Beyond the Guidebook 2010: Road Map for Moving from Awareness to Action in BC to Protect Watershed Health

Creating Our Future

The Province of British Columbia has provided a ‘design with nature’ policy framework that enables local governments to build and/or rebuild communities in balance with ecology:

• This is what we want to collectively and incrementally achieve over time, and this is how we will work together to get there.

The future desired by all will be created through alignment of federal, provincial, regional and local policies and actions. BC local government is among the most autonomous in Canada, and BC is perhaps the least prescriptive province. Historically, the Province has enabled local government by providing policy and legal tools in response to requests from local government. Local government can choose to act, or not.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES: Released in June 2010, Beyond the Guidebook 2010: Implementing a New Culture for Urban Watershed Protection and Restoration in British Columbia draws on BC case study experience to illustrate how success will follow when local government elected representatives, administrators and practitioners:

1. Choose to be enabled.
2. Establish high expectations.
3. Embrace a shared vision.
4. Collaborate as a ‘regional team’.
5. Align and integrate efforts.
6. Celebrate innovation.
7. Connect with community advocates.
8. Develop local government talent.
9. Promote shared responsibility.
10. Change the land ethic for the better.

The foregoing is extracted from Chapter 1 of Beyond the Guidebook 2010. To download a PDF copy of the complete extract, click on Moving from Awareness to Action in BC.