Natural Resources and Sustainability Cluster Design Proposal

 

General objectives of the cluster design program

 

The Research Cluster Design program is a major component of the overall plans underway to transform the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from a granting council to a 'knowledge facilitator'.

 

The key objectives of this SSHRC program are:

 

-       To create strategic direction for humanities and social sciences research (HSS)

-       To engage a broader community in knowledge translation/mobilization (KM/KT)

-        To internationalize Canadian research communities

-       To develop new opportunities for partners to contribute to and benefit from HSS research

-       To achieve greater public recognition for HSS research in Canada

 

These objectives are expected to be reached in a bottom-up process of consultation with the Canadian humanities and social science research communities. Submission of 135 possible topics to SSHRC in response to the Call for Cluster Proposals in the Fall of 2004 was the first step in identifying a limited number of topical areas in which SSHRC expects to invest a sizeable portion of its budget in the post-transformation era.

 

From these proposals, 30 were funded in Phase II of the project and are expected to complete the design of a proposed 'Virtual Institute', perhaps along the lines of the 12 developed in the mid-1990s by the CIHR. Our proposal for a cluster to research sustainability and natural resources was one of the successful 30, which have now been grouped by SSHRC into 9 thematic areas:

 

Innovation and Business

Regions, Cities and Communities

Governance and Public Policy Infrastructure

Multiculturalism and Citizenship

Environment and Resources

Education and Learning

Human Development and Well-Being

Frontiers of Scholarship

Canada and the World

 

Following a national conference in Ottawa, February15-17, 2004, this list will be winnowed to an unknown, but smaller, number of key themes and associated clusters.

 

Objectives of the Natural Resources Cluster

 

Our proposal for a natural resource cluster currently exists as one of two proposals grouped under the theme of 'Sustainability and the Environment'. The other is a proposal focusing on the history of resources and the environment in Canada. Our proposal is for a cluster that is oriented towards analyzing the dynamics and implications of change in the key pillar of Canada's political economy: the resource extraction and harvesting activities which historically have driven the Canadian economy, influenced regional development and population movements, affected the nature of individual and community wealth and creative activity, and defined Canadabs interests in foreign policy, trade and our relations with other countries and regions of the world. Most recently, the interests, ideas and institutions centred on the resource sector have become increasingly linked to the protection and management of the Canadian and global environment and we expect the environmental aspects of Canadian resource activities to be a major focus of our proposed cluster.

 

Specifically, our proposal requests that SSHRC develop a virtual institute or research cluster that would bring together and facilitate the interaction of social science and humanities researchers in Canada and elsewhere working on the wide-range of issues linking resource use and environmental sustainability. This institute or cluster would provide a home for scholars working on issues ranging from global climate change to specific sectoral concerns such as energy conservation and development or fisheries and forestry management, agricultural trade and agri-food issues such as GM crops, to writers, artists and academics working on resource and environmental themes related to the construction and de-construction of Canadian communities, regions and identities.

 

The overall goals of the cluster are as follows:

 

-       To bring together researchers and potential research users who are currently organized in highly fragmented sectors (e.g. forestry, fisheries, water, mining etc) and disciplines (e.g. resource management, environmental studies, economics, Canadian studies, Womenbs Studies, Sociology, Geography, Political Science, English and others) to explore common or analogous issues and problems.

 

-       To generate knowledge that can be used by scholars, practitioners, and students, in Canada and elsewhere,

 

-       To enable the research community itself to determine what common issues and problems are worth exploring in the knowledge generation process,

 

-        To devise an institutional structure that will bring researchers together into problem-oriented multidisciplinary research working groups; and facilitate knowledge mobilization through the establishment of cluster links with knowledge users,

 

-       To act as a knowledge broker in facilitating the direct and indirect transmission of knowledge to final users at policy, community and industry levels.

 

Identifying researchable problems

 

Fragmentation of natural resource research communities is not just a feature of the way resource management is organized in Canada, but an effect of the loss of theoretical utility of older research paradigms such as staples theory and the metropolitan/hinterland distinction to explain new resource and environment related issues. Not only do these paradigms no longer reflect the reality of resource management and its social consequences in the current era, but there are common features of the new world of resource management in a global context that are being experienced across different sectors and different political jurisdictions that need to be reflected in new conceptualizations. These commonalities are caused by the intersection of common drivers of change with existing, well-understood features of society culture, the environment and polity. Taken together they underwrite a new 'post staples" multidisciplinary theoretical paradigm for understanding Canadian natural resources extraction and management. This new paradigm, however, requires much additional study in order to fully understand its elements and their intersections. The proposed resource and environmental cluster would, among other things, work on a broad multi-disciplinary basis to develop this understanding, of Canadian economic, social, political and cultural life.

