Participation in Sustainability Transitions: A Case Study of Engagement in Ottawa’s Energy Evolution Strategy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis engages with the issue of how cities are responding to the challenge of climate change through participatory processes intended to enable sustainable energy transitions.It focuses on municipal-level energy transition planning in the city of Ottawa, Ontario Canada, using a case study of participation in Ottawa's Energy Evolution Strategy.This Strategy aims to have the city reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.This thesis draws on 14 semi-structured interviews with Energy Evolution participants and city staff as well as other primary sources such as reports and meeting minutes.It examines democratic engagement in Energy Evolution informed by two theoretical frames which, together, provide a holistic view of participation in sustainability transitions.Constructivist science and technology studies (STS) theory is used to analyze the creation of the participatory process.Informed by STS theory, I show that Energy Evolution was purposefully created and only partially framed as participatory.It was stakeholder focused, invited, professionally facilitated, and maintained a technocratic focus on energy transitions.I also assess the process against specific normative criteria, informed by the theory of ecological democracy.I show that Energy Evolution was only partly participatory in the way that is envisioned by ecological democracy theorists.Informed by this analysis, I argue for the increased role of diverse non-state actors in transitions processes, noting that for such processes to be effective, these actors require a deeper understanding of, and influence on, participatory processes in institutional spaces that are empowered to make these important environmental decisions.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".