Canada's Strategic Capacity for Sustainable Management of Military Lands
Abstract
Sustainable land management (SLM) is a system of policies, institutional structures, planning processes, and practices that integrate ecological, socio-economic, and political principles in the management of land to achieve intra- and intergenerational equity of land values and services. Increasing recognition of the ecological value of military lands has resulted in military organizations in many nations incorporating environmental aspects into their land management policies and practices. The Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) manages 21,400 km2 of federal land in Canada for diverse land uses. This requires capacity to make consistent and informed decisions to achieve sustainability objectives on the basis of sophisticated land management plans. Capacity refers to an organization’s ability to perform tasks, identify and solve problems, achieve goals, and learn through integrated application of the values, powers, resources, skills, systems, structures, and processes that together confer various political, managerial, and technical capabilities. Organizational capacity operates at strategic, operational, and tactical levels. The purpose of this research was to assess Canada’s strategic capacity for sustainable management of military lands. Extensive review and synthesis of literature enabled the design of a unifying conceptual model of an SLM system. This model informed the development of an evaluative framework using specific criteria for grading organizational capacity for SLM. The evaluative framework was applied to assess the strategic capacity of DND to manage its lands sustainably. DND exhibited considerable capacity for legitimate governance embedded in a comprehensive legislative and policy context, but demonstrated weaknesses in sustainability planning capability, policy effectiveness, and institutional commitment to SLM. DND stands to benefit from further capacity development to promote organizational growth, integration of environmental conservation into its core business, and balanced management of lands it uses in the public interest. I proposed several management and research recommendations for improving capacity for managing military lands in Canada.
Description
Keywords
Canadian Studies, Public Administration, Range Management, Ecology, Environmental Sciences
Citation
Boyd, D. P. (2016). Canada's Strategic Capacity for Sustainable Management of Military Lands (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25195