In this exploratory paper, we introduce a new method of plan quality evaluation to measure strength of policy focus. We demonstrate how the method can be applied to evaluate the strength of farmland protection policy in two local governments in the Province of British Columbia, Canada: the City of Richmond and Metro Vancouver Regional District. The method aims to not only describe strengths and weaknesses but also measure aspects of quality that help explain why a legislative framework is good. We suggest that this approach complements methods to evaluate effectiveness of farmland protection policies.

Since its inception in 1973, the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) in British Columbia remained a single zone, with the same rules used in every decision made by the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC). In 2014, Bill 24 divided the ALR into two zones, with each zone governed by different rules. Zone 1 included the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, and the Okanagan regions. Zone 2 covered the rest of the province, which was about 90% of the ALR. The Government changed the legislative framework to reflect the diversity of the agricultural land base and to give farmers in Zone 2 more flexibility to earn non-farm income from their agricultural land. In 2019, the ALR was returned to a single zone with a single set of rules. Given its historical significance, we evaluated the effects of Bill 24 and found little evidence that the new rules influenced Commission decisions. Understanding why Bill 24 had little effect provides important insights about creating effective land use policy.

The intimate relation people have with food provides unique opportunities for teaching. In this field report, I will describe and reflect upon the method of student-centred learning I use in a first-year university course entitled Food, Agriculture & Society. The aim of the course is to provide students with a broad understanding of how food and agriculture have shaped society and can contribute to a more sustainable future. Consistent with food pedagogy, a premise of the course design is that the intimate relation students have with the food they eat reflects their personal values and responsibility for their choices. An innovative element of my approach is that I co-create the syllabus. The course starts by writing the word “Food” on the blackboard. I then facilitate a multi-step process with students to co-create the syllabus. For most of the course, students lead the preparation and delivery of lectures on their selected topics. In this report, after describing the course design, I reflect upon my approach in relation to the tenets of food pedagogy, as well as discuss student feedback and my experience of teaching the course.

This case study of the Municipal County of Antigon­ish (MCA) in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia assessed the extent to which agricultural land use planning accommodates those societal interests seeking to embed food sovereignty at the municipal level. Data were collected through content analysis of legislative documents, key informant interviews, and a review of the grey literature. Results suggest that the relatively weak municipal planning system in place prioritizes private interests over the public interest in farmland protection. The resultant gaps in the legislative setup in the MCA further reveal that food sovereignty actors and/or ideas have little influence over municipal governance of farmland protection. Broader historical and contemporary trends in Nova Scotia and Canada at large suggest that farmland will continue to lose ground to forces intrinsic to the dominant policy paradigm of market liberalism. Concluding thoughts call for “bringing back the (Canadian) state” itself as central to constituting a new agricultural policy paradigm.

Continuous efforts by governments to protect agricultural land has resulted in a mix of interests, policies, and outcomes. Through this paper, our aims are to evaluate provincial legislative frameworks across Canada and to improve our understanding of why some provincial legislative frameworks to protect agricultural land are better than others. In our study, we evaluated and compared the strength of ten provincial legislative frameworks for agricultural land use planning. Our results show that Québec, British Columbia, and Ontario have the strongest legislative frameworks to protect agricultural land, while the rest of Canada’s provinces have only a moderate to weak policy focus. This situation leaves most of Canada’s agricultural land highly exposed to more conversion and non-farm uses. The results also illustrate how key elements of a legislative framework interact, serving to either enhance or detract from overall strength of policy focus, thereby informing a strategic approach to policy development.

Is protecting farmland a matter of national interest? If so, should the federal government play a stronger role in agricultural land use planning (AgLUP)? This paper examines potential roles and contributions of the federal government in AgLUP. Methods were based on surveys with key informants that examined the validity and viability of six possible roles of the federal government. The key informants were provincial-level experts in AgLUP from across Canada. We found that all six of the potential roles of the federal government to protect farmland that we identified are, to varying degrees, valid and reliable options. Two of the six roles were viewed most favourably: co-operative federalism; integrated policy approach. We also identified a seventh role, which is for the federal government to adopt a policy that ensures that decisions regarding the use of federal-owned land must adhere to provincial legislation.

The literature suggests that plan quality should be distinguished as a type of plan evaluation not only for its focus on content but also for its communicative ends. This distinction is important for expanding the scope of plan quality evaluation, but it also highlights ambiguity about what we mean by "quality." As a way to address this ambiguity we propose three dimensions of plan quality: documentation (comprehensiveness), policy focus (strength), and discourse (persuasiveness). We also propose a set of four principles for evaluating the strength of policy focus: maximize stability, minimize uncertainty, integrate public priorities across jurisdictions, and accommodate flexibility.

