NEW REPORT: “A Blueprint for Watershed Governance in British Columbia”
Note to Reader:
The just-released report by POLIS titled A Blueprint for Watershed Governance in British Columbia focuses on current issues and proposes a path forward for transforming current approaches to decision-making. The report comes at a critical time as BC prepares to replace the 100-year Water Act with a new Water Sustainability Act in the 2014 spring session. The report draws on leading examples of watershed governance from across Canada, and around the globe, and applies them to the BC context.
“The transformation proposed in our blueprint will likely take a decade,” says Oliver Brandes
“Instead of focusing on political lines on a map, A Blueprint for Watershed Governance in British Columbia proposes that water-management decision-making should be aligned with the ecological boundaries of watersheds,” says Oliver
Brandes, report co-author and co-director of the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance at the University of Victoria.
“By examining all actions in the context of the watershed, we can move toward a governance system that is rooted in ecological principles, and shift the focus towards managing the people within a watershed, rather than controlling the watershed itself.”
“The transformation in governance proposed in our blueprint will likely take a decade, at a minimum, but with these changes B.C. could have the potential to become a national, and even global, leader in freshwater protection and sustainability.”
“The blueprint describes nine critical winning conditions that we see as the foundation for creating change and building the necessary institutional architecture for moving towards an ecologically-based watershed governance regime in B.C. Shifting decision-making to a watershed scale could be a real opportunity for positive change, particularly when it comes to engaging local communities in critical watershed decisions,” concludes Oliver Brandes.
TO LEARN MORE:
To download a copy of the report, click on A Blueprint for Watershed Governance in British Columbia.
Also, click on “Think Like a Watershed”, advocates Oliver Brandes, leader of the POLIS Water Sustainability Project to download a related document that is posted on the Water-Centric Planning community-of-interest.
