The Theory, Practice and Potential of Regional Development

The Case of Canada

Kelly Vodden, David Douglas, Sean Markey, Sarah Minnes, Bill Reimer, Kelly Vodden, David Douglas, Sean Markey, Sarah Minnes, Bill Reimer, Kelly Vodden, David J.A. Douglas, Sean Markey, Sarah Minnes, Bill Reimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351262149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Canadian regional development today involves multiple actors operating within nested scales from local to national and even international levels. Recent approaches to making sense of this complexity have drawn on concepts such as multi-level governance, relational assets, integration, innovation, and learning regions. These new regionalist concepts have become increasingly global in their formation and application, yet there has been little critical analysis of Canadian regional development policies and programs or the theories and concepts upon which many contemporary regional development strategies are implicitly based.

This volume offers the results of five years of cutting-edge empirical and theoretical analysis of changes in Canadian regional development and the potential of new approaches for improving the well-being of Canadian communities and regions, with an emphasis on rural regions. It situates the Canadian approach within comparative experiences and debates, offering the opportunity for broader lessons to be learnt.

This book will be of interest to policy-makers and practitioners across Canada, and in other jurisdictions where lessons from the Canadian experience may be applicable. At the same time, the volume contributes to and updates regional development theories and concepts that are taught in our universities and colleges, and upon which future research and analysis will build.

1 Introduction

Sarah Minnes and Kelly Vodden

1 Introduction

Canadian communities and regions face a wide array of challenges, opportunities, and struggles in a changing social-ecological environment. This is especially the case in natural-resource-dependent regions, spread across rural and northern Canada, which struggle with economic and political restructuring and the implications of neoliberal ideologies for service delivery and infrastructure provision, economic development, protection of natural and cultural wealth, and other key facets of development. Rural Canada is home to a significant part of the Canadian population, with 17% of Canadians residing in non-metropolitan areas¹ (Bollman, 2016). There are 5,162 municipalities, the most prevalent form of local government, in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2016). Of these, the 15 largest are home to 37% of Canada’s population, most located along the country’s southern border. Yet the vast majority of Canadian municipalities have relatively small populations and are located well beyond metropolitan areas. In 2016, 86% of Canadian municipalities had populations smaller than 5,000 and 66% were located in areas with moderate to no metropolitan influence (Statistics Canada, 2016). Finally, these communities and the environments that surround them make vital contributions to environmental stewardship and to economic and cultural life. Rural Canada is responsible for approximately 30% of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product, and is home to residents and settlements that often hold strong senses of community and are intertwined with the natural environments of which they are part (Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation, 2015).

In short, rural Canada matters. However, with forces such as climate change, rapid technological innovation, urbanization, and globalization, there is a need for new development approaches that can build on and further enhance resilience in rural communities while recognizing their place in wider, interconnected regional contexts that include both rural and small town and urban settlements. Increased interest in regional resilience has accompanied a rise in awareness of the uncertainty facing such regions, and has also come as a response to increased focus on regional growth (Yamamoto, 2011). In order to adapt successfully in a changing world, resilient regions require the ability to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disturbance, while maintaining or improving their situation over time (Simmie & Martin, 2010; Wolfe, 2010). There is a growing awareness that addressing challenges and harnessing opportunities requires regional approaches, particularly for rural communities. Such approaches are particularly promising to address problems such as the loss or degradation of services and infrastructure (Roberts & Townsend, 2015), the identification and pursuit of collective economic opportunities, and/or opportunities to adapt to environmental change.

In Canada and across the globe, regional development has been discussed as a tool for improving sustainability and resilience, whether in the context of the shifting political economy in Europe and North America, among industrializing countries previously striving to reach the Millennium Development Goals, or among countries in the north and south working to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (Briceño-Ruiz & Morales, 2017; Hanson, Puplampu & Shaw, 2018; Scott, 2009). In this volume we conceptualize regional development as a purposeful and systematic intervention through public policy(ies), programs, projects, and practices to influence the development trajectory within a relatively large but sub-national spatial context, toward a set of desired economic, social, cultural, physical, environmental, and political goals that enhance well-being and prosperity in communities and regions.

