Theresa Satterfield

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Indigenous peoples would strongly deny the Crown ever possessed the power to extinguish their political rights at any point in history. On this view, the Canadian governments do not grant sovereignty to Indigenous peoples. Rather, sovereignty is their inherent right, which flows from ways of knowing and social and political systems that existed long before the arrival of European colonists. I have focused this dissertation on demonstrating the multiple ways in which Heiltsuk Nation practice sovereignty over their territory. Heiltsuk Territory spans 35,553 square kilometres of lands and waters and is located on the central coast of what is now known as British Columbia, Canada. My analysis focuses on practices of Indigenous sovereignty being expressed outside – though supported by – the courts, and specifically in the negotiation and implementation of “reconciliation agreements” between Heiltsuk Nation and the Province of British Columbia and the Government of Canada. Using qualitative data gathered through 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork, my dissertation traces the implications of negotiated agreements between Heiltsuk Nation and the federal and provincial governments, and finds these agreements have enabled new practices of sovereignty, assertions of jurisdiction, new conceptions of Indigenous well-being, and Indigenous-led efforts of reconciliation. Chapter 2 focuses on the implementation of the 2009 Coastal First Nations Reconciliation Protocol (2009 RPA) to explore how, through day-to-day political interactions, this agreement is operating as a mechanism that works to unsettle long-standing assumptions of Crown sovereignty. Chapter 3 documents the “on the ground” tensions arising from overlapping claims of jurisdictional authority in Heiltsuk territory, beginning from the inception of Coastal First Nations – a unique political alliance of several Nations – to the Land and Resource Management process (LRMP) in the early 2000s, through to the government-to-government process developed in response to the increasing legal authority of First Nations at the time. Chapter 4 critically engages colonial conceptions of “well-being” by focusing on the current wellbeing policies being implemented in coastal BC, and specifically in Heiltsuk territory. Chapter 5 illustrates efforts of Heiltsuk Nation to negotiate one of the first “reconciliation framework agreements” between an Indigenous nation and the Government of Canada.

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Fostering sustainability transition is a pressing global societal challenge. Rising GHG emissions, severe social and economic inequality, unsustainable production and consumption activities, and global environmental degradation and its human consequences are all indicators of an unsustainable world. Sustainability Transition Experiments (STEs) have been proposed as a method to accelerate sustainability transitions in response to these challenges. We need methods by which to evaluate STEs, to understand what is happening within transition processes, and to provide insight to STE designers and facilitators as to the efficacy of their processes. This need led to the development of my research questions: How can we conceptualize, and evaluate, the contributions to sustainability transitions of STEs? Was the Energy Futures Lab effective in supporting sustainability transitions in Alberta?I develop a three-part evaluation framework of process, societal effects, and sustainability transition impacts leveraging a development pathway framing. I apply this framework to the case of the Energy Futures Lab in Alberta, Canada which has the goal of fostering transition to a sustainable energy system. Through participant interviews, document reviews, then coding all data in Nvivo, I assess the EFL and the evaluation framework itself. I conclude the framework to be an effective method with which to evaluate STEs. The most significant contribution of the framework is in conceptualizing and assessing sustainability transition impacts. By leveraging the framing of development pathways, this framework provides a detailed set of evaluation categories and indicators that can be used to assess development pathway change and the contribution of an STE to such change. The EFL itself strongly demonstrated commitment to process elements such as fairness, inclusivity, and transparency in its process design and implementation and included many elements that support transition. The EFL has demonstrable societal effects across all categories including individual capacity development, enhanced networks, and institutional change in policy and organizations. There are also examples where the EFL might have influenced characteristics of development pathway change. The evidence introduced in this dissertation leads me to conclude that, despite the limited evidence of direct impact, markers of transition are present illustrating the EFL’s contribution to sustainability transition impacts.

