, then, comes at "the costof confounding nature's strategy of maximum protection or adaptation" (ibid.).

This image of ecological sustainability may be taken as an essential point ofdeparture for a sophisticated understanding of social sustainability. For pro-grammes of urban sustainability, a number of key implications flow from thisdefinition and its underlying strong sustainability thesis. These include:

Neither the globe nor nation-state is the proper scale for institutionalising socialsustainability: The Achilles heel of most blueprints of sustainable developmentis that they are couched at the scale of the nation or globe (Yanarella & Levine,1992a). Targeting sustainable development strategically at the global or nationalscale all but makes impossible meaningful socio-ecological analysis and con-certed political action. Weighing dynamic, conflicting social processes andtendencies at the national or global scale contributing in some cases to sustain-ability and in others to unsustainability would prove to be a daunting, if notimpossible, task—and with wide margins of uncertainty. These imponderableswould also foster a lack of clarity on the impact of such programmes in affectingthe sustainability quotient (the net balance or outcome of aggregate sustainableand unsustainable activities and trends) at the national or global scale.

The city is the nodal point of achieving sustainability: It is the scale of the citythat is the nodal point for social synthesis and the platform for productive changeseeking to realise sustainable development. As that human settlement possessedof the minimum density supportive of urbanity and civic life and as the potentialArchimedean point of the many countercurrents convergent with an ecologicalworldview, the city is the locus of sociality, local economic production andexchange, responsive architectural design, and political participation. Moreover,because the true city has historically been identified with economic self-sufficiency and an equilibrium of social forces, the city presents itself as thelargest unit capable of addressing the many urban architectural, social, econ-omic, political, natural resource, and environmental imbalances besetting themodern world and, simultaneously, the smallest scale at which such problemscan be meaningfully resolved in an integrated and holistic fashion (Yanarella &Levine, 1992b).

Sustainable cities are best understood as 'learning ecologies': If the model ofnatural sustainability presents itself as the touchstone for efforts to bring aboutsocial sustainability, sustainable cities must come to grips with the change-ori-ented and non-utopian character of all social collectivities. Cities, Lynch (1981,p. 97) argues, are the products of thinking human beings who are capable oflearning, rather than collections of instinctual organisms following "an inevitablesuccession until they strike some iron limit". The sustainable city "is one inwhich the continuity of this complex ecology is maintained while progressivechange is permitted" (p. 116). Indeed, such change ineluctably occurs, since nosocial process can completely contain the forces of change and chaos that arealways already there (Yanarella & Levine, 1992a, p. 177). A better interpretation

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of the sustainable city is to recognise it, in Lynch's term, as an evolving"learning ecology" (p. 115).

Sustainability is a balance-seeking process, not a pathway: The problem ofsustainability and an appropriate strategy for achieving sustainable cities may beclarified by juxtaposing two approaches to sustainability (Levine & Radmard,1992). The first is the popular vision of 'moving toward sustainability' achievedby working to make the world less unsustainable. This image of sustainability aspathway advances the injunction: 'pick the low-lying fruit'. On this view,sustainability policies should promote measures that undertake the technologi-cally easiest, economically least expensive, and politically most palatable activ-ities. The problem with treating sustainability as a pathway is that by its ownlogic this linear approach creates a set of insurmountable political, social, andeconomic obstacles, making the projected end-state unreachable. With eachsuccessive step taken, the costs of pursuing the next step along the pathwayinvolves higher financial costs, fewer economic dividends, and greater politicalresistance as the law of diminishing returns comes into effect (Yanarella &Levine, 1994).

In advancing the case for an alternative strategy of sustainable cities, we arguefor a second image of sustainability as a balance-seeking process. On this view,urban sustainability requires a threshold involving a minimum set of conditionssuch that each succeeding step becomes easier, less costly, and more politicallytractable. Between globalist and localist strategies, this strategy locates the cityas the nexus for striving to put into balance the many levels of sustainable andunsustainable systems flowing through the city. Through computer modelsinterrelating the many processes (energy, economic, transportation, etc.) gener-ated within and passing through the city, sustainable policies and practices canbe designed with a view toward maintaining the overall balance among theseforces without exporting negative externalities (waste, pollution, etc.) beyond thecity or into the future. Here, sustainability at the scale of the city becomes nota distant goal to be striven for but a complex and dynamic process to bemaintained in the face of continuing change and tendencies toward imbalance.