The region as a concept is a long-contested one, with regions often being nested within other regions, and regional boundaries being defined by multiple factors. For example, regions can be based on political boundaries, environmental features such as watersheds, or on socioeconomic factors such as where residents in the region work, recreate, and/or purchase goods and services. However contentious and even shifting, these regional definitions have significance for government policy and programming, investments, social relationships, and culture, among other considerations. They are also integral to personal and community identities and to development policy and practice (Douglas, 2006).

In Canada, uneven patterns of development, resource distribution, and political initiatives have resulted in regional distinctions across groups of provinces and/or territories—such as western, central, Atlantic, or northern regions. For example, the Atlantic provinces, and especially Newfoundland and Labrador, have had consistently high rates of unemployment and out-migration. Significant disparities also occur within provinces, creating sub-provincial regions that frequently garner attention due to their special circumstances. Since the majority of Canadians live in the southern part of the country near the United States border (Statistics Canada, 2008), regional disparities occur and distinctions are often made, for example, between northern and southern parts of the provinces. It is this sub-provincial regional scale that is our main focus in this volume.

Canada’s economic history has been defined by dependence on natural resource staples, particularly in the rural “periphery”. Raw materials from these regions have been combined with technology, markets, and finances that have supported the extraction and export of these natural resources, which remain under the control of powerful external actors, whether they be located in decision-making centres of each province, in the capital region of central Canada, or in global centres of industry and finance. Subsequently, Canada has faced challenges associated with the boom and bust of commodity-dependent resource economies and with limited industrial diversification, particularly in the regions from which natural resources are extracted. Known as the “staples trap”, such resource dependence has also had consequences for levels of education, entrepreneurialism, and social stratification, among other characteristics often found in rural resource regions. These inherent challenges have been exacerbated by the erosion and loss of services over the past three decades due to trends such as urbanization, centralization, and downloading of senior government responsibilities onto local authorities (Markey, Halseth & Manson, 2008). As Savoie (1992) points out, however, these regions also tend to have unique strengths, such as higher quality of life and more robust informal economies. The development circumstances of today’s rural resource regions and related rural–urban relationships are, therefore, complex and embedded in political economies that cross temporal and spatial scales.

Canada has a long history of using regional development as a tool to address inequities associated with this development trajectory and thereby build the country and all of its provinces and territories (Savoie, 2017). This is reflected in the nation’s constitution, which commits the federal government to equalization and reduction of fiscal disparities. While regional development has been pivotal to Canada’s history (see Chapter 2), the nature of it continues to change and is frequently called into question. We expect this to continue into the future.

Canadian regional development today involves multiple actors operating within nested scales at local, provincial/territorial, national, and even international levels. Policies, programs, institutional structures, practices, and organizational arrangements are also increasingly diverse and often reliant on the organizing abilities and actions of local actors rather than the centralized, institutionalized actors of the past. New regionalist approaches engaging with this emergent complexity, and apparent shifts in the locus of agency, draw on concepts such as multi-level collaborative governance, relational assets, integration, innovation, and learning regions. While these concepts have become global in their formation and application, there has been little critical analysis of Canadian regional development policies and programs or the theories and concepts upon which many contemporary regional development strategies are based. This lack of critical analysis provides one of the major motivations for this book.

This book contributes to our understanding of the recent era of regional development in Canada (see Chapter 2), through the lens of new regionalism theory. New regionalism highlights approaches for creating more regionally resilient futures supported by informed development policy that is, among other things, flexible, adaptive, and context-appropriate. At the same time, our work subjects the application of new regionalism to research-based critiques through an exploratory examination of its practice (and in many cases its absence) in a selection of Canadian contexts. This volume represents the results of more than five years of empirical and theoretical analysis of changes in Canadian regional development and the potentials of new approaches for improving the well-being of Canadian communities and regions.