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Water governance is a priority for Indigenous peoples, whose complex relationships to water are essential to material and cultural well-being. Indigenous water governance refers to Indigenous modes of interacting with and decision-making processes about water including ontologies, epistemologies, and forms of governance distinct to a given people and adapted over time. Indigenous peoples around the world are presently struggling to protect the waters within their territories against unprecedented changes occurring as a consequence of global environmental change and unsustainable resource development. This dissertation empirically investigates how Indigenous water governance is shaped by the Modern land claims in Yukon, Canada focusing on four of fourteen Yukon First Nations (Carcross/Tagish, Kluane, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and White River); the challenges of navigating complex water governance landscapes where historical and ongoing colonialism shape Indigenous water rights and access; Indigenous approaches to water governance as they are informed by specific water ontologies and forms of governance; and the novel approaches to water governance Indigenous peoples are engaging as informed by their relationships to water and strategic engagement with colonial water frameworks. Chapter 2 engages with the ontological politics of water and water governance. It examines how ontological politics inform water conflict between Indigenous and settler governments and the ways Indigenous views of water as a living entity might come to inform more just and sustainable alternatives. Chapter 3 contributes theory and empirics to the study of Indigenous-state water co-governance in Yukon through an examination of the benefits, challenges and future opportunities with the water governance system, shaped by Modern land claims. Chapter 4 engages with the unique opportunity for Yukon First Nations to develop water legislation and explores the implications of engaging “state-like” forms of governance for Indigenous water governance. Chapter 5 seeks to expand understandings of Indigenous peoples’ roles in Community-Based Monitoring from one of ‘knowledge input’ to an emergent water governance strategy engaged to protect the waters within their traditional territories.

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In recent decades, attempts have been made to integrate social and ecological dimensions of change into understandings of resource sustainability, yet challenges persist. Complex dynamics in social-ecological systems fuel these challenges, rendering it difficult to anticipate and address problems arising from development or environmental change. This dissertation examines the ability of common-pool resource (CPR) theories to address and realize sustainable management. Traditionally, CPR systems have been understood as a set of design principles for managing resources, especially single-resource regimes wherein local drivers of change are known. However, most CPR settings are embedded in complex systems and affected by drivers at global to local scales. This recognition has led many scholars to champion adaptation as the way forward, but significant confusion remains over key concepts, including adaptive capacity. Focusing on Chile’s small-scale fishers and divers, I explore how user adaptations and sociocultural shifts in response to globalization can threaten the resilience of Chile’s celebrated territorial user rights regime. I develop a typology of user motivations, and explain how these intersect with user adaptations and expand our ability to create more robust management. By studying the concrete adaptation behaviours of marine users, I also demonstrate how adaptive capacity is a proactive process and behaviour-specific, contrary to assessment methods that emphasize generalizability. Similarly, by measuring social learning as the propensity of individuals to attend to social information, I show how social learning may not be uniformly positive (and may even be negative) for social-ecological outcomes, counter to expectations in contemporary resource literatures. Finally, it is generally assumed that common understanding of resource dynamics will improve the kinds of collective action that ensures the success of CPRs. Results suggest that other variables may be more important (e.g., migrant population), and the positive role of common understanding requires further testing using clear measures. Overall, the results of this dissertation suggest a need to attend to, and account for, a broader set of potentially significant social and psychological variables. Adopting a more precise and critical eye regarding human factors, as endeavoured in this study, may help the science of social-ecological sustainability progress more capably and effectively.

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‘Sustainable development,’ or how to achieve durably desirable states in our planet’s nested social-ecological systems, has been heralded by many as the core civilizational challenge of the 21st century. Adding to this challenge is the fact that the scientific study of how to model and manage such complex systems is confounded by a number of archaic intellectual legacies from predecessor disciplines. Chief among these is a relatively crude, low-resolution ‘rational actor’ theory of human behaviour, which lies in tension with a range of more recent, empirical insights regarding how humans absorb information, make decisions, and act, in situ. I argue that, while authors widely acknowledge the former theory to be insufficient, terminological inconsistencies and conceptual opacity have prevented the latter insights from being fully integrated into much sustainable development research. This dissertation aims to help bridge that gap on the level of both theory and practice. First, I present an accessible, original synthesis of cumulative recent findings on human cognition. This synthesis suggests a key object of analysis should be the particular ways in which people reduce the deep complexity of their social-ecological context into actionable information. I then apply this theoretical lens to the study of two areas designated by the UN as sites for experimentation with the concept of sustainable development: Mt. Carmel UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in Israel, and Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in British Columbia, Canada. Both Mt. Carmel and Clayoquot Sound are reeling from major ecological shifts, and discordant multistakeholder relations. In my data chapters, I show that by (a) applying my synthesized theoretical lens to an analysis of how the various stakeholders perceive their local context, and (b) adapting and combining a range of elicitation and analysis methods that heretofore have been applied in isolation, I am able to generate insights that have direct, actionable significance for the management of these sensitive, politically fraught social-ecological systems. I conclude with a discussion of implications, caveats, prospects of scalability, and suggestions for future research.

