Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act (EGSPA) was passed by the Nova Scotia Legislature in 2007 with all party support. Framed within the overall goal of making Nova Scotia a leader in environmental protection and economic prosperity through the integration of the environment and the economy, EGSPA enshrines twenty-one environmental goals and sets up a process of accountability in meeting them. Some of the goals are designed around clear environmental outcomes; others require the development of policies or strategies on particular issues. All have firm timelines, and all are the responsibility of the provincial government of Nova Scotia.To mark EGSPA 's fifth anniversary and the legislated five-year review, a group of interdisciplinary researchers undertook to assess EGSPA's performance to date from three perspectives. The research team consists of William Lahey, Katie Sykes, and Meinhard Doelle from law, John Sinclair, Susan Tirone, Karen Gallant, and Lisa Quinn from social sciences, and Peter Duinker from management. Marie-Ann Bowden, William Lahey, and Meinhard Doelle served as editors of this special section of this issue.The Act is considered in the context of an ongoing evolution of governance in the environmental field. From the traditional top down approach of the 1970s and 1980s, environmental governance has seen a gradual shift away from an exclusive concern with the role of government towards the engagement of non-state actors - particularly in the design and implementation of environmental law and policy. As a result there has been a parallel shift of power and influence away from the state toward those same non-state actors. The introduction of alternatives to command and control strategies has resulted in a diversity of regulatory approaches that now range from hard law to the use of economic incentives and voluntary measures.Throughout this gradual transition, there have been those who have warned that the shift in power and influence from state to non-state actors carries with it the risk of losing sight of the goals of environmental governance. EGSPA should be of interest to researchers who support this belief because it was, in part, drafted to respond to this concern. The Act does not directly affect regulatory or governance approaches, and therefore, does not seek to reverse the trend toward more engagement of non-state actors in environmental governance. Rather, EGSPA introduces benchmarks against which the effectiveness of environmental governance is measured, and places ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the benchmarks are met squarely in the hands of government.This special issue considers the implementation oiEGSPA by authors from a number of disciplines. The first article provides an overview of EGSPA and examines its effectiveness through a law and policy lens. The article concludes that EGSPA has had an impact on the Nova Scotia government's commitment to its specific environmental goals, but that it has not yet transformed government approaches toward the ultimate goal of the Act to integrate environmental protection and economic prosperity.The second contribution, authored by Sinclair and Quinn, offers a comparative perspective on the effectiveness of EGSPA. It does so by providing an account of a previous generation of effort to achieve many of the same goals that underpin EGSPA - the Round Table approach in the province of Manitoba. The comparison is particularly apt as it is reflective of a 1990s approach undertaken in many Canadian jurisdictions to assist governments in addressing many pressing environmental challenges. …
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
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".