Events:
Background for CIELAP’s Partnering for Sustainability Conferences
Partnering for Sustainability – 2002 (view conference proceedings)
CIELAP's first Partnering for Sustainability conference took place in April 2002 over 2 days and attracted over 200 delegates from government, industry, civil society, academia, and the media. Sessions included presenters from each of industry, government, and civil society groups. Sector representatives presented successful sustainability initiatives and discussed their reflections on the partnerships they were engaged in.
Participants gained an understanding of the potential for partnerships, and left with the realization that there was much room for further discussion. The timing for the conference proved to be ideal; partnerships between sectors emerged at the WSSD as a major tools for achieving sustainability and participants of CIELAP’s conference were well prepared for this discussion.
The WSSD offered nation-states the opportunity to measure sustainability progress and plan a way forward ten years after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, at which Canada had pledged to work towards sustainable development. At the 2002 World Summit Canada committed to develop a sustainability plan by 2005, suggesting that Canada was serious about moving forward with sustainable development. After this commitment CIELAP felt that future sustainability conferences should be used to hold our government accountable and benchmark Canada’s progress towards its WSSD commitments.
Following the conference the International Development Research Centre supported CIELAP to research the qualities of successful partnerships and to examine how the government could better encourage cross-sector partnership ventures. From this support CIELAP produced a series of reports:
- Developing Canada’s Federal Partnerships: Policy Considerations in the Resource and Environmental Fields
- Getting the Most Out of Partnerships
- How to Make a Partnership Work
- A Guide to Policy for Partnerships in Canada
- Evaluating Two Partnerships
Partnering for Sustainability 2: Leveraging the Synergies of Multiple Stakeholders to Minimize our Ecological Footprint – 2004
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