ABSTRACT Ecotourism is often highlighted as a way to diversify a local economy, especially in peripheral areas experiencing a decline in its traditional economic base. However, not all stakeholders may be supportive of such a shift, which can contribute to tension about development priorities. The Robson valley, a peripheral region in British Columbia, Canada, provided a unique opportunity to study the nature and extent of such tensions because the area is simultaneously experiencing a downtown in its traditional forestry sector and the emergence of a significant ecotourism attraction. Using semi-structured interviews, we examined key informants’ perceptions of current economic conditions and potential future benefits of ecotourism opportunities. Within this context, informants broadly discussed opportunities for ecotourism and forestry and, in the process, expressed tensions between the two sectors. Rather than leading to direct conflict, the tensions contributed more to a sense of lack of support for ecotourism, which was associated with entrenched institutional legacies of the area’s traditional economic base. While arguments against ecotourism centred on its perceived limited economic contributions, the range of tensions reflected a broad set of ideological positions. A better understanding of these tensions may help to anticipate potential conflicts, improve communications, and, hopefully, mitigate conflicts.

The Inland Temperate Rainforest of British Columbia is a globally unique ecosystem containing areas of high biodiversity and stands of ancient cedars. The ancient cedars, which are estimated to be 1000–2000 years old, are located in a region historically focused on the economic values of timber. Yet recent scientific discoveries and new recreational uses of the forest have changed people's interest in and perceptions of this old-growth forest. The purpose of this research is to document the range of values associated with the ancient cedar forest identified as important to residents of two communities and discuss how these nascent values fit within, shape, and inform recent policy developments. Using a case-study approach, data were collected through household surveys and content analysis. Results reveal a set of old-growth forest values focused on life-support and ethical values that have successfully challenged resource management policy.

Despite the overwhelming emphasis placed upon it in the innovation and entrepreneurship literature, the Silicon Valley model of venture capital investment is not the only way to develop new high-risk technologies in the private sector outside the R&D departments of large firms. A very different business model has contributed to the growth of the Cambridge (UK) cluster, where successful science-based firms funded lengthy phases of exploratory technology development by carrying out R&D contracts for customers and by building competitive advantage through ‘demand pull’ incentives and the strategic accumulation of intellectual property. This paper contains an inductive exploratory analysis of the soft company business model and provides illustrative case study evidence of its use in the life sciences sector. While this empirical evidence is specific to the Cambridge context, the findings can be generalized to provide a suitable alternative, or complement across developmental phases, to the standard VC investment model.

The current period of growth in the number of farmers markets is associated with higher demand for local food but also leads to more competition among farmers markets. Dealing with increased competition challenges the way that farmers markets are used to operating. In this commentary, the authors discuss how a business-oriented approach to strategic planning may help farmers markets respond to industry-wide changes. We first focus on what we refer to as the core business of a farmers market, whereby a farmers market can view itself as a business entity that functions separately from its vendors. We extend this discussion to strategic business planning and how competitive analysis can be used to better understand and thereby strengthen a farmers market's position in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Ideally, a business-oriented perspective should not compromise the special qualities of a farmers market but serve to enhance these qualities and add to the growth and development of a farmers market. The insights in this commentary are drawn from the general experiences of the authors.

R&D service firms are highly innovative knowledge-intensive businesses. They constitute an important component of the knowledge economy, but one that is often in the shadow of the role normally attributed to universities and other public research organisations in the growth of high tech clusters and, more broadly, innovation systems. In this paper we present evidence from an in-depth analysis of the strategy, practice and impact of a sample of R&D service providers long active in the Cambridge area, the leading science and technology cluster in the UK. Based on an extensive programme of interviews with companies' CEOs and managers, we analyse: the main features of the R&D contract and the way in which this allows firms to de-risk the uncertain process of early technology development and to meet customer's needs; the services' typical organisational features and development stages; the variety of observed growth paths. We provide evidence of the significant direct and indirect contribution to innovation of these service firms and conclude by discussing the implications of this original model of technology development in relation to the early-stage financing and university-led growth debates. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Emerging research has highlighted the significance of ancient western redcedar (Thuja plicata) stands within the upper Fraser River watershed as examples of rare forest types within British Columbia’s inland temperate rainforest (ITR). These stands represent a globally significant repository of canopy lichen biodiversity. Ancient redcedar stands were historically found in greatest abundance in wet “toe-slope” topographic positions, where mountain slopes flatten out as they reach the valley bottom. Abundant groundwater runoff and wet soils in these topographic positions provided protection from fires and sustained trees during dry summer periods. However, the placement of road and rail corridors in these same topographic positions has facilitated the logging of many ancient redcedar stands. The result has been the widespread loss of ancient cedars, which today account for only 3.7% of the 130 571 ha ICHvk2 biogeoclimatic zone east of Prince George. Of the remaining ancient cedar stands found in the ICHvk2 less than 2% (approx. 100 ha) are currently protected within BC provincial parks. Here we outline three scenarios that would increase the proportion of this ecosystem within BC parks and would support landscape-level planning objectives for the upper Fraser River watershed. We suggest that the cultural and biological values represented by these proposed areas would meet criteria for nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage or Biosphere Reserve site, ultimately resulting in widespread positive benefits for diversification of the regional economy, by building on a regional tourist attraction that has already developed at the site of the Ancient Forest Trail.

