We recount the experiences of a research project on communities affected by cycles of boom & bust in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, their attempts to manage and mitigate the effects, and the legacies, of these cycles. We propose a two part approach: self- analysis and strategy building. Self-analysis has to be a community effort and consider governance evolutions, including but broader than local government histories, and consider informal actors and relations, forms of local knowledge, grounding community narratives, and positions in regional networks and in multi-level governance. Self-analysis of this sort can inform and structure a truly unique strategy for reinvention. Communities can learn from their own path, from other places, and from theory. Copying is not a strategy and hinders the community’s capacity to adapt to a new and better-understood path of local governance. In the process, local autonomy – hence strategizing powers – can often be increased.
Local governments and local communities are never all-powerful. They have limited powers and a limited degree of autonomy, with the limits coming from other levels of government, from citizens, industries, from the imperfect and competing understandings of the world at our disposal. In a globalized world, with national and regional governments often downloading responsibilities to local governments, without adding the resources and expanding their powers, those limits are felt more clearly.
In Western Canada, local governments are relatively weak creatures of higher-level governments, and the effects of globalization are felt all the more strongly in many communities dependent on one natural resource or one economic sector. A few key industries had a lot to say about development strategies in Alberta and British Columbia, from the beginning of Canada’s existence as a British colony. Half of the settlements in the region did not survive beyond a generation. Besides the ghost towns, many others can be called boom/bust communities – places subjected to dramatic ups and downs.
Through a research project in 2014-2016, we, a team at the University of Alberta, studied 12 such communities, through interviews, focus groups, observation, collection of maps and statistical information, analysis of policy documents and plans, and archives of local newspapers. New fieldwork episodes were combined with insights some of the group members developed through previous projects in the region. We were not only interested in the effects of ups, downs and repeated cycles at the local level, but most importantly in the possibilities for local strategy to counter or at least mitigate the negative effects. We were particularly interested in the legacies and paths of development of these communities.
We found that it is not beneficial to take a narrow view on boom/bust, a view focusing on a few parameters, e.g. income, and population numbers. Rather, one has to be open to a variety of perspectives and observe not only from the familiarity of one discipline, the range, and effects of boom/bust on the community, but in all areas of life. Places big and small reveal these effects. The smaller the place, the more radical and obvious the effects, yet the bigger the place and its administration, the more complex the ramifications and legacies can be for public administration and policy, for planning, and for the fine-grained web of informal institutions that make a community work. Moreover, the effects and the responses to boom/bust have to be understood in functional networks of communities, not necessarily contiguous regions. Legacies to be analyzed include the legacies of old booms and busts, as well as traces of responses to previous cycles. A form of knowledge can appear in local administration as new players can enter, a form of planning can erode, a domain of policy can become more or less important or focused on a few topics.
Importance of the Past: Legacies and Dependencies
To analyze these legacies, we propose the concept of dependencies. We distinguish between path dependencies – as legacies from the past in current governance –interdependencies and goal dependencies. Interdependencies can occur between actors, between actors and institutions, and between institutions. Under institutions we understand the tools of coordination in collectively binding decision-making: policies, plans and laws. Those tools of coordination we can call types of formal institutions, which always function in a complex interplay with informal institutions and unwritten rules. Goal dependencies are the effects in current governance of goals for the future, or envisioned futures as such in policies, plans, laws, or expressed in informal institutions.
When taking a closer look at the types of dependencies in the communities we studied, we observed that boom/bust communities tend to show what we call a concentration problem, with the dependence on one sector over time leading to a simplification of governance. We see how a few key players can steal the show and a limiting set of institutions de facto dominate governance (even when more exist). The concentration problem is also a concentration of knowledge, expertise, and a small set of discourses and understandings of what the bigger issues are that play a role in governance and the development of the community. Path and interdependence are strong, goal dependencies become weak, and the tools and willingness to envision alternative futures, or to reinvent oneself as a community, gradually erode. In a set of entwined feedback loops, planning becomes harder, and planning for change even less likely. This entails two aspects: long-term perspectives are harder to maintain and develop, as time pressures are high in boom periods, and hopes are low in bust periods. Both in boom and bust, planning is seen as a hindrance, spatial planning in the narrow sense of the word, and planning as broad strategies for community development. Secondly, change is hard to envision and coordinate because of the concentration problem, and because unused institutions (e.g. economic development policies) become powerless after a while on the shelf. The concentration problem is linked to a self-selection process of the population in the community because of affinities in worldview and education, and because of a crowding out, economically, of other jobs and occupations beyond the core industry. For example, a local canoeing enthusiast in Fort McMurray, Alberta closed his canoeing business, started to work in the oil sands and in one year of work he made more money than he had made in almost a decade working in the tourism sector.