Canadian Sustainability Policy: origins, orientation and promise

At least since UNCED, the USA and Canada have struggled to face up to thetransition from the idiom of environmentalism to the vocabulary of sustainabil-ity. While both have seen common environmental issues emerge on their policyagendas, the character and emphases in their policy debates and the form of theirperiodic resolutions of these issues have been shaped by the historical andcultural formation processes affecting their environmental/ecological politics andtheir institutionalisation and administration in their respective policy processes.

In the USA, contemporary environmentalism owes its impetus to the conser-vation and preservation movements, which emerged between 1890 and 1920 outof concern with sustenance and habitat issues (Schnaiberg, 1980). 'Progressiveconservationism' developed in response to the destruction of the nation's naturalresources and was based on an alliance of state agencies and 'responsible'

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corporations that recognised the need to promote careful resource managementthrough centralised administration, technical efficiency, and long-range planning(Hays, 1969). The preservationist movement represented by the Sierra Club andthe National Audubon Society, was, however, more concerned with habitatissues, i.e. setting aside wilderness areas and parklands for the enjoyment ofpresent and future generations.

This environmental experience has integrated habitat and sustenance goals andenhanced the preeminent position of those elitist, hierarchical organisations thathave shaped American environmentalism into a largely middle-class, reformistmovement supported by professional staffs of environmental lawyers, impactscientists, and lobbyists skilled at political action and legal redress. Morerecently, mainstream American environmentalism has been invigorated by therise of grassroots and citizen action groups committed to nurturing democratic,decentralised organisation activities, revitalising American politics at thelocal level, and challenging technocratic tendencies towards state and federaladministration of environmental issues (Oelschlaeger, 1991; Schnaiberg &Gould, 1994; and Zimmerman, 1994). Ecological groups and NGOs dedicated tomobilising local-global action on behalf of global ecological problems havechallenged the worldview of mainstream environmental groups, reopening foun-dational issues over the deeper philosophical relationship between humankindand nature, the strategic and tactical efficacy of legal-judicial actions, and thesocial constituency of the overwhelming majority of American environmentalgroups.

Canada's environmental organisations overlap considerably with American-based environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Earth, butCanadian environmentalism's historical formation process and its greaterfinancial support from government point to important dissimilarities that haveled its environmental politics to take a different course and expression in thecontext of rising global interest in sustainability issues (Lundqvist, 1974; Wall,1986; Paehlke, 1989). The Canadian environmental movement grew out ofconservationist initiatives to build a system of national parks, but later than inthe USA. The preservationist impulse also came later in the 20th century andwas triggered "as much in opposition to government initiatives on Crown landsas to the rapacity of private enterprise" (Paehlke, 1989), but its raison d'etre wasto advance the lifestyle objective of wilderness appreciation rather than theshaping of governmental policy through lobbying.

Canadian environmentalism has been more rooted in the professions and thecivil service bureaucracies, occupations with a stake in conservation and preser-vation, and has been expressed in government agencies and federal programmesrather than in middle-class associations (Boardman, 1992). In recent years,however, permanent national and provincial voluntary organisations such asOntario's Pollution Probe and New Brunswick's Conservation Council havebecome active in environmental politics. Single-issue citizen action groups toohave begun to populate Canada's environmental scene.

With the elevation of sustainable development onto the global agenda, thegreater initiative and involvement by the state in Canadian environmentalpolicy-making and the more limited but growing activism of the public and

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native environmental groups have been prominent in Canada's response to theglobal dialogue over sustainable development. The Canadian forum for advanc-ing a vision and plan for a sustainable future is the Project de societe. Its originslay in decisions by the 40-member panel that had assisted in the Canadianposition at the UNCED that a new organisation was required to sustain themomentum of Canada's sustainable development efforts and to promulgate theNational Sustainable Development Strategy called for at Rio in the Agenda 21document. The Projet de societe then is a national process of multi-stakeholder,collaborative partnerships fashioned at each level of governance with all sectorsof society. In this sense, Canada has striven to use its cultural and ethnic mosaicas a virtue to work out a vision of a sustainable future based on consensuallybased principles, goals, and policies for realising that vision. Within this broadand loosely based democratic framework, stakeholders are encouraged to lookbeyond their narrow self-interests and engage the process of generating pro-grammes and practices harmonising competing interests and resting on a societalproject uniting all parties.

