A Dynamic Balance: Social Capital and Sustainable Community Development

by Ann Dale

A Dynamic Balance aims to illustrate the links between two normally disparate literatures -- social capital and sustainable development -- within the overall context of local community development. Since the social dimension of sustainable development is the least understood of what are often viewed as its three imperatives (the other two being the ecological and economic), the book illuminates the importance of understanding this dimension and how it can be mobilized at the community level. This is shown by applied research in a number of small, predominantly rural Australian and Canadian communities.

Given the number of small communities in both countries struggling to diversify from single-resource economies in a context of increasing globalization, this topic touches on several critical public policy issues. The contributors argue that the key strategies for communities to respond to the issues they are facing must be embedded in the dialectics of sustainable development. Unless this critical imperative is met, single-resource economy communities will continue to face ecological, social, and economic collapse.

This book will appeal to both specialists in the fields of social capital and sustainable development, and to wider audiences, such as business administration students, development experts, and public policy decision-makers.

288 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2006

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.