Books
PLANNING for CLIMATE CHANGE: Strategies for mitigation and adaptation
Simin Davoudi, Jenny Crawford and Abid Mehmood (eds)
My chapter (12) is "Beyond A Technical Response: New Growth-Management Experiments in Canada". While local government in Canada has made real progress toward reducing emissions through building energy retrofits and landfill gas capture, containing urban sprawl and the resultant emissions from transportation use remains a problem. In this chapter two Canadian efforts to respond the challenges of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through growth-management activities.
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Environmental Challenges and Opportunities: Local–Global Perspectives on Canadian Issues
Christopher Gore and Peter Stoett, eds
Featuring a strong line-up of respected Canadian scholars and with an interdisciplinary flavour, this integrated collection of a dozen case studies conveys the need for both local and global analysis of environmental problems in the search for solutions and viable policy options.
The topics addressed are wide-ranging, but together represent the most critical environmental policy issues of our time, and offer an overview of the challenges — and opportunities — facing Canadians in the early 21st century.
My chapter (7) "Urban Sustainability" is an overview of how Canadian local government has responded to the global challenge of sustainable development.
Changing Climates in North American Politics: Institutions, Policymaking, and Multilevel Governance
Edited by Henrik Selin and Stacy D. VanDeveer
North American policy responses to global climate change are complex and sometimes contradictory and reach across multiple levels of government. For example, the U.S. federal government rejected the Kyoto Protocol and mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) restrictions, but California developed some of the world's most comprehensive climate change law and regulation; Canada's federal government ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but Canadian GHG emissions increased even faster than those of the United States; and Mexico's state-owned oil company addressed climate change issues in the 1990s, in stark contrast to leading U.S. and Canadian energy firms. This book is the first to examine and compare political action for climate change across North America, at levels ranging from continental to municipal, in locations ranging from Mexico to Toronto to Portland, Maine.
Changing Climates in North American Politics investigates new or emerging institutions, policies, and practices in North American climate governance; the roles played by public, private, and civil society actors; the diffusion of policy across different jurisdictions; and the effectiveness of multilevel North American climate change governance. It finds that although national climate policies vary widely, the complexities and divergences are even greater at the subnational level. Policy initiatives are developed separately in states, provinces, cities, large corporations, NAFTA bodies, universities, NGOs, and private firms, and this lack of coordination limits the effectiveness of multilevel climate change governance. In North America, unlike much of Europe, climate change governance has been largely bottom-up rather than top-down.
With my colleague Christopher Gore (Assistant Professor, Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson), I contributed to our chapter "Local Government Response to Climate Change: Our Last, Best Hope".
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