They create dependencies. Actors imbued with long-term perspectives have stories about themselves and their community which may date far into the past and look far into the future, as well as knowledge and expertise that supports these visions, and ways of observing the environment that help to assess progress. By encoding and embedding long-term thinking into institutions, communities and actors can strengthen the impact of their visions as they are confronted with traces of old perspectives, old futures codified in institutions, and/or tools of governance they can’t ignore. Institutions stabilize expectations and interactions in governance itself, and through governance, in the rest of the community. One cannot write all the laws, policies, or plans affecting the community locally, but in Canada, there is much space to act, to use institutions to devise and enact strategy. Path mapping, understanding the presence, absence, confrontation, and transformation of long-term perspectives in the past can help actors analyze the present and move towards strategizing for the future. Once again, analysis of strategy inspires strategy.
Considering the qualities of laws, policies, and plans If we want to discern the space for future local institutions, we need to understand what laws, policies, and plans currently exist, how they work, and how they interact with one another and with informal institutions, and we need to see how, in the local governance path, institutions have previously played out. We are still in the domain of path mapping. Laws are the most rigid of institutions, and the ones over which local places have least influence. That is, local actors can work with bylaws and can, in some cases, create and manipulate local law. While there do exist other, sometimes more informal, forms of local law, for leadership there is much more space to be found in the managing of law through the selective interpretation and implementation of provincial or federal level laws, and negotiations with other actors on how to apply these rules. Public policy is commonly considered to be the output of politics. However, we have increasingly come to realize that policies, that is, what governments and governance “do�, are often shaping politics, rather than the other way around. Policies and plans are more flexible, in implementation and in adaptation, than legislation. Policies, however, only work within the frame of laws, and laws, for their part, can uphold and codify, but also delimit policies. Plans can potentially be the most powerful tools for a community to move forward, as integral visions for an alternative future that incorporates
Part III: Boom/Bust:Moving forwards: Path and context mapping
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