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Aboriginal people of the Pacific Northwest have extraordinary affinities to fisheries resources. Balanced relationships with their environments facilitated comprehensive understanding of the cycles of renewal and resource abundance to prosper amidst cyclic variability and harsh climates. Traditional Aboriginal law and social institutions were the sentinel guardians that authorized territorial jurisdiction and resource use. The accumulation of Aboriginal Ecological Knowledge (AEK) ensured continuity of sustainable use and effective resource husbandry to increase wealth. Large surplus of products were driving factors for regional trade and exchange further contributing to wealth generation.Examining the use of eulachon (Thaleichthys pacificus), in the north-central portion of its range illustrates the linkages between resource use, customary law, and territorial authority. Eulachon are used to produce “Grease” (oil rendered from the fish) in this region only from the Unuk River in the north to the Klinaklini River at the southern terminus. Four coastal Aboriginal groups (Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Nuxalk) produce Grease and are located in or near transportation corridors. An elaborate system of territorial authority was validated through the feasting system, also known as potlatches. Those territorial owners that were effective resource managers achieved higher prestige, and maintained authority by demonstration of resource products’ surplus. Contemporary fisheries management regulation has severely restricted Aboriginal access to limited harvests only, despite those same resources having been in Aboriginal use for thousands of years. Several factors have contributed to profoundly altering Aboriginal practices, their historic traditions, and the spaces on which they depended. These include but are not limited to colonization and its assimilation policies, and myriad restrictive legislation over many decades. The geographic scope of the highest degrees of social complexity exactly matches the eulachon Grease producing region. The wealth and prosperity that existed in this region for thousands of years was due to the integral fit of these social institutions with their unique ecological landscape. Removing this fit has caused damage to the wealth and prosperity of Aboriginal people and also risks the collateral loss of the applying Aboriginal Ecological Knowledge in the stewardship of the Pacific Northwest.

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Engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) promise great benefits for society, yet our knowledge of potential risks and best practices for regulation are still in their infancy. High uncertainty and novel ENM properties complicate the management of risk, rendering existing regulatory frameworks inadequate. This thesis investigates the challenges that nanotechnologies pose for risk regulation, and aims to inform the development of policies and practices to address these challenges. In chapter 2, US federal environmental, health and safety (EHS) regulations are analyzed using a life cycle framework, to evaluate their adequacy as applied to ENMs. This analysis reveals that life cycle risk management of nanomaterials under existing regulations is plagued with difficulty, and populated by myriad gaps through which ENM may escape federal oversight altogether. Chapters 3 and 4 examine expert opinions on risks, and perceptions of regulatory agency preparedness to manage risks, using a web-based survey (N=404) of US and Canadian nanotechnology experts. Risk and preparedness perceptions were found to differ significantly across groups of experts. Nano-scientists and engineers were more than twice as likely as nano-regulators to believe that benefits from nanotechnology would greatly exceed risk. Yet, those working in regulatory agencies were far more likely to regard government agencies as unprepared than were experts outside government. These differences were explained by expert views of the novelty of benefits and risks, attitudes toward other classes of risk, preferred approaches to regulation, experts’ degree of economic conservatism, and trust in regulatory agencies.Recognizing the myriad challenges for risk regulation, chapter 5 explores the use of decision-analytic models to cope with uncertainty. Drawing on baseline data monitoring efforts of the US EPA and California DTSC, this chapter argues for the use of novel decision-analytic tools and approaches (such as risk ranking, multi-criteria decision analysis, and “control banding”) in lieu of formal risk assessment to meet regulators’ goals in particular decision contexts.Considered together, this thesis concludes that oversight can be improved through pending regulatory reforms, the utilization of expert opinion to inform decision-making, and the development of improved decision-analytic tools that enable the assessment and management of risks under high uncertainty.