The chief instrument for advancing this Canadian agenda for sustainabledevelopment in government policies is the Round Table. Originating fromrecommendations of the National Task Force on Environment and Economy, itwas quickly established by all 13 jurisdictions of the Canadian government.Recent studies suggest that to date the record of these organs of eco-democracyhas been an uneven one (Scruggs, 1993; Colgan, 1997). Greatest progress in thepolicy formulation process perhaps resides in the development of sustainabilityindicators—measures of tracking progress toward sustainability goals popular informulas interpreting sustainability as a pathway.

The checkered character of the record of the Round Table experience can beseen by juxtaposing its most innovative recommendation—fostering 'green'industries—with its area of greatest resistance to sustainable resource policy—capturing nonrenewable resource rents (Colgan, 1997, pp. 128, 131). AsColgan has noted, "none of the governments has made an effort to shift aportion of the revenues received from nonrenewable resource extraction into apermanent fund that can be used to develop alternatives to the exhaustibleresources" (p. 131).

If the Round Table has been a multi-level mechanism for integrating sustain-able development into policy making, Local Agenda 21 has been a mechanismfor transferring concerns voiced in global forums into local programmes forrealising sustainability. Among the new environmental organisations generatedout of the sustainability debate, the International Council for Local Environmen-tal Initiatives (ICLEI), whose world secretariat is located in Toronto, is aninternational clearing house on sustainable development and environmentalpolicies geared to local governments. ICLEI's non-doctrinaire, bottom-up ap-proach to sustainable development eschews any single formula for an exper-imental approach to seeking out and examining what activities work best in localsettings and what local conditions give rise to them. Its empirical approach tookanother form in 1993, when it established its Local Agenda 21 Model Communi-ties Project. Tapping 14 cities, including Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Munici-pality, as applied research projects to test its loose framework for sustainable

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development planning, ICLEI has followed these programmes and their progressin finding successful sustainability practices in diverse sectors.

The USA and the Uncertain Quest for Sustainability

The USA, by contrast, has been stymied in its efforts to advance a sustainabilityagenda by a variety of cultural, political, and institutional factors. The deeply-rooted sway of corporate values and priorities in American federal policymaking (Greenburg, 1974) and political culture (Wolfe, 1983), coupled with anhistorically weaker role of national government in the planning sector (Hartz,1964; Weinstein, 1968; Blissett, 1972; Miller, 1976), have hobbled federalsustainability initiatives. Although resistance to the 1992 Rio Earth Summitevidenced by the Bush Administration gave way to creation of the President'sCouncil for Sustainable Development by his successor in June 1993, US policyhas been characterised by a slow, circuitous course, a minimalist orientation, anda greater emphasis on symbolism over substance.

Since its initiation, overall sustainable development policy has become littlemore than a patchwork of modest initiatives and largely symbolic programmes—including the Department of Energy's Center of Excellence for SustainableDevelopment, the Department of Commerce's National Teleconference on Sus-tainable Communities, and the National Association of Counties US Conferenceof Mayors Joint Center for Sustainable Communities. Meanwhile, variousAmerican cities have enlisted stakeholders in devising sustainable communityprogrammes based on a minimalist understanding of sustainable developmentand a checklist of sustainability indicators.

