Implementing Integrated Land Management in Western Canada: Policy Reform and the Resilience of Clientelism

Integrated Land Management (ILM) is an example of a policy reform that attempts to replace the disparate elements of a disorganized policy regime with a more integrated strategy. ILM designs aim to create or reconstruct a policy domain to produce coherent policy goals and a consistent set of policy instruments that support each other in the achievement of large-scale land use and land management goals, such as eco-system sustainability, in the face of conflicting resource-use demands. Ideally, ILM comes about by conversion in a process of consciously re-aligning instruments and goals, or displacement if a regime is exhausted. However, it is also very possible that, instead, processes of layering and drift can be at work, restricting the potential for a new integrated regime to emerge or limiting its value if it does. In Canada, ILM-type designs have been proposed as the solution to a number of natural resource management problems There is general agreement that the cur- rent system of policy and management for natural resources is based on a long legacy of distinct single industry regulatory regimes which contain mutually exclusive or inconsistent policy elements. Even where existing policies have called for ‘multiple use’ or ‘integrated resource management’, the regime in place has always been one designed to allow a dominant use constrained in various more or less complex ways by secondary ones. The unanticipated outcomes include a neglect of cumulative impacts, leading to unplanned environmental changes, and an unnecessarily large resource-use footprint caused by duplication of infrastructure and waste. However, as the four case studies included in this paper reveal, replacing the dysfunctional elements of these regimes is by no means a simple process.