The main questions of the research presented in this volume are:

1. How has Canadian regional development evolved over the past two and a half decades (since the creation of existing federal regional development agencies, as discussed in Chapter 2)?
2. To what extent have Canadian regional development systems incorporated the ideas of new regionalism in their policy and practice?
3. What can we learn from the Canadian contexts about the merits or flaws of new regionalism?
4. What innovations have been developed in Canadian regional development that can contribute to the broader body of regional development theory and practice nationally and internationally?
5. To what extent is regional development in Canada characterized by knowledge transfers and shared learning and what factors or mechanisms constrain and/or facilitate learning, knowledge flow, and collaboration within Canadian regional development networks?

By answering these questions, we aim to inform policy-makers and provide concrete contributions to regional development analysis across Canada, and in other jurisdictions where lessons from the Canadian experience may be applicable. At the same time, we aim to inform and update regional development theories and concepts that are taught in our universities and colleges, and upon which future research and analysis will build. The literature review provided in each chapter takes an international scope in regards to new regionalism and provides comparative coverage of theoretical debates and policy practice.

It should be noted that although Indigenous governance in relation to Canadian regional development is not extensively discussed in this book, it is acknowledged by the authors as an important area of research for further investigation. This is especially the case as new governance, land use, and resource management arrangements are established under the many land claims negotiations currently taking place between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian government. Each one represents a new approach to regional development as Indigenous peoples re-imagine and implement their visions of themselves, their environments, social organizations, and governance. Furthermore, through the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) calls to action, governments, educational, religious, and civil society groups and citizens across Canada (including rural communities and regions) are exploring how to engage in reconciliation with Indigenous communities. Activities emerging from reconciliation will have implications for existing governance structures, processes, and partnerships across the country, particularly for settler communities in rural areas that share resources and services with their Indigenous neighbours.

2 Examining new regionalism within the Canadian context

New regionalism is a multi-faceted concept that emerged in the 1990s in response to the socioeconomic and political restructuring that took place throughout the 1980s. The former decade was a time that saw the ascendency of neoliberal concepts, policies, and practices along with increased attention to localized responses to national and global trends. These changes required a reconceptualization of the “old” regionalism (further explained in Chapter 3) (Lovering, 1999; Wheeler, 2002). New regionalism has been posited as incorporating various concepts, such as new urbanism, smart growth, and sustainable communities, with a focus on the regional scale (Gibbs & Jonas, 2001; Hettne, 2005; Savitch & Vogel, 2000). It is acknowledged as taking place in a fundamentally different and changing world (Savitch & Vogel, 2000), and as having characteristics such as being rooted in place, focusing on competitive advantage, being co-constructed (i.e., combining top-down and bottom-up involvement), and having a focus on open governance processes that foster trust, collaboration, and empowerment among a range of development actors (Wallis, 2002; Zirul et al., 2015).

The research team took a comprehensive approach to the conceptualization of new regionalism in relation to Canadian regional development (which is outlined further in Chapter 3). The project focused around five main themes of new regionalism identified in the literature. These themes included: i) collaborative, multi-level collaborative governance; ii) place-based development; iii) integrated vs. sectoral and single objective approaches; iv) rural–urban interactions and interdependence; and v) fostering knowledge flow, learning, and innovation (see Figure 1.1). A full description of new regionalism is provided in Chapter 3 and more detail about each of the five themes is presented in Chapters 5 to 9. We sought, therefore, to examine the extent to which power and decision-making are shared among different groups engaged in regional development policy and practice at all levels: a key ingredient of collaborative, multi-level collaborative governance (Cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• List of case studies
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Regional development in Canada: eras and evolution
• 3. What is new regionalism?
• 4. Project approach: critical reflections on methodology and process
• 5. Searching for multi-level collaborative governance
• 6. Identity and commitment to place: how regions “become” in rural Canada
• 7. “Integrated” regional development policy and planning
• 8. Rural–urban interactions and interdependence
• 9. Learning, knowledge flows, and innovation in Canadian regions
• 10. Conclusions: Implications for policy and practice
• Index