Local governments under such evolutionary conditions tend to become reactive. The absence of a long term perspective, as a frame of reference, and the disbelief in the need and possibility to reinvent themselves, makes the policy tools for reinvention emaciate. Professionals and their expertise disappear after being marginalized, and without these professionals, a reintroduction of long-term perspectives for adaptive governance becomes harder. After the people disappear, their roles disappear or are partly taken over by other groups of professionals. After a while, institutional memory fades and this further reduces the understanding of possible alternatives and other ways of organizing community governance. Where planning and development strategy is most important, it becomes harder to practice and harder to reintroduce.
Community Analysis or “Self-Analysis”
Still, we believe there are ways out for communities. What is important first and foremost is to take a step back, and to self-analyze; to get a new and different grasp of the evolution of the community, its dependencies, its main players, dominating stories, forms of expertise, the formal and informal institutions that still function and can be retooled, and the ones that might be needed. Learning from the past can be complemented by learning from other places and learning from theory, although the lessons cannot be immediately copied. Institutions, for example a form of planning or a specialized expertise, cannot be transplanted without adaptation, and the analysis of the development path can inspire insight in ways to modify promising ideas from elsewhere.
Such self-analysis can be painful, even traumatic, as boom/bust communities in many cases objectively need to define a new path and need to work on reinvention based on a new narrative. This means a confrontation with things that are taken for granted now, a critical reflection on positions of power, on identity discourses, on notions of truth, efficiency and value that permeate local governance now. Self-analysis can be a necessary therapy, albeit a painful one. The self-analysis is also ideally participatory, and a reflection not only on the evolution of government but of governance. By which we mean that discerning the changing community requires a broader look at who’s actually involved in governance. In practice, people, organizations, and departments can play different roles from their formal ones; they can play several roles, and there are usually many invisible players in local governance: landowners, a charismatic shop owner, the chamber of commerce, or a family with a long history in the community.
Governance analysis can shed new light on the past and present, therefore opening up new perspectives on the future. If one can reveal, for example, how and why a form of planning disappeared, then this can inform a (re)thinking of long-term strategy and appropriate policy tools. If certain actors were excluded and this created problems, one can think of ways to bring them into the fold of governance. A careful mapping of actors and roles, formal and informal institutions, dependencies, of patterns of inclusion, exclusion and transformation of knowledge and expertise in governance can be helpful there.
Strategic Community Plan
Such analysis can then lead into a process of strategizing. Our analyses taught us that a community has to craft its own process and give that process its own content – one cannot prescribe one form or tool of strategy or one focus of that strategy which could be helpful for all boom/bust communities. A strategy is in essence a community narrative – one that will present and implement a shift in existing narratives, as well as use and invent institutions as tools to move in that direction. A strategic community plan is also a long term perspective, and that is often what is missing in the most problematic boom/bust communities. Without long term perspectives on community futures, ad hoc responses will dominate in policy, and the concentration problem will get worse. A strategic community plan has to be context-specific in form and substance. Knowledge of the context comes out of self-analysis.
A successful strategy does not have to take the form of one formal institution, e.g. a comprehensive plan or an economic development strategy. It can be embodied in several institutions, as long as there is coordination among them. It can be an informal strategy, where partial aspects are formal institutions that show up every now and then (e.g. land use plans, infrastructure plans, downtown policy, and/or environmental policy). The content does not have to focus on one sort of economic activity, not even on a particular form of diversification or diversification as such. The most important thing for a strategy is that it envisions the long term and it includes measures towards its own implementation, and that it reflects on the governance tools needed for the coordination of action. In communities deeply entrenched in concentration problems, one can imagine a community strategy to further transitional governance; that is, the creation of a new platform from which alternative futures can be envisioned more easily, without giving content to those futures right now.