In many respects the showcase of community sustainability programmes in theUSA, Chattanooga's 'Sustainable Development' programme has pioneered inbrownfield redevelopment (i.e. the reclamation of rundown industrially contami-nated properties for re-use by industry) and in replacing diesel buses withelectric shuttles (in part to overcome the legacy of the 1960s when the city hadsome of the worst air quality in America). Another notable focus has beendowntown revitalisation. Prominent among these efforts has been the Riverparkdevelopment, spearheaded by a group of business elites and developers and theLyndhurst Foundation, to marshal public funds and private capital to build,among other things, a hotel, marina, aquarium, golf course and old-time tradingpost. These projects however have been diminished by the lack of significantinvolvement by Native Americans and African Americans whose burial groundsand neighbourhoods respectively would be affected by such developments(Bartling & Ferris, 1996). Despite the involvement in design charettes bynationally known architects and energy experts and its slogan calling for'economy, ecology, equity' (Frenay, 1996), Chattanooga's overall sustainabledevelopment programme is still heavily geared to fostering only a modicum ofenvironmental responsibility bounded by the primary goal of continued econ-omic growth.

Two major contributions of Sustainable Seattle to urban sustainability practicehave been efforts to gauge progress through sustainability indicators and torestructure urban design around the urban village concept. Seattle's 'Indicators

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of Sustainable Community' has isolated some 40 key indices comprisingyardsticks of sustainability. Based on the idea that "sustainability is more adirection than a destination" (Seattle, 1993-1998, p. 2), this technique bears allthe marks of an instrument shaped by quantitative, incremental assumptionsbased on a liberal notion of linear progress. The most positive argument forgovernments employing sustainability indicators is that selecting such indicatorsreflects collective values (Meadows, 1972) and clarifies stated goals and desiredoutcomes (Roseland, 1998, p. 203), while assuring that what gets measured andevaluated gets implemented and supported (Osbome & Gaebler, 1992).

Seattle's brief experience with indicators as policy instruments, however, hasbeen sobering. Although emulated by other cities, its 'Indicators of SustainableCommunity' approach has suffered from the proclivity to treat these indicatorsin isolation from one another rather than examining them in their linkage toothers, despite professed concerns for applying them holistically (Pace, 1998, pp.28-33). Given their vagueness and generality and their multiple ways of beinginterpreted, they are more aptly characterised as 'indicators of a mirage'(Glasscock, 1996) or measures of unsustainability. Indeed, the overall judgementby the organisation's own report is that "overall, the Seattle area is not movingtoward the goal of long-term sustainability" (Seattle, 1993-1998).

More promising has been the Urban Village concept, the centrepiece ofSeattle's Comprehensive Plan. As an antidote to urban sprawl, the urban villageproposal has sought to foster growth management and neighbourhood enhance-ment by supporting within Seattle's boundaries the flowering of urban centres,hub urban villages and compact residential neighbourhoods composed of ethnicand racially diverse neighbourhoods, mixed-use buildings, pedestrian-orientedcommercial areas, community-based organisations and well-integrated publicspace (Seattle, 1994, p. ix).

The ensuing political struggle over the urban village strategy has mobilisedvigorous opposition from local merchant groups, land developers and areacitizens. Based on ideas and design principles of neo-traditional urbanism, thiscentral concept falls short of a truly sustainable urban design concept. Itembraces a neo-urbanist image of small-town America in the heart of amodern metropolis without radicalising its foundations by connecting it toecological anchors that would make it a meaningful contribution to Daly &Cobb's (1989) strong sustainability thesis. Thus, the Seattle's ComprehensivePlan remains caught up in the rhetoric of sustainability and sustainabledevelopment while continually reverting to the language and assumptions ofeconomic growth.

Portland, Oregon's major claim to attention is its model Urban GrowthBoundary (UGB) approach to urban growth management. A policy creature ofOregon's 1974 Goal 14 and Portland's progressive planning culture, the UGB isa blunt policy instrument intended to draw a sharp line of demarcation betweenthe 'urbanisable area' within the city, where further growth is expected andpermissible, and rural land outside the boundary, where it is not. This quarter-century-old land-use experiment has begun to face concerted opposition fromcity dwellers, rural farmers, developers, minority spokespeople, and even envi-ronmentalists (Oregonian, 1998).

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Part of the problem with this policy tool is that its bluntness means that itsbureaucratic application has tended to generate unexpected consequences andpolicy paradoxes. One criticism is that it has preserved thousands of acres ofunproductive farmland outside the boundary while permitting development ofmore fertile farmland within the boundary (Franzen & Hunsberger, 1998, p.2).More serious, though, is the fact that it is not so much a genuine ecological toolas it is a growth management device. To be so, the UGB concept would needto be married to the ecological footprint approach of Wackernagel & Rees(1995). This union would assist policy-makers and citizens not only in settingouter boundaries to urban growth, but would also provide a measure forassessing a city's carrying capacity vis-a-vis the Ecosystem (Rees, 1996).

