ABSTRACT
Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 went through a process of diffusion, interpretation and translation as the idea of sustainable development passed to the level of cities and communities in British Columbia, as elsewhere. Because policy learning takes place in particular social and institutional contexts, amongst particular policy actors, the authors focus their analysis on one particular case, that of Vancouver. In Vancouver, both ‘sustainable development’ and ‘climate change’ were introduced into the policy lexicon in the early 1990s. By 2007, the understanding of sustainable development had shifted its boundaries considerably to encompass a primary emphasis on the challenge of action on climate change. With this process of slippage between a sustainability and a climate change policy frame, concomitant changes to the content and approach of policies have gone largely unacknowledged. However, the difference between a sustainable and climate change policy frame makes a difference to the specific and tangible actions of urban policy, organisational differences in terms of the role these policies and their proponents play within the city government organisation, and theoretical differences in terms of the ecological restructuring of urban governance. The authors investigate the effects that a sustainability framing has, compared to the effects that a climate framing has, in terms of some of the major policies and practices enacted and ignored in this policy space, and in terms of the organisation of the policy work in this domain, over the last two decades. In this case study, the authors find a series of shared, if shifting, normative assumptions about the appropriate and optimal reach of policy, about leadership, collaboration and partnerships, and other questions of strategy and the exercise of power. The learning process around appropriate responses to the opportunities of sustainable development and the threats of climate change are also laced with inertia, power dynamics and the possibilities offered by particular situations, creating different kinds of opportunities for arguments to be advanced and disputed by different parties, and for compromises to be reached.
