Barriers to implementing sustainability locally: a case study of policy immobilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aims to contribute to the field of urban planning by applying policy mobilities and transfer theories to a case study of the Capital Regional District and its 13 municipalities in British Columbia, Canada, in order to analyse and understand the dynamics of how sustainability is governed locally, with a special focus on barriers to sustainability policy mobility. The empirical material is primarily based on interviews with key stakeholders who guide policy development and creation in the region to inform an understanding of how sustainable development initiatives are developed and shared. This study finds that while there is interest and demand in sustainability, policy-makers are frustrated with their lack of success in implementing sustainability programmes. While there are some instances of policy sharing and transfer among municipalities in the region, there is a clear desire for more exchanges which would allow municipalities to respond more effectively to the demands placed upon them. Significant barriers to policy mobility are also identified, in particular, an unclear understanding of sustainability, a culture of competition and hostility among municipalities, difficulty with the process of transfer itself, and a lack of time, money and resources. These barriers are in part a result of a broken governance structure which does not provide clear leadership to the municipalities, sets municipalities to be competitive with each other and provides ineffective support for municipalities through an unwieldy regional administrative body which is not well regarded by the municipalities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".