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This dissertation examines new relationships and reconciliation processes between First Nations and the province of British Columbia after the 1997 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in Delgamuukw, a decision that confirmed the continuing existence of Aboriginal title in the absence of treaties. Beginning with existing theories and critiques of reconciliation, I construct a framework for evaluating if reconciliation processes, and particularly those related to territorial governance, are genuine. The framework is then applied to an examination of new relationships, including co-governance, and a new Indigenous system of territorial governance: the Coastal First Nations’ Regional Monitoring System. In order to better understand how relationships are changing and competing claims to land and resources are being reconciled, I interviewed First Nation and provincial policy- and decision-makers, engaged in participant-observation as an employee of various First Nation groups, studied a case of Indigenous territorial governance, and analysed documentary evidence. I found that by strategically using the uncertainty of undefined Aboriginal rights, some First Nations are regaining governing power over their territories and inculcating a new vision for reconciliation in the province. Instead of focusing on treaties in a process designed to create certainty for settler governments, reconciliation is now seen by decision-makers on both sides as an incremental and ongoing process of building relationships, creating sustainable economies, co-governing with a common vision, and building capacity to meet these goals. I also argue that, despite systemic change, the relationship between the province and First Nations remains colonial. Ultimately, genuine reconciliation will require a relationship to which First Nations agree. Other requirements include the province relinquishing territorial control and observing Indigenous sovereignty in practice, the province compensating Indigenous peoples for their losses, and both parties negotiating on equal footing the sharing of decision-making authority and revenues where First Nations agree to co-govern. Overall, the study addresses power as yielded not in a single decolonizing act, but through many small acts in an ongoing process of reconciliation, thereby illuminating decolonization as it is currently and arguably occurring.

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This dissertation investigates the social controversy and regulatory challenges presented by genetically engineered (GE) crops in India. Current research insufficiently addresses risk controversies in the developing world, nor provides adequate consideration of GE biosafety as an important socio-political concept as well as a technical one. The study addresses these gaps by mapping the GE controversy in India, its insertion into health and safety decision-making, and the ways in which divergent stakeholders have established positions in these risk debates. Secondly, it assesses the challenges facing the biosafety regulatory regime in India, particularly as a country undergoing a "risk transition," whereby a growing middle class and marginal farmers are pitted against one another in surprising ways.The data for this study are drawn from three main sources using a case study methodology. Firstly, interviews with: farmers, civil society groups, and regulators. Secondly, an analysis of key policy and legal documents that serve as the foundation of India's regulatory regime. And finally, an analysis of the literature and materials that help make up the "public debate" including NGO publications, website postings, films, and newspaper articles covering aspects of the controversy from key Indian English language sources. Rooted in the social studies of risk, the dissertation also draws from literatures on comparative policy analysis, narrative theory in social science, political ecology, and science and technology studies. India is undergoing a "risk transition", and the country's response to GE agriculture can be expected to differ from what has been more thoroughly mapped in other parts of the world. Moreover, biosafety is the central organizing principle of agricultural biotechnology regulation in India, and its ongoing negotiated quality has spurred both regulatory innovation and larger governance challenges.India has a diverse, largely agrarian population and this study finds that developing new ways to understand how the GE regulatory regime is changed by public debate is crucial, as are meaningful ways to solicit and incorporate public participation in a complex democracy. Strategies to address public perspectives must extend beyond organized civil society groups to include other citizens, especially marginal producers with much at stake in the GE debates.

