| Summary: | The 'community-based sustainability ideal' is a North American brand of sustainability
which envisions place-based communities as the ideal forum for the achievement of
sustainability. There are three linchpins to the ideal: place, community, and
sustainability. According to the ideal, community is place-based, and is the site in
which the goals of ecological integrity, economic well-being and social cohesion can
best be advanced, rendering it the ideal locus for sustainability. As such, the three
linchpins are seamlessly bound together as a 'common sense' package.
I argue, however, that these linchpins are thus-far ill-conceived because they
romanticize local social relations, systematically erasing any sense that there may be
difference and conflict generated in place-based communities attempting sustainability.
My position is that any desirable and attainable vision of community-based
sustainability must be grounded in the discursive realities of the present. Given that
difference and conflict are unlikely to disappear from place-based communities in the
foreseeable future, these issues must therefore be explicitly incorporated in any vision
of community-based sustainability. To this end, I deconstruct the representations of
place, commumty and sustainability embedded in the 'community-based sustainability
ideal' and suggest an alternative, less problematic way in which community-based
sustainability can be imagined. My arguments are filtered through, and shaped by, a
case study of Galiano Island, British Columbia, which constitutes a place-based
community attempting sustainability.
The thesis argues that the 'community-based sustainability ideal' should be reworked
such that place is de-essentialized, so that it is possible to recognize multiple,
conflicting representations of place. Similarly, the assumption that commumty members
are united through a shared unity of purpose needs to be challenged so that difference and conflict are recognized as integral aspects of community. Finally, sustainability
advocates need to acknowledge that there is not one, but multiple ways in which
sustainability can be interpreted in place-based communities. From here, advocates of
community-based sustainability are in a position to suggest how differences can be
articulated and positions negotiated, such that workable, desirable visions of
sustainability can be pursued.
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