Municipal Responses to the Call for Sustainability: the case of Hamilton-Wentworth

Canadian commitment to sustainable development has taken greatest expressionin the many municipal programmes for local sustainability which have experi-mented with new ideas, innovative structures, and novel projects. Among thesemyriad programmes is the Vision 2020 Sustainable Community Project of theRegional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth.

With a population of around 452 000 (cen. 1991), the regional-municipalityand its centre, the city of Hamilton, are located in the southwestern part ofOntario, along western Lake Ontario. Noted for a strong manufacturing basedominated until recently by the steel industry, the region has undergoneeconomic restructuring, causing many of its largest steel and related industriesto downsize, relocate or even shut down.

The origins of Hamilton-Wentworth's Sustainable Community programme layin the concatenation of management and planning imperatives and regionalenvironmental concerns taking place in late 1989 and early 1990. The adminis-trative impetus stemmed from the perceived need within the regional manage-ment staff for new means to integrate and co-ordinate municipal budgetarydecisions with policy goals. This review eventually coalesced around the conceptof sustainable development as the appropriate anchor of a new regional planningand budgeting system (Thorns, 1997).

The other event fuelling the sustainable community initiative was grassrootsorganising around the Hamilton Harbor. When the harbour was chosen as one ofsome 17 toxic areas for which a remedial action plan (RAP) was mandated, areacitizens and representatives from industry, government, and environmentalgroups responded by convening a group to reach consensus on methods toeliminate its environmental hazards and improve water quality. As regionaladministrative staff members were laying the groundwork for the task force, thelocal RAP group decided to adopt a course seeking long-range, sustainablesolutions to the problem of harbour restoration. The outlook and energies of itsmembers filtered into the activities surrounding the sustainable communityinitiative, as some of its members were invited onto the sustainable developmenttask force (Bekkering, 1996).

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This initiative was launched by the Regional Council in June 1990 with thepromulgation of a citizens' task force on sustainable development. Its mandatewas to develop a specific definition of the meaning of sustainable developmentfor Hamilton-Wentworth and to formulate a community vision to steer futuredevelopment in Hamilton-Wentworth grounded in the principles of sustainabledevelopment. From mid 1990 through early 1993, the citizens' task forceengaged over 1000 citizens in town meetings, interviews, focus groups andround tables, culminating in a vision statement titled, 'VISION 2020: TheSustainable Region', an outline of a sustainable Hamilton-Wentworth in the year2020 based upon sustainability principles and requirements.

Coupled with this vision statement is Vision 2020's approach for monitoringprogress toward the end-goal. Launched in Summer 1994, an indicators projectcalled 'Signposts on the Trail to Vision 2020', identified 60 key measures ofsustainable development, later trimmed to 24, for the region. These signpostshave been used annually to monitor and assess progress toward sustainability,with a report card being released on Sustainable Community Day each June(Regional-Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth, 1996c).

Since the Regional Council's adoption of Vision 2020, the Hamilton-Went-worth sustainable community programme has put into action many recommenda-tions of the citizens' task force reports. Chief among these actions is revision ofthe long-term plans and policies of the region. Incorporating nearly 100 of the400 proposals listed in Vision 2020, the Regional Council passed a new OfficialPlan for Land Use, titled, 'Toward a Sustainable Region', in June 1994. This wasfollowed in November 1994 with the adoption of the 'Renaissance Report', astrategic plan for long-range sustainable development. As a result, all councilreports now document sustainable community implications of all proposals andpolicies (Region of Hamilton-Wentworth, 1996a and b).

Vision 2020 has also given rise to a host of specific projects, ranging from thedevelopment of a bicycle commuter network to alleviate automobile transporta-tion loads and a Hamilton-Wentworth green-up programme to assist families andbusinesses in implementing conservation and other sustainability measures toconstruction of combined sewer overload reservoirs to improve harbour waterquality. It sponsors an annual Sustainable Community Day, where publiceducation and youth-oriented programmes seek to instill ecological values andsupport for sustainable development. The sustainable community programmealso named 9 October 1996 'Crazy Commute Day' which encouraged citizens tochoose alternative transportation options to travel to work (Hughes, 1996b).