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This thesis examines the growing recognition of the right to a healthy environment and its potential influence on public policy and environmental protection. It includes an analysis of 192 national constitutions, a survey of 500+ environmental law experts, an examination of environmental laws and court decisions in 86 nations, and a comparison of the environmental performance of nations with and without constitutional environmental protection using three comprehensive indices and three time-series.Constitutional environmental protection is widespread—incorporated in 140 national constitutions—including 86 constitutions that explicitly recognize the right to a healthy environment. Common law nations lag behind civil law nations in this regard. Environmental rights also are recognized in four binding international agreements covering 115 nations in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Constitutionalizing the right to a healthy environment appears to have significant legal consequences. In 72 of 86 nations studied, national environmental laws were strengthened and incorporated environmental rights post-constitutionalization. In 50+ nations—spanning Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa—courts have enforced the right to a healthy environment. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica have pioneered simple and inexpensive judicial processes for protecting the right to a healthy environment. Increasingly, international courts and commissions are applying environmental rights in human rights cases.In some nations, the constitutional right to a healthy environment appears to be contributing to: enhanced enforcement of environmental laws; a barrier to rollbacks in environmental law; greater government accountability; a level playing field with other rights; reduced environmental injustice; and improved access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice.Preliminary analysis suggests a positive relationship between environmental protection provisions in constitutions and environmental performance. Nations with constitutional environmental provisions have smaller ecological footprints, rank higher on comprehensive indices of environmental indicators, and reduced emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases faster than nations without such provisions. Additional quantitative research is needed to further explore the impact of constitutional provisions on environmental outcomes.In conclusion, constitutionalizing environmental protection, particularly the right to a healthy environment, represents a potentially transformative act, capable of reconfiguring legal systems to place unprecedented priority on ecological sustainability.

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Management of wildlife viewing tourism, possibly as a legacy of management of hunting and trapping activities, tends to see its ultimate goal largely in terms of the sustainable human use of wildlife resources. However, where the potential impacts of human activities are non-lethal, the focus on population dynamics may not adequately address relevant societal and ethical concerns. Additional concerns include protecting tourist safety, maintaining a pristine wilderness experience, habituation (either positive, allowing for easier viewing, or negative, reducing animals’ “wildness'”), stressing animals, and showing disrespect or a lack of courtesy.Formal theories of animal and environmental ethics, while frequently conflicting and under-determinate in terms of specific prescriptions, provide a coherent basis and language for the discussion of each of these different concerns.The values extant in society, as reflected in lay writing about wildlife tourism, show that there is societal support for a variety of goals that wildlife tourism management should address. These include population-level and individual-level consequences as well as non-consequentialist goals such as fostering respect for wildlife or avoiding a “trophy photograph” mentality.Scientists attempting to assess the impacts of wildlife tourism use a variety of measures related to both individual and population responses. Especially when using individual-animal measures (behaviour, stress responses), scientists are rarely explicit about why these measures are important, relying instead on an implicit and uncertain link to population-level impacts. These measures, however, may be linked more directly to equally valid (from a management perspective) individual-level concerns.Given the variety of goals that are ethically justified and societally supported, it is inappropriate to conceptualise management as a mere scientific problem. Instead, I use a decision-analysis framework to synthesize relevant contributions from the scientific, ethical, and social-values literatures, identify their respective contributions to the decision-making process, and conclude that while good indicators exist for most of the objectives identified, thresholds at which changes in the indicators call for management action remain to be established.

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Recognition of the impacts of climate change has prompted re-assessment of existing conservation policy frameworks (here thought of as collections of means and objectives that reflect values, beliefs and expectations of control). The concern is that changing temperature and precipitation regimes will alter an extensive range of biological processes and patterns. These system dynamics are at odds with long-established conservation policies that are predicated on assumptions of stable biodiversity targets (e.g. species or ecosystems), and that seek to protect these targets by means of static protected areas. Efforts to address this challenge have so far originated from the fields of ecology and biogeography and include the core adaptive strategies of expanding protected areas and implementing migration corridors. The purpose of this research was to reach beyond these disciplines to integrate across a set of ecological and social insights to develop a more holistic understanding of challenge of adapting conservation policy to the impacts of climate change. Two overarching questions guided this research: 1) do the impacts of climate change necessitate a different set of means, objectives and expectations than are indicated by current conservation adaptation proposals (i.e. proposals that include new protected areas and migration corridors as the primary adaptive strategy); and 2) if there is evidence that this is so, what are the barriers to implementing a policy framework with new means, objectives and expectations?Using a combination of case study, expert elicitation, and ethnographic methods, the results of this thesis provide empirical evidence that the impacts of climate change are seen by many experts to implicate the need for changes in conservation policy that include consideration of interventions such facilitating species distributions through disturbance, assisted migration, revised objectives, and triage-like priority setting. Yet simultaneously there is evidence of a public precautionary ambivalence towards these alternative elements of a potentially new policy framework, combined with durable more preservationist (less engineering) conservation values. It is contended that these value-based commitments have in part, shaped the adaptive response so far. Combined, these results highlight that policy adaptation within “science-based” conservation is a tangle of social dynamics, including durable preservationist-type values and related resistance to anticipated difficult trade-offs implicit in a more transformative decision framework.