Working on transitional governance can entail the hiring of different types of people, consultants, reshuffling roles, and maybe institutionalizing the form of self-analysis argued for above. It can mean a new look at existing policy tools or it may be a structured reflection on other places in terms of best practices and what can be learned. Working on transitional governance is putting the infrastructure in place for a new governance machinery which can then take the community in a different direction, to be decided later. It does require a growing awareness that things have to be re-examined, and that a long term shift in orientation is needed.
Local Leadership
Local leadership is critical here, and such leadership will always take a risk when trying to put boom/bust communities on a different path. Sensitivities will be hurt, identities questioned. Dependencies cannot be ignored, nor can they disappear. Leadership can however manage dependencies by understanding and navigating the landscape of formal and informal institutions, by understanding visible and latent stories, and understanding how new stories can be built on old ones, as well as how existing institutions can be used to change and expand the options for self-transformation in the community. We observed how leaders had to manage expectations, take risks, playing at times the role of an insider, and other times an outsider (and therefore reducing the shock of change).
A strategic community plan can thus take many forms, and the variety of possible forms should be part of the discussion. If we grasp that variation, then the strategy building can unfold more freely and can adjust more to the identity of the community. The strategy has to envision short and long term goals, and – a slight distinction – it has to rely on tactics. Tactics are not necessarily tied to the short term goals, but are whatever short term activity is needed to move the strategy forwards. Strategy and tactics rely on each other. Good leadership shows an understanding of this relationship, as well as a deep awareness of internal and external situations as to what is necessary and possible in a given context.
Any strategic community plan for reinvention in boom/bust communities should be aware of the position of the community in larger networks and of the local government in relations with other levels of government. Those networks and relations represent obstacles and opportunities. The potential for reinvention hinges on awareness of the assets and identities in the wider area. In the implementation of the strategy, the same awareness of the existing forms of multi- level governance can prove very helpful.
Enhancing Local Capacity for a Strategic Community Plan: Administrators as Leaders
A key component of long-term strategy can be the expansion of local powers and autonomy as a means towards some of its goals and towards reinvention as such, as well as a goal in itself. The primary goal of a strategy toward transitional governance can be the expansion of autonomy. One cannot simply rewrite formal roles, so it is likely that a two prong approach is needed: renegotiating, possibly in collaboration with other communities, the powers and resources of local governments (including redistribution of resource benefits), and secondly, using other means to informally but effectively redefine local autonomy. Local governments can create new actors, at arm’s length, with more freedom to operate (e.g. community forestry, advisory councils, economic development corporations, community foundations, downtown associations) who can form new collaboration(s) with existing actors locally and regionally, public and private (i.e. public-private partnerships), and work on the coordinative power of existing institutions.
Leadership here is not only elected leadership, and it is not only the realm of individuals. Leadership can be collective, and, regarding issues such as this, one needs to harness all leadership qualities in the community. When aiming at strategies for reinvention in boom/bust communities, local administration and its civil servants plays several essential roles: it embodies institutional memory, understands informal power relations in the community, can function as power broker, offers technical expertise, can stabilize and partly formalize existing informal strategies, can reflect on and enhance the inclusion/exclusion of sorts of potentially useful knowledge and expertise in local governance, and monitor and cultivate relationships with neighbours and higher level governments.
There are no guarantees, but usually much more is possible than communities realize. There are more tools at their disposal to move forward, more possible paths, and more assets to give content to the strategy. Relying on a success story elsewhere, or a consultant with a ‘miracle solution’, is risky. One cannot escape the tough process of self-reflection and of participatory strategy building grounded in such reflection. The need for strong local leadership cannot be eased nor can the risks of building and implementing such strategy be ameliorated.
KRISTOF VAN ASSCHE is professor of planning, governance & development at the University of Alberta, and also affiliated with the Universities of Wageningen and Bonn. He is interested in evolution and innovation in governance, which leads him into work on comparative public administration, policy and planning, involving fieldwork and advisory work across the world.
MONICA GRUZMACHER is researcher and adjunct professor at the University of Alberta working on issues of sustainability and natural resource governance, focusing on small communities, and interested in overlaps and possible synergies between indigenous governance and resource management.
LEITH DEACON is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Planning Program in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta. He is a registered professional planner (RPP) and holds membership with the Canadian Institute of Planners (MCIP). Leith is interested in concepts of governance, resiliency, planning, and policy primarily related to resource-based communities. The primary objective is to improve the long-term sustainability of communities from an economic, social, and environmental perspective and emphasizing the importance of appropriate governance/legislation.