Hamilton-Wentworth's Vision 2020 stands out for its careful planning byregional planning staff and task force members, as well as for its broad citizensupport. That Hamilton-Wentworth's Vision 2020 has become the crown jewelof Canada's many sustainable community experiments is evidenced by the manyaccolades it has received, including Environment Canada's Environmental Ex-cellence Award in 1994.

Most impressive has been the programme's success in balancing administrat-ive prerogatives and actions with public decision making and direction. TheSustainable Community Day, scheduled each October, has blended a widevariety of community education activities involving segments of the citizenry

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and citizen organisations in programmes that have approached the ideal of amutual education process among citizens, youth, elected officials, public ser-vants, environmentalists, preservationists, corporate leaders, and small businesspeople. The record suggests that commitment to consensus building and partner-ship between and among different sectors of the community is genuine andconstitutes a community norm. By all accounts, the regional municipality seemsto be into local sustainable development for the long haul.

Regional planners, business people, and venture capitalists have also demon-strated an uncommon ability to discern novel ways of greening the localeconomy in confronting regional economic restructuring. Corporate downsizingof the steel giants in the area, like Dofasco and Stelco, have compelled regionaladministrators and corporate executives to seek ways to chart a new vision forthe region's economy. Restructuring of the area economy around new businessesdedicated to recycling, pollution controls, waste management, and resourceefficiency is readily perceptible (Kendrick & Moore, 1995). The success ofcompanies like Philip Environmental, Inc. and Zenon Environmental, Inc. andproposals for a Technopolis Centre in Hamilton to disseminate and showcaserecycling technologies foreshadow growing efforts of high-tech and knowledge-based companies in the region to carve out a niche with an environmentalidentity in the competitive global arena of fast capitalism (Wilkins, 1993;Mitchell, 1995a,b).

Vision 2020 has had to weather dramatic shifts in provincial support over itsbrief tenure. Originally aided by a sympathetic New Democratic Party provincialgovernment, it has suffered in recent years from the Progressive Conservativevictory and 'Commonsense Revolution' in Ontario. Sizeable budgetary cuts ingovernment services and programme have undercut Vision 2020's planningambitions and goals, as well as weakened conservation authorities and otherenvironmentally-related measures (Prokaska, 1995) by reducing protection ofenvironmentally sensitive areas, balkanising planning among contiguous munic-ipalities, weakening restrictions on urban sprawl, and permitting more develop-ment on agricultural lands (Stacey & Butler, 1995; Hughes, 1996a; Lewinburg,1996). However, the Hamilton-Wentworth programme has managed to survivethe provincial policy reversal and budgetary onslaught.

A more formidable symbolic attack on Vision 2020 has come from opponentsof regional plans to build a north-south expressway through the Red Hill Valley.Red Hill Creek Expressway foes have argued against the highway constructionproject on the basis of its incompatibility with some of Vision 2020's goals.They point out that its vision of "green corridors bring[ing] nature into the city"and its commitment to accommodating "automobiles, as complimentary forms oftransportation" require the preservation of Red Hill Creek from partial destruc-tion to make room for the East-West route of the proposed expressway(Neysmith, 1995). They have argued that while the regional municipality hasgained political capital from its sustainability vision, the Friends of Red HillValley have been following the basic tenets of sustainability through concertedaction to make those principles come to life in this case (Lukasik, 1996). Theyhave also claimed that the vision statement's own report card has acknowledgedincreases in air quality complaints and downtown office vacancies (two of the 24

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sustainability indicators), trends that would only be exacerbated by the construc-tion of the expressway (Stortz, 1996).