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This doctoral dissertation explores how the people of Zeghie, living in a designated sacred area, have confronted and attempted to survive internal and external pressures on their forest-based, coffee-dependent livelihoods. For generations the peninsula has embraced strict rules that have helped sustain the forested and coffee-based agro-ecosystem. Today, the Zeghean economy is at a crossroads and rapid forest harvesting is the norm. This research adopted a number of theoretical approaches including environmental history and political ecology to understand determinants of deforestation and environmental degradation and their impact on the long-term sustainability of the natural resources and people’s livelihoods. While Zeghie’s landscape is unquestionably long-inhabited and also unquestionably regarded as sacred in the eyes of most of its inhabitants, a closer look revealed a landscape that is both historically complex and socially troubled wherein coffee is a newer livelihood than most conservation and aid agencies have assumed it to be, and that other agricultural practices have been used in the past and might be used again. It also suggests that the potential for viable livelihoods may well be over-shadowed by discourses of the sacred and of biodiversity. Research and analysis conducted as part of this work also sought to understand deeply rooted gender and power relations, which are currently fuelling poverty and marginalization. Widespread male emigration and increased numbers of female-headed households have resulted in a fierce struggle for land and have highlighted extreme problems pertaining to the absence of fair and equitable justice for women. The use of critical and feminist legal theory and feminist political ecology has been instrumental to understanding the ways in which local legal and rule-based systems reinforce inequality through imposed community harmony for all at the expense of justice for women. The study concludes that deforestation and environmental change in Zeghie are exacerbated by complex social, political-economic, and historical processes—processes entrenched in the micro politics of property ownership and gendered legal and decision-making institutions. A broader set of policies, institutional and technical interventions will be required for the sake of both local livelihoods and the management of natural resources.

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Current US government risk assessment and management regulations and policies are based on a position that views risk as an objective measure of a predictable physiological morbidity or mortality outcome that is not otherwise connected to social or cultural beliefs and values. Whereas human health risk assessments are meant to determine the probability of adverse impacts from particular hazards, the conventional risk assessment framework fails to consider Native American definitions of health and so risk. This study was conducted with the Coast Salish Swinomish Indian Tribal Community of Washington State, where contamination of their aquatic natural resources has been found. By conducting two series of interviews with traditional high-use seafood consumers, experts and elders from the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, and by averting use of what I describe herein as ‘conventional’ fish consumption survey, the study allowed interviewees to provide a more complex narrative set of details and information that bestowed a much more accurate picture of the reasoning behind seafood consumption habits within the community. Among the more salient points that emerged from the interviews was that seafood represents a symbolic, deeply meaningful food source that is linked to a multi-dimensional ‘Swinomish’ concept of health. Yet drastic changes in access, harvest and consumption have occurred over time, and continue to this day. A health evaluation tool was also devised using simple descriptive scaled rankings to elucidate non-physiological health risks and impacts in relation to contaminated seafood. Findings demonstrate that community cohesion, food security, ceremonial use and knowledge transmission all play primary roles as concerns the Swinomish notions of health, and that these indicators are regarded as equally important when juxtaposed to physical indicators of health. Thus, to eat less seafood—as prescribed by current policy and decision-making procedures when contamination is present—is actually detrimental to the multi-dimensional concept of health as defined by the Swinomish. The evaluation tool may be used in conjunction with the conventional risk assessment framework to more accurately and comprehensively deduce risks and impacts.

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