Articles

Human societies worldwide are dealing with messy, wicked problems beyond the capacity of any one sector, community or nation to solve. In such complex, turbulent environments (Trist 1983) there is even a greater need for collaboration between sectors, communities, and countries to solve the dynamically interconnected problems human societies are now facing.

Canada’s cities have reached a critical point in their collective history. Many need significant new investment in infrastructure. But they also need a substantially different planning model to work with than they have had in more than half a century. The new model will have to focus on the uniqueness of each community's needs.

In a changing and unpredictable world, sustainable community development is less a goal than a dynamic process of working with the resources and information at hand. In order to sustain this dynamic interactive process, communities need to anticipate and respond to these dynamics and nurture their resilience in order to innovate and diversify.

This paper explores the ways in which one community has developed strong social capital in the light of several development challenges. Using a case study approach data was collected from a small community in the Queensland hinterland.

In this paper, we question the importance of social capital as a primary indicator of a community's ability to engage in sustainable development as social capital can have both hindering and facilitating effects. We suggest that actor agency allows an individual or group to increase access to other critical forms of capital to overcome barriers and solve problems.

The use of internet technologies, specifically interactive electronic dialogues, has the potential to revive the shrinking Canadian public sphere. Precedent for this assertion can be found in the historical effect of radio technology.

Sustainable development research is inherently interdisciplinary; it requires the conscious search for unifying concepts that foster and reinforce understanding across disciplines. In addition, the number of sectors and actors involved in potential solutions requires a multistakeholder approach to decision making.

Purpose – To distinguish sustainable development education from environmental education and stress the importance of problem-based interdisciplinary learning to sustainable development education.

Although community social networks can build resilience, and thus, aid adaptation to unexpected environmental change (Tomkins and Adger 2004), not all social networks are created equal.

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