Recent calls for national food policies that promote greater food sovereignty represent an emerging concern of public policy. Such a shift in food policy toward greater citizen control over domestic food supplies would have significant implications for all aspects of the agri-food system. One area of concern is the conservation and use of agricultural land because, in the end, every act of producing and consuming food has direct or indirect impacts on the land base. Yet no research has considered the potential interactions and implications between food sovereignty and agricultural land use planning. This gap in research presents an opportunity to critically examine the effects of the changing roles and values on agricultural land use planning within and across jurisdictions. We believe that a better understanding of the dominant policy regimes within the agri-food system, including global competitiveness, farmland preservation, and food sovereignty, can lead to land use planning practices that are most beneficial for integrating not only multiple interests across jurisdictions, but also multiple perspectives.

Using ecohealth as a transdisciplinary lens to explore the connections among overlapping domains of inquiry, this article examines methodological relations between Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystem Health, two approaches for improving rural health and well-being. The experience of working on a project tasked with developing an integrated, systems-based approach for understanding the nature of rural livelihoods and ecosystems provides the base for analysis. Several key insights are discussed: The overarching goals of health and sustainability facilitate collaboration among disciplines; differences arise from how each approach operationalizes systems as variables and indicators; the dependent variables for one approach can be used as the independent variables for the other. In summary, while broad concepts like health and sustainability help transcend differences across disciplines and scales of analysis, variables and indicators cannot, as they are bound to how an observed system is operationalized. An advantage of using an ecohealth lens is that it creates conceptual and analytical spaces in which differences can be reconciled and used as sources of synergy. A source of synergy revealed in this article is the interdependence of variables used by each approach.

A core concern of all planning theory is properly linking knowledge to action. Using this core concern as the base for analysis, this paper examines the nature of underlying differences among contemporary schools of planning. The analysis centres on four general concerns of planning: its guiding purpose, the role of the planner, knowledge of the future, and knowledge of the public interest. The results highlight areas of debate among schools of planning thought, and suggest a separation between knowledge and action. In turn, the method of analysis demonstrates that using similarities as themes that cut across schools of planning thought helps to advance a theoretical understanding of planning as a social phenomenon.

In a past era, government procurement was a major lever for industry development and innovation - one thinks back to offset programmes, and commitments required under industry licensing schemes. The world has moved on. What might be the role of government procurement in industry development today? And what might we learn from the experience of schemes in other countries?The Canberra roundtable began with a presentation by David Connell. David was the Chief Executive of TTP Ventures, a Cambridge based venture capital fund specialising in early stage science and technology based ventures. He is also associated with the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge. In the UK David has been campaigning for the introduction of a US style Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme and his recent report on this subject has had a major influence on UK policy thinking. The authoritative report on Innovation in the UK by Lord Sainsbury1, which was released just weeks after this Canberra forum, strongly recommended the adoption of such a scheme.David Connell's presentation was followed by panel discussion around a variety of Australian perspectives on procurement policy.USING GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT TO HELP GROW NEW SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES: LESSONS FROM THE US SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION RESEARCH (SBIR) PROGRAMMEDavid's presentation fell into two parts. In the first part of his presentation he explained the development challenges facing the growth of new science and technology companies, and the disadvantages UK firms suffered compared to their US counterparts. In particular, and this expanded upon some of the myth-busting about commercialisation which featured at our 2006 Summit, David argued that we have been too narrow in our thinking about the origins of technology innovation and tend to ignore what he terms 'soft companies' built around customer contracts and solving real world customer problems. David then outlined the operation of the US Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme, and the competitive advantage it, and related procurement policies, give to US firms.'SOFT' AND 'HARD' COMPANIESFirst of all I want to talk about the idea of soft and hard companies. This is a particular way of looking at the business models that technology companies can adopt when they start out. When an entrepreneur or a group of entrepreneurs start a technology business there are a whole range of strategies open to them, with different levels of risk and return. Risk in this context has three components. First there is all the uncertainty: can you make the technology work? Is there a market? Will competitors get there first? Secondly, how much is the technology going to cost, and what's the investment going to be? Thirdly, how difficult is it going to be to manage the business as it progresses? (See Figure 1 - Risk and return).At the bottom of this exhibit, there are consulting businesses. Lots of technologists and scientists find they can start start some kind of consulting business; a business card and a telephone number and you are away. A bit more difficult but more expensive to start is contract research and development. This is where you develop technology for individual customers. It is very easy to start a business of that kind in areas like software but you can also do it in other areas as well, often with relatively little capital investment. A bit further up the spectrum is where you are actually developing and supplying volumes of product. Right at the top you've got speculative product development. This last option is your classic business school model. You have your bright idea, you write your business plan, you raise your money, you develop your product and eventually you sell it to a grateful group of customers.Down at the bottom are the soft companies; up at the top are the hard companies. The reason the word soft and hard are used is because, at the bottom end of the spectrum, your strategy is very malleable. …

Planning is often described as a future-oriented activity. However, little attention has been given to the relationship between planning and its orientation to the future. This article explores this relationship from a socio-historical perspective by examining the emergence of planning as a social phenomenon in relation to society's break from a traditional to a modern experience of the future. Discussion centres on how planning functions as society's way of 'normalising' the future, of making decisions about the future a normal part of everyday life. This function is discussed in both a modern and 'post' modern context.