Crafting strategies for sustainable local development – A community guide

Many small places share similar challenges in re-imagining their future and we believe community strategy can help. Crafting a strategy, envisioning a long-term future can take many forms. The message in this guide is simple: strategy is not a form but rather a function. Community strategy needs to coordinate action towards an envisioned future. That future needs to connect to the stories, the values, the ways of working together in a community, without simply perpetuating them. The guide can be useful for people living in or working for small communities, for all people interested in the future of small places, in rural, remote and resource- based communities. It is especially useful for places where the future cannot be a repetition of the past, where a form of transition is needed or already taking place. In these pages, the reader will find tools for the community to analyze itself in a new way, to assemble a vision out of many stories and to craft a strategy to move in that direction. And, oh, yes… it’s useful for bigger places too.

Kristof and Monica arrived in Alberta early in 2014 from across the ocean where their paths had originally met. Kristof had been working on rural development and governance evolutions in post soviet countries and Monica was finishing her studies on social ecological relationships and governance transitions in indigenous communities of the Amazon both at the German Institute for Development Research. They began their work at the University of Alberta as a team, with research on drastic governance disturbances and institutional transformations in rural areas of Alberta and British Columbia. They have also had the opportunity to learn about regional government and reinvention paths in western Newfoundland. They continue their work in Alberta focused now on land use governance, learning and long-term strategies.