Edging Forward: Achieving Sustainable Community Development

by Ann Dale

As Canadians, we are faced with a do we continue to allow communities to merely survive or can we help them to thrive?

 

Dr. Ann Dale has dedicated her life to studying Canadian communities and how they can transition towards more sustainable development paths. Since publishing her book At the Edge over fifteen years ago, her new book chronicles the various options that Canadians have to step back and actively implement sustainable community development practices.

 

But what factors are stopping Canadian communities? How can a single ‘story’ dominate our development? What are the barriers and drivers and how do we reconcile competing agendas, and vested interests against changing the single story?

 

Once again, Dr. Dale draws upon both the personal and the professional to discuss her own journey in reconciliation, reconnection and the power of relationships and ultimately love and compassion as one of the most important pathways for transforming human development.

 

With 10-years of new research backed by many social innovations and progress in implementing sustainable community development, Dr. Dale concludes that there is hope but there is much more to do. As a country, we’re only edging forward when we need to be leaping forward. 

138 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 8, 2018

About the author

Ann Dale is an award-winning Professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability at Royal Roads University. With extensive knowledge in sustainability and governance, she hopes to make a difference with her research for community vitality. As a former executive in the federal government and a founder of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy in 1988, she brings a wealth of practical and theoretical knowledge to her writing. To solve modern day problems, Professor Dale believes that both place-based and virtual communities are essential in building critical dialogue on socio-political issues.
 
Professor Dale has written widely on sustainable community development and has received national and international recognition for her research. She has won several awards, including her university’s first Canada Research Chair in sustainable community development, is a Trudeau Fellow (2004), and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Sciences. Her book, At the Edge: Sustainable Development in the 21st Century, received the 2001 Policy Research Initiative Award for Outstanding Research Contribution to Public Policy. More recently, she was awarded the 2013 Molson Prize for the Social Sciences by the Canada Council for the Arts and was a recipient of the 2016 Canada’s Most Powerful Women, Top 100.
 
Professor Dale presently leads MC3 2.0: Meeting the Climate Change Challenge, a major climate change adaptation and mitigation research project in British Columbia. She is also active in the Canadian environmental movement, the founder and chair of the National Environmental Treasure (the NET), and is the co-chair of Women for Nature, a Nature Canada initiative.
 
Professor Dale lives with her husband, her Akbash dog, and her silly Barbet dog, by a lake in rural Québec.