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Adapting To Climate Change: The Case Of Multi-Level Governance And Municipal Adaptation Planning In Nova Scotia, Canada, Brennan A. Vogel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Nova Scotia is the only province in Canada to use the gas tax as a financial incentive to create a regulatory mandate for ‘Municipal Climate Change Action Plans’ (MCCAPs). The MCCAP adaptation policy mandate initiated and enabled climate change vulnerability assessment and the development of climate risk priorities and adaptation plans to uniformly occur at the local scale in 53 Nova Scotian municipalities. This dissertation seeks to answer the question: What are the social factors that impacted municipal climate change adaptation policy and planning processes in the multi-level governance context of Nova Scotia’s MCCAP?

The study develops and operationalizes a …

Conceptualizing Response Capacity And Flood Action In The City Of Vancouver And District Of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, Jonathan P. Raikes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Attention to effective local flood response has become a necessity in urban governance as issues pertaining to floods become increasingly visible with disasters rising. This research identifies components of response capacity to floods and municipal action, and potential mechanisms to increase response capacity in the City of Vancouver and District of Maple Ridge using interviews (n=7), Q methodology (n=12), and a literature review. Findings show that legislation, institutional behaviour and collective action, technological pathways and resource management are fundamental to an institution or organization’s response capacity. Municipal action is influenced by competing priorities as determined through legal responsibility and liability, …

Enterprising Outsiders: Livelihood Strategies Of Cape Town’S Forced Migrants, Madeleine Ann Northcote

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although refugees and registered asylum-seekers have a legal right to work in South Africa, research shows that prevailing anti-immigrant attitudes and South African employers’ suspicion of these migrants’ documents makes employment extraordinarily difficult to acquire. This thesis investigates how, in the face of such challenges, forced migrants in Cape Town secure their day-to-day livelihoods. The research is based on semi-structured, open-ended interviews with thirty-two refugees and other forced migrants who live and operate in the Cape Town area, as well as five key informant interviews with employees of refugee service organizations. It also draws from literature on both South Africa’s …