This unresolved controversy points to an even more fundamental shortcomingin Vision 2020's planning and implementation to date: downtown revitalisationand related transportation issues. Despite activities such as a Downtown IdeasCharette (Mokrycke, 1996) and the municipal government-commissioned trans-portation policy study, little headway has occurred in finding meaningful waysto curtail the automobile as the primary means of transportation in and out of thedowntown business area or to curb its role in shaping the form and pattern ofdevelopment of the downtown or suburbs. Aside from Crazy Commute Day andfailed experiments with bicycle paths along downtown streets, both public transitand bicycles have received short shrift in efforts to modify automobile use(Croft, 1996). While the report rhetorically gestures to the region's vision ofsustainable community by 2020, it recommends $850 million for road mainte-nance and construction, as opposed to $270 million for public transit, over thesucceeding 25 years. The problem appears to be that the transportation studygives overwhelming attention to alleviating anticipated traffic bottlenecksthrough shop-worn traffic nostrums, rather than by giving priority to pedestrian,bicycle, and public transit recommendations flowing from a genuine vision of amore compact sustainable city of the future (Hughes, 1995).

Looming on the horizon like a slow tidal wave are the negative shaping forcesof growth pressures from the Greater Toronto Area (Poling, 1995). If onedefining feature of Hamilton-Wentworth's identity has been its non-identity withToronto ('Hamilton is not Toronto'), the unchecked expansion of the GreaterToronto Area threatens to engulf the regional municipality and submerge itsdistinctive regional identity in a more homogeneous agglomeration. WhileVision 2020 has important goals and proposed tools for stemming this process,its prevailing shortsightedness with respect to adopting a holistic approach tosustainability hobbles its sustainable community strategy in the face of the slow,but inexorable tide of metropolitan growth and sprawl from the north.

Grounded thus far on a thin sustainability platform, the Hamilton-Wentworthprogramme seems to satisfy itself with emphasis on parts of the programme (e.g.its valorisation of sustainability indicators), while leaving the vision of the wholeto languish. As in the case of Seattle, the adoption of sustainability indicatorsdiverts attention from the needed task of thinking holistically and implementingsectoral policy innovations in an integrated manner. The alternate task ofdesigning and building sustainable city implantations in, for example, brownfieldsites where all the necessary sustainability elements could be brought to bear andput into balance is an approach that the Hamilton-Wentworth Region may yetfind more profitable in advancing its sustainability agenda (Levine & Radmard,1990).

To shift from the parts to the whole, from indicators to balance-seekingprocesses, the Hamilton-Wentworth Sustainable Community Programme willneed to muster resources for taking the next step from a view of sustainabilityas a pathway to sustainability as a balance seeking process. It will need tostrengthen its democratic, consensus building foundation to find that minimumthreshold of sustainability in the space and place of its region. It will need to

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institutionalise sustainable development as a means of negotiating the manyforces operating within its boundaries using a sustainability equation that isalways moving, always in need of rebalancing. Fortunately, the Hamilton-Went-worth sustainable community initiative manifests many resources in its citizenry,its culture, and its public realm for taking that next step.

Conclusion

This study has explored the scope and trajectory of Canadian sustainabilitypolicy. As the illustrations from the USA and the more detailed Canadian casestudy testify, an integrated approach to negotiating the political, cultural, andeconomic obstacles to urban sustainability from pathway to process remains aformidable task. A strategy of environmental moralism and policy incremental-ism still seem to be the order of the day in the North American context. Theimplications of Daly & Cobb's strong sustainability thesis and the idea ofsustainability as process have yet to be institutionalised into a resilient andcoherent programme of urban sustainability.

Meanwhile, European initiatives in urban sustainability, buoyed by the moreadvanced character of its discourse and its greater cultural appreciation of thehistoric city, point to ingredients and directions that North American cities andcommunities would be best advised to emulate (Levine et ah, 1999). Perhaps themany individual novelties and innovations characterising the approaches of theAmerican and Canadian programmes will play their part in assisting in thelong-term and necessary cultural transformation proliferating around the worldand posing the sustainability paradigm as the best and only foundation forlocal-global restructuring of political economy, governance, and lifestyle in thenew millennium.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his deep gratitude to the Canadian Embassyand the Canadian Studies Program for providing a grant to support field work inOntario and the Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth during thesummer of 1997. Appreciation is also extended to Dr Richard S. Levine, DrWilliam C. Green and Mr Dennis Moore for their timely counsel and generoussupport for this undertaking.

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