 

Drivers and Themes

 

Key drivers of change affecting Canadian society in general and resource management in particular include:

 

• -       Technology and innovation affecting the supply and demand of resources, raising issues of ethics and the philosophy of knowledge as well as a host of socio-economic and educational issues related to the transition from the old to the new political economy
• -       Demographic changes, including changing patterns of immigration and social diversity that affect geographic and community population structures, modes of life and attitudes to resource development and environmental, cultural and community sustainability
• -       Reconciliation of aboriginal rights and title with existing rights and tenures, resource use and conservation ethos, raising issues of law and ethics as well as those related to community structure and cultural creation.
• -       Globalization and its impact on patterns of trade and investment, culture, identity, diversity and the creative process among other issues.
• -       Security concerns, including security of supply for key resources and food security, with impacts on foreign policy considerations in Canada and elsewhere, links with major trading partners and impacts on cultural exchanges, intellectual property rights and other such issues
• -       Environmental changes on a variety of scales but especially climate change, which has significant implications for resource and community sustainability especially for coastal and northern communities as well as related government programs and business interests.

 

Consequently, the thematic areas of research that will contribute to a new paradigm encompassing the impacts of all of these changes include:

 

• -       Economic relations
• -       Governance
• -       People and places
• -       Sustainability
• -        Health and Well-Being

 

Our proposal is to construct a networked cluster of researchers and research users that could be organized as research teams sited at the nodes formed by the intersection of these themes and drivers (for hypothetical examples, see the attached figure). Some of these nodes are familiar, though they are at present poorly articulated and subject to the fragmentation that we seek to overcome. For example, a working group located at one such node might investigate the urgent need to reconcile aboriginal claims raises significant economic and governance issues across a whole range of different resources that would benefit from bringing together researchers from different disciplines and resource areas. Other nodes may be relatively unfamiliar. Again, for example, another node might bring together archeologists, anthropologists, historians, geographers and ecologists in a working group to explore what we know about social adaptation to climate change in the historical and prehistoric past that may provide important lessons about the policy choices we will have to make ourselves.

 

Not all of these research nodes would be would be supported at the same time. A subset identified by the research and user communities would receive funding each year for a multi-year period in the form of multi-investigator "strategic grants'. The model of 'drivers and themes' is intended to help generate meaningful research clusters. Getting the drivers and themes right is, therefore, crucial to the success of the enterprise. Of course, the choice of themes and drivers contains implicit and explicit theoretical assumptions. Elaborating these theoretical assumptions and relating them to the cluster research outcomes is intended to be a significant output of the whole project. We need a relatively small number of themes to keep the model manageable, but the drivers of change need to be specified with care in a way that captures everyone's understanding of what is at work in the world of natural resource and environmental development. Not every 'node' is intended to generate a researchable problem set. Working groups that take in multiple intersection points will help create multidisciplinary research.

 

Finding an Organizational Structure

 

Proposal:

The organizational model will be a 'virtual institute' in which a small number of the research clusters identified by our consultations will be supported and loosely directed towards program goals by a steering committee with some central functions. We will ask for multi-year block funding from SSHRC. An enlarged steering committee will be created to pursue the consultations with the research community that we have set in motion and to generate the clusters. Researchers will be asked to develop more detailed working group proposals - that will include significant matching funding from partners where possible - and the steering committee will fund a small number of these. The steering committee will be expanded further to include cluster coordinators and the expanded steering committee will be accountable to SSHRC for spending the money according to the goals of the program and SSHRCs continuing commitment to excellence, peer review and competition. Individual investigators and their institutions will be responsible for accounting for expenditures according to SSHRC program rules. Cluster grants will be time limited but renewable.

 

The steering committee would provide the infrastructure required to adjudicate and account for funds expended, as well as facilitate knowledge dissemination and transfer through the subvention of an active publication program involving the creation of on-line journals, book publication subventions, and funds to promote participation in parliamentary and legislative committees, inquiries, reviews and other elements of KM/KT. The steering committee will also be responsible for maintaining overall direction towards the goal of creating a new theoretical paradigm, but will remain committed to the development of inquiry in both a top-down and bottom-up fashion.

 

A workshop to involve the knowledge creation and knowledge mobilization communities

 

We need to have an open and wide-ranging discussion among representatives of all relevant disciplines and knowledge user communities in Canada. At our January 28^th workshop, we want to try to find the answer to two questions. First, do we have the main drivers of change correctly identified? While we don't want to miss important drivers, remember that the model can't become too complicated. Second, what kind of institutional structure will best serve both communities? Innovative organizational structures, particularly those that could do away with or minimize centralized functions by creating an autopoietic institute are needed. Striking the right balance between creativity and direction is critical to success. And how do we ensure the delivery of policy-relevant findings in a timely manner? While we have tried to provide some structure for the workshop discussion in this paper, we believe that a successful research cluster can ultimately only be designed by those who are going to contribute to its work and use its findings.