Events:
Background for CIELAP’s Partnering for Sustainability Conferences
The arrival of the 21st century has brought with it a host of positive changes including significant advances in technology, communications, and global understanding. One of the great successes that we have seen is a diverse range of stakeholders embracing of the concept of sustainability in its many forms. All sectors, to varying degrees, are now beginning to reorient their actions, systems, decisions, and priorities in the direction of more sustainable alternatives.
Sustainability requires that we place equal importance on the environment, economy, and society. It makes sense that, increasingly over the last 5 years, sectors have been turning to one another to learn from each another’s expertise and to gain a better understanding of how to move forward in sustainable ways. Cross-sector partnerships are becoming more and more prevalent because of their potential to bring about creative, widely accepted, and effective solutions to sustainability concerns.
CIELAP began discussing the need for cross-sector partnerships in 2001 in its paper Sustainable Development in Canada: A New Federal Plan. This report outlined a four-step sustainable development strategy for Canada and highlighted that the power, resources, and expertise to act on sustainability problems were increasingly distributed among different sectors of society. CIELAP’s report identified that there was a need for greater cross-sector discussion and idea sharing about sustainable development.
To respond to this identified need, CIELAP envisioned holding a conference to bring together key decision and policy makers from government, business, and civil society to discuss innovative ways that the sectors could work together to advance sustainability initiatives in Canada. This conference would showcase practical and tangible examples of successful collaborative projects that involved these different sectors, facilitate dialogue, and generate take-away solutions.
CIELAP acted on its vision and held its first Partnering for Sustainability Conference in 2002. The conference was held in the months leading up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), when sustainability was being widely discussed and debated and actors were beginning to look for common ground and ways to work together.
Learn more about the conferences:
Partnering for Sustainability – 2002
Partnering for Sustainability 2: Leveraging the Synergies of Multiple Stakeholders to Minimize our Ecological Footprint – 2004
Partnering for Sustainability 3: Working Towards Sustainable Urban Communities – 2005
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